Fellowship In His Sufferings

This comforting and encouraging sermon explains why Christians are often called to suffer in life. We so often focus on our sufferings and complain and fret when faced with trial and pain, but the Bible tells us to count it all joy because we are learning what it means to walk with Jesus. Suffering can be the greatest blessing we can be given in life because it often is the thing that brings us closer to Jesus and prepares our character for the future in heaven.

"I count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him...and that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death." (Phil. 3:8-10).

In order to be qualified to understand us, to save us and to empathize with us as our great High Priest, Jesus experienced what it was like to suffer rejection, ridicule, temptation, hopelessness, depression, pain, alienation and loneliness. Pastor Bohr expands on several texts which illuminate the horrors of separation from His Father that Jesus felt, to give us some small idea of the price paid for sin. Pastor Bohr shares a heart-tugging insight into Ellen White's experience which describes how the inspiring and soul-winning books she wrote on the life of Christ were done in the context of great suffering and perplexity. Yet these times of the worst pain she ever experienced were also the happiest times of her life because they brought her closer to Jesus in understanding what He went through in His life. This sermon will encourage you to look at suffering from a new and positive perspective. The closer we are to Christ, the more suffering will become meaningful. We may have full assurance that Jesus understands us entirely and is with us in every trial. Through our suffering with Him, He is working sin out of us and helping us to understand what our sin did in causing suffering to Him. "Together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share His glory, we must also share His suffering.Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory He will reveal to us later." (Rom. 8:17,18 NLT) "After you have suffered a little while, God will Himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast" (1 Pet. 5:10 NIV).