Restoring Fortunes, a sermon based on Job 42: 1-6, 10-17, preached on September 22, 2024

There are some great videos on the internet of first-time drivers, but in these videos, it’s not the teenage drivers who are being recorded. It’s their nervous parents. Our daughter Lily showed me a video of a mother sitting in the passenger seat of her car. Her daughter was excited to be at the wheel, having just received her learner’s permit, yet her mother was nervous. She was clearly tense, but it was more than that. It might be more accurate to say that this mother presented as someone with generalized anxiety disorder. As her daughter moves towards a stop light, Mom reaches with her left arm to brace herself with the dashboard. Her right hand finds the grab handle above her door. She looked like she was expecting an explosion at any second. This is the way it often is. That’s how I was driving with our 15-year-old daughter, Lily. When Lily first got her learner’s permit, she asked me to ride with her around the neighborhood. I was nervous, but not because of how Lily was driving. Lily drove slowly and cautiously. She made full and complete stops at all stop signs. She looked both ways before moving into intersections. After the wave of anxiety passed through me, I was impressed, and she was proud, so when we made it back to the house after circling the neighborhood, she wanted to park my car in the driveway. That’s a challenge because our driveway snakes around the house. It’s a difficult driveway to back out of or to pull into, yet she was threading the needle. She navigated her way up the driveway, around our house. She pulled up right next to her mother’s car. Slowing down right in front of a brick retaining wall, which marks the raised bed of my garden, she wanted to bring the car to a full and complete stop, so she slammed on the gas. The front two wheels of the car were up on the raised bed of the garden. She yelped, then cried. I asked her to put the car in park and told her to hop out and go inside. I backed the car back off the raised bed of the garden. No real damage was done. I haven’t grown many tomatoes this season, but no real damage was done to the car, and wise parents tell me that it’s just this kind of hardship that all kids need to face as they’re learning to drive. A small mistake that doesn’t hurt anyone is just what every new driver needs as they learn to drive because such real-life suffering teaches a lesson that can’t be learned from the safety of a drivers ed classroom or a driving manual. I can’t teach her everything. Sometimes, she’s got to walk that lonesome valley on her own. This is the fourth sermon in a row based on the book of Job. Today, we read the ending of the book. Four weeks ago, we read the beginning, and what I want you to notice today is how Job changes. I want you to notice that the way Job parents his children changes. If you remember back to the beginning of the book before anything bad happened, Job was working overtime to protect his kids. We read in the first chapter: He would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” This is what Job always did. This is what every parent is tempted to do. I remember one afternoon when Lily was very young. I had read an article about the dangerous content on the internet, and so I called my grandfather and told him that I was thinking about having the internet disconnected from the house to protect little Lily from what all she might find there. He said, “While you’re at it, keep her from getting a library card because there are plenty of dangerous ideas in there as well, and maybe don’t send her to school or let her learn to read. Maybe just wrap her in bubble wrap. That should do it.” Do you get his point? My grandfather, knowing that resilience comes from making mistakes, facing temptation, and suffering, wanted me to help Lily learn to live in the world rather than protect her from it, which is where Job ends up at the end of the book. We just read that Job, had seven sons and three daughters. He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Karen-happuch. Notice that the book of Job names the daughters and not the sons. That’s unusual. Then, here’s something even more unusual. We read: In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers. Now, there are daughters named in the Bible. Sometimes, the Bible tells us the names of the girls, but never do the daughters inherit anything from their fathers. I can think of one other instance in Scripture where it happens. It’s in the book of Numbers, the account of the daughters of Zelophehad. Everyone knows about them, right? With this uncommon practice of preparing his children for his death by providing all his children an inheritance, what is the Bible trying to tell us? What changed in Job? What did he learn from suffering? From suffering, he learned that life doesn’t last forever and that hardship strengthened his relationship with God, so why overprotect them from it? Why not equip them to stand on their own? Will they make mistakes? Of course. Might they squander their inheritance on loose living? Sure. Think about what happened with the Prodigal Son, who squandered his inheritance and returned to the Father valuing his relationship with him. We can pray for them, but think about what happens when they pray on their own from the ash heap. There’s a beautiful story that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tells about learning to pray. It was late one night in January of 1956. He couldn’t sleep, and so he got out of bed, went to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee by his side. He said that he could feel the darkness of despair creeping towards him. A few weeks earlier, Rosa Parks had refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King, who had just turned 27 years old, was the leader of that boycott and had received an endless stream of death threats against him and his family ever since. He had reached a point when the forces standing against him seemed impossible to overcome. It was the middle of the night, and he was away from home. Had he been in Atlanta, he would have gone to see his father and would have asked his father to pray for him, but his father was too far away, and it was too late at night to call. King wrote: I was ready to give up… In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. [It was as though I had never prayed before.] I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears were gone. My uncertainty disappeared and I was ready to face anything. My friends, Job is a book of the Bible in which the main character suffers. Suffering has so much to teach us. Suffering taught Dr. King to pray. That dark night of the soul set him free from his fear to stand up for righteousness. Yet his father would have spared him that suffering, just as I would have spared Lily from her first car accident. I want you to know that I asked Lily if I could tell that story about her first car accident. She told me, “You’ve already told everyone, so why not tell it in a sermon?” I’m not a perfect father. I wish I were, but I’m not. I’m not Jesus. Jesus is more than me, and I want our girls to know Him more than I want them to think that I’m perfect, and more than I want to protect them from every hardship that they may face. I want them to know that in the pit of hardship, they will not be alone. No matter how dark the shadow, His light will still shine. No matter how bad the mistake, no matter how deep the shame, His grace is for them. He is more than me, and as much as I want to protect our girls from everything, I won’t always be there, so I want them to have the inheritance of faith. Job gave his daughters an inheritance: an inheritance of gold that would help them, preserve them, and keep them. Yet, our inheritance is even greater than that, for our fist Scripture lessons tells us that our High Priest, is holy, blameless, undefiled, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other priests, He has no need for sacrifices, for He died once and for all. We are but humans. He has been made perfect forever. You may not meet Him when the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, and everything is just fine, but not every day will be like that. On those dark and stormy days, look, and you will find Him. The blessing of suffering is that while we are suffering, Jesus, and our need for Him, becomes clear, and Jesus is the most precious inheritance, the greatest fortune. Amen.