Suffering with Joy

In 2000, my sister, Joy Dyer, tried to pay for a purchase at a department store and she could not make her hand write out a check. That was the first sign that something sinister was attacking her body. Almost one year later to the day, cancer took Joy’s life. The letters in this book were born out of a desire to walk with them through this hard journey. My hope is that these letters will provide some comfort and encouragement to other fellow-sufferers who are walking a hard path. - Tom Ascol, Author

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1. Call to Me
2. Strength and Peace from God
3. A Lesson on Prayer
4. Even the Mountains Will Sing
5. Whom Shall I Fear?
6. The Measure of God’s Love
7. Peace in the Ups and Downs
8. God Is Near to Us
9. Our Hiding Place
10. Seek the Lord
11. A Legacy of Devotion
12. Lift Your Eyes Up
13. Count It All Joy
14. Endure
15. Humble Yourself
16. Christ Our Shepherd
17. In Due Time
18. The God of All Grace
19. Confess Your Sins
20. Love in Deed and Truth
21. Be Holy
22. Seek First
23. Ask, Seek, and Knock
24. Incomparable Glory
25. Our Good and His Glory
26. Foreknown and Predestined
27. Called, Justified, and Glorified
28. Who Can Be Against Us?
29. The Giver of All Gifts
30. For Us
31. Justified
32. Arise, My Soul, Arise
33. Our Final Enemy
34. More Than Conquerors
35. Though All Hell Should Endeavor to Shake
36. To Save Sinners
37. More of Him
38. In Immanuel’s Land
39. Our Great High Priest
40. A Sympathizing Savior
41. Blessed
42. Fight the Fight of Faith
43. We Will Rise with Him
44. Never Doubt in the Dark What God Has Taught You in the Light

Afterword

Endnotes

About the Author

After the cancer diagnosis of his sister Joy, brother Tom Ascol wrote weekly letters for one year to encourage Joy’s family and friends with the precious promises of God’s Word. Over twenty years later, we have the rare privilege of reading these tender, Christ-centered, and moving letters for our own Bible memorization and devotional lives—each of which breathe with realism in the crucible of suffering alongside optimism that the world cannot know. Above all, Joy’s life shows that those who live and die in the Lord are truly blessed (Phil. 1:21; Rev. 14:13). I trust that the Lord will richly bless these letters for the comfort, encouragement, and endurance of many of His children in the midst of suffering as well as for stirring up holy jealousy in the hearts of the unsaved for the portion that belongs to God’s people, which in turn, may press them on to seek and find salvation for their own souls by the Spirit’s grace.

Dr. Joel R. Beeke
Chancellor and Professor of Systematic Theology and Homiletics, Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary
Pastor of Heritage Reformed Congregation, Grand Rapids, Michigan

This is holy ground. We are invited to a family pilgrimage of affirming the goodness of God, the power of His Word, and the vital reality of prayer as they experienced together the road to death of Joy—beloved wife, mother, sister, daughter. This journey, now more than two decades ago, was fueled with strength and energy in each next step by familial Scripture memory, exposition of the context of the memory verse, and a prayer based on the verse. We learn of the inception of the killing cancer, the agreement to journey together in the context of revealed truth, experiences week by week of Joy’s brave and trusting journey, the decline, the death, and the victory of such a death. We read the sermon Tom Ascol preached at the funeral. We can see that in Christ death is stingless. This was not conceived as an academic work or projected as a volume of devotions for the public. It is grippingly existential in the most spiritually and edifyingly provocative way. Their journey becomes ours and elicits the unerring exclamation, ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’

Dr. Tom J. Nettles
Retired Professor of Historical Theology, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary