Some suffering is not Apostolic

For example: the suffering of an overweight person. Overweight is such a powerful illustration for spiritual truth, but one I dare not use from the pulpit for fear of being insensitive to the number of overweight people in the congregation (am I just sacred?). To be frank—overeating is a sin. It is a lack of self control at best, and idolatry at worst, and in most cases a mixture of both. If Christ cannot help us master our love for food, who is to say we can master our love for this world?

If someone overeats to the point of flirting with obesity, there is price to pay on the body. Joints start giving out, the back is strained, and it simply takes more energy and effort to do everyday chores. Life becomes more difficult—an element of suffering is introduced. While we can pray for such things—we should take all our burdens to the Lord in prayer—such suffering is decidedly not the same as the suffering so often mentioned in the New Testament letters. And unfortunately, there is a lot of suffering of this category in the American church.

• Guys suffering from singleness because they don’t have the guts to get married to another sinner who is not the latest Miss Evangelical. Girls then also end up suffering (innocently).
  
• Highly moralistic Christians who think that working out salvation with fear and trembling means approaching every moral decision with sweaty-palmed fear and trembling and having a hair-trigger finger on the guilt-gun of moral failure. Sin requires a kind of “evangelical penance” of giving the speech at accountability group, setting new “boundaries” and doing some new spiritual discipline.
• Long term laziness and lack of basic life skills. For example, if a seminary students did not grow up in a family that taught him or her how to have a conversation and be responsible, it is likely to introduce awkwardness and possibly rejection from the church.
• Having the expectation of living a comfortable, secure life in the suburbs and experiencing the “suffering” when this expectation is not met.

More on this topic later.