Welcome to Mortification of Spin, a casual conversation about things that count with Carl Truman, Todd Pruitt, and Amy Bird.

Mortification of Spin is a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

Let's join this week's conversation.

Thank you. Welcome to Mortification of Spin.

This is Todd Pruitt, and I'm joined as always by my co-hosts Amy Bird and Carl Truman.

And today we want to take on a topic that is pressing in a lot of people's

lives because none of us are immune from this. And that is the subject of lament. Now,

of course, lament is a response to the sorrows and the troubles that we face in life.

And since no one is immune from sorrows and troubles, we need to know what to do with lament.

And I think oftentimes that this has proved difficult for a lot of Christians to navigate

because of the prevalence of bad teaching, the preponderance of preachers out there who are

quick to promise a life of ease and comfort, that if one has enough faith, or if one

sows your seed in my ministry, the Lord will lift you up out of having to experience

those things that affect less faithful people, that you won't have to go through the pain of a wayward child or the pain

of a terrifying diagnosis or any other such types of sufferings if you'll just have enough faith.

And because that kind of message comes from some of the largest churches and some of the most

widely heard preachers on the planet,

there are, unsurprisingly, lots of professing Christians who are utterly dismayed and shocked

when they experience suffering.

And therefore, oftentimes are either encouraged to deny that they suffer or they end up punting the faith because

it didn't work for them. So we want to take some moments to talk about the role of lament,

the function, the place of lament in the life of believers. Carl and Amy, when the Christian encounters trouble,

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