ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN PASTORAL THEOLOGY & PRACTICE LPTP-37 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> JOSHUA: As pastors, we will also have the opportunity to offer counseling and comfort to those who are sick. Can this be a good opportunity for pastors to be of special service to his people? It seems to me it can be. >> DR. WARNECK: Joshua, when persons are overtaken by illness, they also are overtaken by considerable anxiety�-- anxiousness about their present welfare, sometimes anxiousness about their relationship to the Lord. They ask questions. What is God saying to me? And what is the future? So these very weighty issues prey heavily on the minds of the sick and the afflicted. It's a marvelous opportunity to bring to them the consoling faithful words and promises of God which have sustained Christians in their faith through difficult times all the way from day one, as it were. So let's talk about this just a little bit more. We indicated some of the anxieties that are apparent here when a person is seriously ill. Acute awareness of how fragile life is, the brevity of life, how life is vulnerable�-- all of these relate to a heightened sense of our mortality. And, as such, illness can be a very teachable moment. And that's when the pastor moves in with the comfort of God and His word. God's purposes in affliction, in sending these burdens upon our people, His purposes are not always clear and not always apparent. As we indicated, there are many questions. How difficult it is for a Christian to deal with the ironies and unexpected causes of affliction and the implications of illness�-- these are crosses indeed. The great opportunity for the Christian pastor is not to answer all of the questions surrounding illness but to help the afflicted redirect some of their questions in this way: Not why does the Lord afflict me and why am I suffering, but how might I use these present circumstances in which I find myself in a manner that the Lord's strength is perfected in me in terms of the apostle Paul's own reflection on his thorn in the flesh about which he speaks rather eloquently in II Corinthians chapter 12. This is the direction our ministry should take, we submit. So, when persons press those questions, the pastor attempts to reinterpret them in such a way that the afflicted Christian finds stability and comfort in God's gracious promises to endure the Lord's visitation and heavy hand, if you will, to comprehend that, "As a loving father chastens and disciplines his child," Hebrews chapter 12, 1 and following, "so the Lord chastens those whom He loves." Now, if we can lead a Christian in the midst of their anxiety over their illness to that kind of confidence in a gracious and merciful God and his even though we do not understand his dealings with us, it seems that we have a very useful and effective ministry here. There's one caution in this regard, and it is this: Many Christians interpret illness, accident, tragedies as God's punishment in their lives. We need to help them with this. Indeed there are some happenings which can virtually be interpreted in terms of cause and result. Those things occur. But many times we cannot and should not link a particular result with a particular cause, in this instance, that one has sinned and, therefore, God is visiting him in his judgment and punishment. To help them with this, I would suggest that we simply remember that the apostle Paul worked through these kinds of questions in the passage I referred to a moment ago, II Corinthians 12, where he besought the Lord three times, he says. Maybe three intensive retreats of a kind. He was so intense about pleading with the Lord over this thorn in the flesh, whatever it was, something physical, something mental, whatever it was. The Lord answered him and said, "My strength is made perfect in your weakness." And then the apostle's response: "Most gladly will I, therefore, delight in the visitation of the Lord that His strength might be perfected in me." Now I submit that that's kind of a paradigm that will be very useful to us in addressing some of those acute questions that Christians raise about their illness and their sufferings. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***