“WHEN IT’S YOUR OWN FAULT: HANDLING SELF-INFLICTED PAIN”
How To Handle Pain Without Becoming One
January 5, 2014
Cornerstone Community Church
My first memory of pain dates back to when I was five years old. We were in a wooded area on some kind of a family outing. Even at five the messiness of the wilderness bothered me, but I was doing my best to ignore my obsessive-compulsive tendencies and have some fun racing around with my two older brothers. We were heading back to a cabin we were staying in and I was in the lead. My brothers were gaining on me, but this was a race I was not going to lose. All that stood between me and victory was a fence, the kind of fence I don’t think I’d ever seen before – a barbwire fence. It looked like it could be a problem, but I was confident that my small size would be an advantage in getting through this fence more quickly than my brothers.
Now to be honest I don’t fully recall what went wrong. I don’t know if I was rushing faster than I should have or if I was distracted or if I was just plain stupid to think I could crawl through a barbwire fence at the age of five, but what happened next pretty much ruined the family outing for everyone. I put my hand on a barbwire, and when I felt the pain I gave my hand a jerk and ripped a big hole in my left hand. It was very bloody … and I may have cried. My favorite part of the story, which I’ve told many of you before, is what my Dad did. He carried me into the cabin, wiped away as much of the blood as he could, and then poured iodine on my cut. I promptly passed out, and don’t remember waking up until the next morning when Mom and Dad took me to the doctor to get stitched up, which frankly was fairly painful in itself.
This morning we begin a series on pain, a topic every one of us is intimately familiar with. None of us have to theorize about pain; none of us have to try to imagine what pain feels like. We all have stories to tell; we all have scars to show. And we have all lived long enough to know that we have not seen the last of pain. It’s not like we go out looking for it. We usually do our best to avoid it altogether. But pain is inevitable for even the most fortunate of us, and we know it.
So the question for us is this – how will we handle it? How do we handle pain without becoming a pain ourselves? Over the years my wife and I have had our share of surgical procedures, and we’ve shared hospital rooms with a variety of other folks. Some of those roommates have been absolute joys to be with. They’ve been courageous, optimistic, helpful, and considerate. They were in pain, but they weren’t a pain to share a room with. But we’ve also had the other kind of roommate, the roommate who was as much a pain as the surgical procedure we had just gone through. My wife had one roommate in particular who made her stay far more miserable than it should have been, an older woman who complained very loudly about absolutely everything. Nothing any of the nurses or doctors did for her was appreciated by her, so they finally stopped responding to her when she pushed the call button. So then she started giving us orders and telling us to go out and get the nurses to come in and pay attention to her. She may well have been in pain, but I know this for certain – she was one.
And none of us want to live like that. Oh, none of us want to be in pain – we all understand that. But when it comes, as it will, we most certainly don’t want to compound things by becoming a pain to the people who love us and who are our caregivers. The Bible has quite a lot to say about pain. In 1 Peter for example we read this: “So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.” (1 Peter 4:19) In other words, it is possible to suffer and to continue to do good. It is possible to suffer well, to endure pain with grace and dignity. It is possible to be in pain and to still be caring and kind and generous and hopeful. In fact, if you have to be pain-free to be caring, kind and generous, then you will be caring, kind and generous for a very small percentage of your life.
So that’s what we want to learn in this series – how to handle pain without becoming a pain, how to handle hurt without being hurtful. And part of learning to handle pain in general is learning to handle different kinds of pain in specific. When the Bible addresses our pain it doesn’t just lump all pain in together. There are times, as we will talk about in a few weeks, when pain is just plain evil, when the enemy the Bible calls Satan is the source of our pain. There are times when our pain is caused by other people, sometimes by evil people who wish to do us harm and sometimes by well-intentioned people who hurt us by their incompetence or their negligence or by mistake. There are times when nobody did it, when the wind no one caused knocked over our home, when our car skidded on the ice that no one put in our path. There are times, as 1 Peter 4:19 tells us, when we “suffer according to God’s will,” when God in his sovereignty and his wisdom orchestrates the circumstances that cause us pain.
And then there’s our topic for this morning – self-inflicted pain. There are times when our pain is our own fault. I know I was only five, but even at that age I was very aware that it was my own fault that I cut my hand on a barbwire fence. The iodine thing – I have to give my Dad the credit for that. But the cut itself, and the scar I’ve looked at every day for the last 53 years, is all my own doing.
So here’s the question – is that all there is to say about self-inflicted pain? Do we simply say to the person who brought misery onto themselves, “It’s your own fault.Too bad. That’s tough. Hope you learned your lesson.” Is that all the Bible offers us? Of course not. For God’s people, grace gets the last word. In fact, listen to the very last verse of the Bible: “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God’s people. Amen.” (Revelation 22:21) But let’s start at the beginning, in the book of Genesis, and take a quick trip through what the Bible has to say about how to handle this particular kind of pain, the pain that is nobody’s fault but our own.
The Curse Is Our Own Fault
The first book of the Bible is Genesis, the book of beginnings. If you are a person who likes to read through the Bible in a year, you’re reading Genesis right now. Most of us are familiar with the account. God creates Adam, the first man, and then declares that it is not good for Adam to be alone. So God creates Eve, the first woman. It’s not evident in our English translations, but our Hebrew scholars tell us that Adam’s reaction when he first sees Eve is in essence to say, “Whoa!” Let’s just say that Adam was very excited to meet Eve. The text goes on to tell us that God places Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and he gives them a command – they can eat from any tree in the Garden except for one, and if they do there will be consequences. Then Satan gets involved and tells Eve that God is lying about the consequences, and that the one tree she really wants to eat from is the one God said to leave alone.
So what happens? Eve eats from the tree, and she gives some to Adam, who also eats from the tree. They exercise their free will. They make the choice to disobey God. And God then does what he warned he would do – he pronounces a curse. Here’s the text from Genesis 3:
To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.
To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life … For dust you are, and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:16-19)
Now before we get to the obvious point, let’s pause and notice something important. Commentators on these verses point this out – there was pain in the world before the Curse. Notice that God says to Eve, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing,” which, commentators observe, means that pain was already in play. So why does that matter? Well, it’s a reminder that pain is not always a bad thing. If pain existed before mankind’s fall and before the Curse, then pain could not have been a bad thing. Presumably if, before the Fall, Adam stuck his hand in a fire he would have felt pain, pain that was a warning to keep his hand out of the fire if he didn’t want to get burned. None of us like pain, but pain can be a good teacher. It’s not always bad.
But here’s the obvious point – the Curse is our own fault. Mankind messed things up right from the beginning, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. To a certain degree, the Bible teaches, much of what is wrong in our world is wrong because of the Fall of mankind. Much of the pain we suffer is because of the Curse. In Romans 8 we read this: “For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Romans 8:20-22) It’s not hard to see the echoes of Genesis 3 in those verses – “the whole creation is groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” which is clearly a reference back to Genesis 3 and the Curse. One reason we experience pain is because creation is broken, and according to the Bible, mankind broke it when Adam and Eve sinned. One day the Curse will be reversed, but until that day we live with the consequences of an act of free will.
In some ways it’s like this. Have you ever watched a whole bunch of dominoes fall? The world record for the number of dominoes knocked over by knocking over just the first domino is … 4,491,863, set in 2009 in the Netherlands. Apparently there is nothing else to do in the Netherlands than to play with dominoes, because 12 of the last 14 domino records have been set there. The sin of Adam and Eve was in a way the knocking over of the first domino, and thousands of years later the dominoes are still falling. There is pain and brokenness and heartache in our world because of the Curse, and we as mankind, the Bible says, have no one to blame but ourselves.
God Disciplines Us Because We Need It
Here’s a second truth the Bible teaches us about pain that is of our own making. There is a certain kind of pain that God brings into our lives as a means of disciplining us, as a way of correcting us when we veer off course morally. Job 5:17 says this: “Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.” In the last book of the Bible Jesus says this to the church at Laodicea: “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent.” (Revelation 3:19) Did you ever get disciplined as a kid? I have to imagine that all of us were; I certainly was. It wasn’t fun; you didn’t like it. But you deserved it. And if it was done properly, if it was received properly, it made you a better person.
Sometimes I’ll hear people say that God never causes pain, that he is too loving and gracious to ever purposely bring pain into our lives. But that’s just not true. The truth is that God is too loving and gracious to not bring pain into our lives. But he’s not doing it to punish us; he’s doing it to discipline us and to correct us and to shape us. Jesus already paid the punishment for our sin. But sometimes God needs to bring some pain into our lives to get us back on track morally. Let me show you the most complete treatment of this topic in the Bible. It’s from the book of Hebrews in the New Testament, and it reads like this:
Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live? Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:7-11)
Those of you who are dog owners, let me ask you this – do you like to see your dog in pain? One of our late Golden Retrievers, Abby, was in many ways a thorn in my side. She caused thousands of dollars of damage to our property over the years. But one year when she got really sick and was in obvious pain, do you think I was at all happy about that; do you think I thought to myself, “Serves you right, Abby!” Of course not. It broke my heart to see her suffer. But dog owners, did you ever cause your pet pain? Did you ever discipline your pet in the process of training her? Sure you did, and you did it because you loved her. When Abby was young I used the choke chain on her when we went for walks to teach her to follow my lead. Abby did not like the choke chain; it caused her pain from time to time. Now did I get any pleasure out of that? OK, a little bit, especially after she chewed through my sprinkler system for the umpteenth time. But seriously, my point is that as pet owners we all know how important it is to discipline our pets not just for our convenience but for their own good, so they don’t run out in front of a car or do something else that will cause them harm. And we discipline them because we love them.
So if we do that even with our pets, much less with our kids, doesn’t it make sense that our very wise and very loving Father would discipline us for our own good, that he would cause us a measure of pain in order to make us better people? The Hall of Fame, ex-coach of the Dallas Cowboys, the late Tom Landry once said, “The job of a coach is to make men do what they do not want to do, in order that they can be what they’ve always wanted to be.”As Jesus himself said it, “Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline.” So the question then becomes, “How do I handle it?” That’s the big question of this series – how do I handle pain without becoming a bigger pain to the people around me.
In part this is an easy answer, and in part it’s actually pretty hard. The easy answer is this – repent. That’s how Jesus told us to respond when he rebukes and disciplines us, by repenting. Part of repenting is to grieve over your wrongdoing, but primarily to repent is to change direction and to get back on the right path. When I applied the choke chain to Abby, what I really wanted was not for her to feel bad that she had strayed; I wanted her to get back on track and fly right. And that’s what God wants us to do. In the words of the AT&T commercials, it’s not complicated.
But here’s what’s a little harder; here’s where it is complicated. How do you know when God is disciplining you? I’ve asked myself that many times over the last few years as I’ve dealt with all the pain in my hip and from my surgeries. I’m not saying that my sin was the direct cause of my hip problems. It’s not like my hip went bad because I abused drugs or ate an ungodly number of Arby’s sandwiches. But I asked myself, and I asked God, “Is this the hand of God to correct something in my life that’s out of line?”
Now here’s something I’ve learned about this process over the years. I’ve learned that I am notoriously bad in discerning this on my own. This is where we really need each other in the Body of Christ. We need to be able to go to people who know us and who love us and who are in touch with God and ask them, “Do you see anything in my life that God might need to correct in me? Do you think it’s possible that this particular pain might be the discipline of the Father?”