In many cases, we go into the refiners fire so that God will remove the draws from our lives,

draw us close to himself, and in the process of pain and suffering we are made more like Christ.

As I look back on times of suffering in my own life, I can see how God use those times to draw me closer to him.

Perhaps you can see that in your own life. Yet we don't always

have that perspective when we're in the midst of grief and suffering. You're

listening to the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host Nathan W Bingham.

How should we understand suffering and how as Christians should we respond? This week on

Renewing Your Mind, Arce Sproll will be helping us deal with various difficult problems in the Christian life.

And today, as he looks at suffering, he considers a number of ways that the world tends to respond and can influence us

and then directs us to the Bible's teaching on how Christians should think about suffering.

Here's Dr. Sprawl. Several years ago, I was invited to give a lecture at Covenant College down in Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.

And I remember, the address that I gave at that time was called

the locus not locust like the insect but the locus of astonishment. That is the place where we focus on what is really amazing to us.

And I pointed out in that address on that occasion

that we sing amazing grace and give lip service to the sense in which we are amazed by grace, but I wonder

how amazed we really are, where we have become so accustomed to the mercy of God, the patience

of God and the grace of God, that we begin to take it for granted and to assume it and then

pretty soon to demand it and so that when he is gracious

to us we're hardly surprised but I find that what is most astonishing,

characteristically to Christians of our day

is when they are visited by tragedy or affliction or suffering. And many times the presence of

suffering in our life undoes us and brings us to a state of a spiritual crisis.

...