Gratitude & Lessons Learned through Suffering & Trial

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Benjamin Kreps:

Hey everyone and welcome to the Mark Prater podcast where our aim is to connect our global family of Sovereign Grace Churches with our executive director. Mark, you are always in your office standing and yet you are sitting for this podcast and there is a reason why, that you're going to update us about.

Mark Prater:

There is a reason why and it's why we skipped a week on the podcast as well. Let's see, about three weeks ago, maybe four weeks ago, I was at the church, had an evening meeting, was walking down a darker staircase and just missed the last step. And I ruptured my patella tendon in my left knee. So the injury was no athletic move at all. It was just, I missed the last step and the only way to fix that is to have surgery. And so I had surgery two weeks ago, today actually on the recording of this podcast. This is a Thursday. And that surgery went as expected, went well and have the gauze off and it looks like the incision is healing well and we'll start physical therapy either later this week or next week. So I've been a little bit out of action because of that. In God's sovereign kindness, he allowed me to have a knee injury that required surgery and that's why I'm sitting down with my left knee stretched out in front of me.

Benjamin Kreps:

Yeah, so glad the surgery went well. One of the wonderful things though, and I remember you even talking about this right after you experienced just some private conversation after you experienced this injury, was expressing your gratitude for what God's doing in your life through this trial. And actually you are not wasting your trial, you're not wasting your suffering. You are learning lessons in your trial and you wanted to share some of those with us.

Mark Prater:

I do want to share some of those lessons and it is amazing to me how God has used my little suffering, and I say little intentionally because people suffer so much more than I do, this little suffering to deepen my gratitude to God and my love for him and my treasuring of Christ.

And so I'm trying to capture that and learn from this all I can. These are soul lessons. It's a category that I have. So first one is deeper gratitude for the wisdom of God and how he uses suffering. We know those verses from James 1:2-4 where he says, rejoice when you face trials of many kinds for they test your faith. And that's important because faith gets tested, mine's been tested, and that leads to endurance essentially, is what he's saying. Steadfastness. And it's used to build you up in God and in Christ.

And that's been my experience through this little trial over the last several weeks, just marveling at God's wisdom and how he uses trial and suffering to test, and in my case to deepen. I think for most of us to deepen our faith in him so that we will not only trust him more, but we will treasure him more. And if that's the only lesson I have from this trial, there are others, that was worth it right there because I do treasure him more and love him more and am grateful for this trial. So that's the first one.

Second, deeper gratitude for Christians whose suffering is much worse and are examples to me as I've been walking through this time experiencing pain and discomfort, that kind of thing. I'm thinking of people who have suffered or are suffering much more than I have. And I look at them and I think of them and they are such examples to me. One of them would be my friend Alan Redrup, for example, who passed away about a year ago. And how he walked through his final days was just a wonderful example to me.

Here's a third one, deeper gratitude for the word of God. The word of God has, there've been moments where I've clung to it. So before my surgery I was experiencing a bit of fear. And in that moment I was just praying. And the Lord directed me to Isaiah 41:10 where he says, fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you by my righteous right hand. And so that's been a verse I've memorized. It's a verse I was telling myself over again, speaking the truth to myself. And he helped me. And that's because he has revealed himself to us in scripture. And he calls us not to fear because he's with us and he will help us and strengthen us. So just a deeper gratitude for the word of God, a deeper gratitude for my salvation.

I have had moments over the last couple of weeks where I'm in tears when I'm remembering when he first called me to himself. I don't believe I was saved in that moment. It was a process for me. But there was this undeniable moment that I was experiencing something I'd never experienced before that did lead to my conversion and faith in Christ. It was him reaching out to me, not me reaching out to him and he saved me. And so as I went into surgery thinking if I don't make it through this, I have eternity because of Christ only, only because he reached out to me first in mercy. He saved me and that had nothing to do with me. If anything, I was resisting him. So I have a deeper gratitude for the fact that he saved me.

Next lesson, deeper gratitude for the cross. So the pain that I've experienced and continue to experience, at least to some degree is minuscule when I compare it to the pain and suffering that Jesus suffered for all of our sins on the cross. And I'm talking about physical pain. He suffered physical pain, but the emotional pain and then the pain of receiving all the full fury of the wrath of God for all our sins. And the effect that's had on me, Ben, is I just stand back and I treasure Jesus more. I worship him more because that is a great act of sacrificial love that is beyond comparison and nothing like we will ever know. So grateful for the cross.

Next is deeper gratitude for the theologically rich songs that Sovereign Grace Music writes and produces. There have been some of the Sovereign Grace songs, especially from the Psalms project, that have carried me through this time. Psalm 1:21, Psalm 90, Everlasting God, has just carried me and I've sung those. Jill and I have sang those together and they just have strengthened me. So grateful to Sovereign Grace Music and for the kind of lyrics that are being written by members of our churches that are affecting me, helping me and so many others in suffering and trial.

Here's another lesson, deeper gratitude for common grace. You're aware of common grace, but when you experience it through doctors and nurses and medical technicians and through even drugs that can help you get through this, you're just aware of God's common grace that we don't deserve and how he uses even unbelievers in our lives to fulfill his purposes in our lives. And again, I marvel at the wisdom of God and using common grace for his people.

And then lastly, but not lastly, is deeper gratitude for my wife Jill. She's been amazing through this. She just embraces it. She knows how to care for me. She does it well. She is busy, she is active and she's doing an amazing job. I tell her multiple times every day how grateful I am to her. I look for specific ways to encourage her. I was just encouraging her this morning and we've walked through this together as a married couple and we've become closer as a married couple. It's unique. God can use suffering experiences to grow you as a married couple, but he does use suffering. When you walk through it together as a married couple, it brings you closer together. So I'm grateful to God for my marriage. I'm grateful to God for Jill.

Benjamin Kreps:

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing these lessons that you're learning. I love that Isaiah 41:10 promise. I love as well that it's in the context of verse eight where God says, you, Israel, my servant Jacob, whom I have chosen the offspring of Abraham, my friend. So as you're experiencing God's friendship and his promises, thanks for modeling for us, a theologically informed trial, theologically informed suffering, cross centeredness in your suffering, applying the promises of God to your suffering. It's wonderful. And these are sweet lessons that you're sharing with us. You also have a couple of practical lessons that you've learned as well that you wanted to share.

Mark Prater:

Yeah, this is a list I've just started. I hope this, I believe this list will grow in the coming days a bit more, but a couple of just practical lessons for me. The first one is slow down. I'm a very active guy. I like doing a lot of things. I like getting a lot of things done. I'm that kind of a guy. I think that's been the most difficult part of this trial for me is not being active and God is slowing me down. So I believe he's teaching me to slow down and reevaluate what I'm doing so I can focus on those things that only I can do in this role in serving Sovereign Grace, which is a process started a little over a year ago anyway, but this is a unique timing of the Lord I believe.

And before this injury, I pre-ordered Cal Newport's book Slow Productivity. And it was just released on March 5th. And I've got it. I'm about halfway through it and I'm learning a lot from a practical standpoint from that book. So the Lord, the day after I injured my knee, I felt like the Lord was saying, Mark, yes, I'm doing this so you can slow down. And then I get this book, Slow Productivity, which has really affected me. I'll talk more about that book in a future podcast.

But here's one more lesson then I'm done. Don't measure effectiveness by busyness, rather measure effectiveness by doing fewer things well that have greater impact. And I think I've been in the mode of sometimes measuring effectiveness by my busyness and the Lord is showing me there's nothing wrong with being active and working hard, but you need to do fewer things and you need to do them well because those things will have greater impact than busyness will. And so that's another lesson I'm going to try to apply to my life.

Benjamin Kreps:

Good. Well hopefully there is some rest happening while you're sitting in your chair in your office, unable to go anywhere. We're so grateful for all of the hard work that you have served us with in Sovereign Grace over the last decade and grateful that there is a God-centered perspective, of course there is with you, in this trial. I think the older I get and the more I read the Bible, the more I just see so clearly in scripture, God's utter sovereignty through other scriptures and what a joy it is to rest, to be able to say, actually my days are in your hands. He was not surprised when you missed the last step and he's working it for your good and to teach you and to grow you, and to bring you into sweeter and deeper fellowship with him. So thanks for sharing all of that with us, Mark. We'll be praying for you. Thank you all for checking out the podcast. We'll see you here, Lord willing, unless maybe Mark falls down another set of steps next week. Bye for now.