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290 Baptist Preaching 35 Three Steps for overcoming Affliction (Job 42:10) Pepe Luis Flores Varas (Translated by Ivette Herryman Rodríguez1 ) Dwelling of God Church Lima, Peru BIOGRAPHY Pepe Luis Flores Varas was born in La Libertad, Peru, and is married to Cirila Coillo de Flores. Varas has served as pastor at three different Baptist churches: Noah’s Ark Baptist Church, Emanuel Baptist Church, and Dwelling of God Baptist Church. Currently, Varas is the pastor of three churches, as well as serving as coordinator of five new church plants. He also serves as the president of the Peruvian Baptist Convention and is an adjunct professor in the Baptist Seminary of Lima and Baptist Institute in Arequipa. He received his bachelor of theology from the Baptist Theological Seminary of Peru. SERMON COMMENTARY Varas places his finger on the pulse of resentment and offers a cure. His pastoral concern glistens in this message, which takes its point of departure from the experience of Job but reaches out to embrace a bouquet of intertextual allusions. This message combines insights into spiritual psychology from an experienced pastor with a grasp of the canonical teaching about shedding those burdens of resentment and the unforgiven that drag down the life of the spirit. He begins with an affirmation of the universality of tribulation. He expects this to increase in what he considers to be the end times. The image of Job and his complicated friends sets the tone for the message. Job is both helped and hurt by those friends. To free himself from their unwise counsel Job must pray for them. This opens the way to a canonical review of similar situations and spiritual psychology. Varas is careful to distinguish genuine restoration from a shallow prosperity gospel. His great burden is to teach the release from resentment that brings both physical and spiritual complications. Using a host of intertextual allusions he reinforces the text at hand. He introduces the trope of a man with a backpack crossing a river for an inheritance. He must lose the pack to get the inheritance . This trope is as deep and textured as Bunyan’s pilgrim, whose burden falls off his back at conversion. Part VI—Latin America 291 Varas pleads that his hearers move from a sense of victimization to one of restoration. Along with more intertextual citations he gives the vivid experience of Corrie ten Boom at just that point. Each listener may be in his or her own concentration camp and need freedom in the same way. When one has thus been freed, there is the possibility of moving from a sense of need to being a helper of others. Varas makes an arresting use of the self-destructive Garasene demoniac in a biblical allusion. This demonic wild one hurts himself and others as a lifestyle. Yet when he meets Jesus and is made whole his first impulse is to help others. He wants to go with Jesus but is rather told to go back and to help tell those in Gadara what God has done for him. In his healing he becomes a helper. He becomes the wounded healer. With true pastoral wisdom, Varas identifies some who cause trouble in the church as those who have never handled their own issues. Pastors are aware of those presenting problems in the church who often mask what those problems are by lashing out in the assembly due to their own pain. This projection takes various forms. In an inclusio Job reenters the message in his own restored and redeemed person. He stands there as a monument to what God can do for those who have known extremes. In the Louvre there is a painting by Francia, “St. Job at the Foot of the Cross.” There is a sense that Varas does just that in this sermon. He begins and ends with Job but in the midst places the icon of suffering in the shadow of a greater revelation for which he waited. SERMON ANALYSIS Varas demonstrates a degree of traduction in this message. He brings needs from the present alienation toward the text as much as he brings the text toward those needs. The two meet in that fine line between past biblical revelation and current human situation. His rhetoric is denotative. His theosymbolic code is low-positive. Resentment has its own demonic torments. God is greater if we permit him to be so in our experience. The individual can experience that. His use of culture...

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