How to Remain Positive Through the Pain or "The Positivity of Pain" (Part 2)

Praying Through the Bible #79

TEXT: Isaiah 26:12-18

Last week, we began talking about how God allows our painful experiences to be used to bring about positive results. Have you ever taken bitter medicine? It didn't taste good when it was going down, but when it spread throughout your body and had done its work, it made you feel better. Pain gets our attention. Pain makes us stop and ask, "What is God trying to tell me?"

C.S. Lewis said, "We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and some will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

As we mentioned last week, Isaiah gives to us a prayer from the children of Israel who were no strangers to pain. Today, we are going to wrap up our look at this prayer, as we continue to see the positivity that can come from pain.

1. We see that pain causes us to acknowledge God as the source of our blessings. As the children of Israel come out of their painful experience, in verse 15 they say, "Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, thou hast increased the nation: thou art glorified: thou hadst removed it far unto all the ends of the earth."

2. We see that pain causes us to turn to God in prayer. Verse 16 reads, "Lord, in trouble have they visited thee, they poured out a prayer when thy chastening was upon them." This is another positive thing that comes from pain -- it causes us to turn back to God in prayer.

3. We see that pain causes us to focus on positive results. Look now at verses 17-18: "Like as a woman with child, that draweth near the time of her delivery, is in pain, and crieth out in her pangs; so have we been in thy sight, O Lord. We have been with child, we have been in pain..."