Fearlessly Courageous
11/14/2022
Desk of Dennis Piller
Can Cancer be God's Servant
I have contemplated many times what would Pastor Brooks say when you face a life-challenging battle. I surely cannot ascribe that I could know that but I have spent decades under his pastorship, decades riding motorcycles and taking week-long bike adventures and I have seen him in many situations including his first bout with cancer.
When we read the Bible we learn how God thinks, we discover his character and personality. I feel I have discovered much of Pastor's heart, beliefs, and teachings through these 35 years. Like many of you, it has shaped me, and molded me into a strong soldier and ambassador for Christ. Pastor always had a message and a truth to share. An insight to impart and 3 points to see God's truth in a clearer light.
I feel he would tell you about his Cancer journey. Encourage you to keep your eyes focused on the prize…the Lion of Judah. To keep serving and using your God-given gifts and to show your faith and trust in Father God even in the midst of your storms. Don’t stop praising him. Never stop!
I thought, how do you cope with a life-threatening thorn in your side?
How do you trust…really?
I read a piece by Pastor Randy Alcom who just lost his wife of 54 yrs.
“Can Cancer be God’s Servant?
His wife wrote to a friend and fellow cancer sufferer,
"The cancer battle has been tough. However, my time with the Ancient of Days has been epic! He has met me in ways I never knew were possible. I have experienced His sovereignty, mercy, and steadfast love in tangible ways. I now trust Him at a level I never knew I could".
He said, One unforgettable morning, after meditating on Psalm 119:91,
“All things are your servants,” she shared with me what she’d just written:
"My cancer is God’s servant in my life. He is using it in ways He has revealed to me and in many more, I have yet to understand. I can rest knowing my cancer is under the control of a sovereign God who is good and does good”
He said, every day, I witnessed God’s sanctifying and happy-making work in my wife: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope . . . because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit”
(Romans 5:3–5).
He said, Nanci and I — and thousands worldwide — prayed daily for her healing. God’s final answer was to rescue her from suffering and bring her into his presence where it’s “better by far” (Philippians 1:23). Through her afflictions, he achieved in her an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all
(2 Corinthians 4:17). She praised Jesus for it, and I will forever do the same, though I miss her immensely.
Why God Permits What He Does
When our ministry posted Nanci’s words, “My cancer is God’s servant,” someone responded,
“WHAT? God does NOT give people cancer. Jesus bore our sicknesses and carried our pains on the cross.”
“Everything God does flows from his wisdom and ultimately serves both his holiness and love.”
That reader is not alone in trying to distance God from suffering. But by saying sickness comes only from Satan and the fall, not from God, we disconnect him from our suffering and his deeper purposes. God is sovereign. He never permits or uses evil arbitrarily; everything he does flows from his wisdom and ultimately serves both his holiness and love.
Joni Eareckson Tada often shares the words of her friend Steve Estes: “God permits what he hates… to accomplish what he loves.” God’s “permitting” something is far stronger than it may sound. After all, whatever God permits actually happens; what he doesn’t permit doesn’t happen.
I know I probably rattled a few cages with this line of theology but God is sovereign or he is not. Charles Spurgeon suffered terribly from depression, gout, rheumatism, neuritis, and a burning kidney inflammation. Yet he said, “It would be a very sharp and trying experience for me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me . . . that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.”
God’s hands are not tied by cancer (the result of the curse), or by the vengeance of child killers (the result of human sin and demonic strategy). He didn’t merely “make the best of bad situations.” He took bad situations and used them for his glory and our highest good. His sovereign grace far outstripped our hardships.
If this were not true, anyone facing a terminal illness would have to believe they experienced bad luck, and that God is either not as powerful or not as loving as he claims to be. Parents who have lost a child would have to believe the death was a meaningless accident, and that it wouldn’t have happened if only the child hadn’t been at that place at that time, or if that man hadn’t been driving drunk, or if a thousand other circumstances had been different.
"If onlys" and "what ifs" can rule our lives and drive us crazy. Instead, embracing God’s higher purposes — even when invisible to us in painful and tragic events — affirms God’s greatness. This is not fatalism. It is trust in the character and promises of our faithful, all-wise God.
He said, Nanci fixed her attention on his attributes. Only eight months into her cancer journey, she wrote,
I honestly would not trade this cancer experience to go back to where I was. These last months have been used by God to propel me into a deeper understanding and experience of his sovereignty, wisdom, steadfast love, mercy, grace, faithfulness, immanency, trustworthiness, and omnipotence.
Psalm 119:71 says, “It was good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” If affliction was good for the psalmist, then withholding that affliction would have meant withholding good. The universe is first and foremost about the purposes, plans, and glory of God. God sees eternal purposes and plans and knows ultimate good in ways we cannot.
Our sovereign God weaves millions of details into our lives. He may have one big reason, or a thousand little ones, for bringing a certain person or success or failure or disease or accident into our lives. His reasons often fall outside our present lines of sight. If God uses cancer or a car accident to conform us to himself, then regardless of the human, demonic, or natural forces involved, he will be glorified.
“God is at work behind the scenes, and one day we will understand our suffering’s hidden purposes.”
“O great and mighty God, whose name is the Lord of hosts, great in counsel and mighty in deed” (Jeremiah 32:18–19). God is at work behind the scenes, and one day we will understand our suffering’s hidden purposes.
We are still believing! We are still interceding for healing for Pastor Dale! So, do not grow weary in your prayers and fasting for Pastor.
I promise you, in the process, you will find Jesus in a deeper way and open up the power of the Holy Spirit in other areas of your own life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz81dIfwf4Y
Nicole Mullens The God Who See.
Randy Alcorn is a best-selling author of many books and the director of Eternal Perspective Ministries.
