Audio“Preach to hurting people, and you will never lack an audience.” That is what one of my preaching professors told me over twenty years ago. As a young man barely over 21, relatively new in the Christian faith, I didn’t know much about the Bible or much about life. So, it sounded to me like bad advice – I mean who would want to hear messages about comfort and overcoming suffering all the time? Well, what I have learned in the ensuing years is that suffering is always relevant because we are always suffering. You might say, “Well, not me, I’m not suffering!” Just hang in there. You will get your turn, I assure you. And even when we are not suffering personally, people we love are suffering, and we suffer with them. But not only have I learned that suffering is always a relevant subject to preach about, I have also discovered that one cannot preach the Bible faithfully without regularly dealing with the subject of suffering and apart from having a sound theology of suffering. The subject does not arise “here and there,” or “on occasion” in Scripture. I can hardly find a page of the Bible that doesn’t deal, in some way, with suffering. So it has taken me a long time, but I have finally learned that the old professor was right. Preach to hurting people – because that’s the only people there are in the world – and you will never lack an audience – because the subject is relevant to everyone at all times.When we begin to read the book of Exodus, it does not take us long to discover that the Israelites were suffering in Egypt. Of course, few (if any) of us will ever experience the magnitude of suffering that they did. The circumstances and intensity of suffering vary from person to person, even if the experience of it is generally universal. But what is unchanging from person to person and circumstance to circumstance is the source of genuine hope in the midst of our hardships. So, when we read these words in Exodus and see how God was bringing hope to His people in the midst of hardships, we have every reason to believe that this same God is still bringing hope to His people in the midst of our hardships as well. So, let us look at our text and discover several truths about hope in the midst of hardship that are evident in our text and applicable to our experience in the world today. I. God’s people are not immune to suffering (1:1-14). In school we all learned rules of grammar and syntax. One of them was to never end a sentence with a preposition. For some reason, someone just decided that ending a sentence with a preposition was something up with which they would not put. And another rule – well, I just broke it – is that we should never begin a sentence with a conjunction. Now, I have finally found a way around this rule, but it isn’t easy. If you will take three semesters or more of Hebrew, and become proficient in handling the Hebrew Bible, you can show your teacher that the Scriptures which God inspired contain many sentences that begin with a conjunction, and some entire books of the Bible begin with a Hebrew conjunction. Exodus is one of them. If we were to be excessively literal in our translation of the Hebrew here, we would begin verse one something like this: “And these are the names of the sons of Israelwho went to Egyptwith Jacob.” There are a variety of rules of Hebrew syntax which explain the use of this conjunction at the beginning of this book, but the most basic reason it is there is that this is a continuation of the story of the book of Genesis. The first seven verses are all almost exact quotations of verses in Genesis. The names are the same, only the setting has changed. Having just completed a quick survey of the book of Genesis, we are familiar with these people and how they came to be in Egypt. You will recall that they were not there for the same reason that they would later be in exile in Babylon. In that case, they were deported to Babylonas a punishment f