Are you in a season of suffering right now, and wondering whether God has stepped out of the room?
The German theologian Helmut Thielicke was once asked what he saw as the greatest defect among American Christians. His answer: they have an inadequate view of suffering. I don’t know if that is our greatest defect, but it ranks right up there.
Two boys walk into a dentist’s office. One of them says, “I want a tooth pulled, no gas, no numbing, because we’re in a hurry.” The dentist says, “You’re a brave young man. Which tooth is it?” The boy turns to his friend and says, “Show him your tooth, Albert.”
That is most of us with suffering. We are all for it, as long as it happens to someone else. In the first message in this series we saw three reasons God allows pain. In this one I want to build on them with four more.
Suffering is part of the plan
This may surprise you, but the Bible does not treat suffering as a glitch in the Christian life. It treats it as part of the assignment. Paul writes, “unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29).
Given. The word means to grant freely, to bestow as a favor. Paul puts believing and suffering side by side. Both are given in Christ’s behalf.
You say, “But if I draw closer to God, surely he will keep me out of trouble.” Now while that sounds reasonable, Scripture teaches the opposite. “Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12). A closer walk with God is not a promise of an easier road.
Reason four: to examine our faith
On April 20, 1999, one of the gunmen at Columbine High School pointed his weapon at a student named Cassie Bernall and asked her whether she believed in God. According to the account that spread afterward, she said yes. Whatever the exact words were in that room, the question put faith on the table in the most literal way imaginable.
Would yours hold up?
Israel wandered forty years in the desert, hot and miserable, and I am sure some of them wondered whether Moses knew where he was going. Moses did not sidestep their suffering. He told them the Lord had led them through the wilderness to humble them and to test them, “to know what was in thine heart” (Deuteronomy 8:2). The Hebrew word carries the idea of putting someone to the test to find out what they are really made of.
Jesus told the church at Smyrna the same thing before prison and tribulation arrived: be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life (Revelation 2:10). Peter says trials test your faith the way fire tests gold, and your faith is worth far more to God than the gold (1 Peter 1:6-7).
How you hold up under fire matters. Other believers are watching. People who do not believe are watching. And God himself is watching.
Reason five: to further our obedience
Picture a man walking his dog down the street on a leash. When the dog lunges after a squirrel, the owner gives the leash a tug and the dog falls back in line.
Suffering is often that tug. Left to ourselves, many of us would run around like an untrained puppy, chewing on everything in sight. The Master yanks the chain, and we learn to walk close to him. It is the school of hard knocks, and nobody enrolls in it on purpose.
The psalmist knew it well. “Before I was afflicted I went astray: but now have I kept thy word” (Psalm 119:67). And a few verses later: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes” (Psalm 119:71).
Even Jesus learned obedience this way. Hebrews 5:8 says that although he was a Son, “yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered.” If God the Son learned obedience through suffering, what makes you and me think we will get off the hook?
No pain, no gain. Is there an area of your life right now where the Master may be tugging the leash?
Reason six: to comfort others
You may be thinking that so far suffering sounds like it only benefits God’s program. Is there anything in it for you? Absolutely.
Paul opens 2 Corinthians by blessing “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
Look at that carefully. Comfort does not start at a greeting card aisle or a florist’s counter. It starts in the heart of God. The verb is continuous: he keeps on comforting, in all of our affliction, not just some of it. And he does not intend for his comfort to stop with you. He wants you to pass the baton to the next person who needs it.
If you are going through a big trial right now, you may be in a prime position to become a channel of God’s comfort. You could start a new ministry and call it Walking in Your Moccasins. I’m sure you can come up with a better name.
Reason seven: to humble us
Suffering reminds us how small we are, how limited we are, and how desperately we need the Lord.
Paul had seen things in heaven that no one else had seen. To keep him from becoming proud, he says, he was given a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him (2 Corinthians 12:7). Scholars have guessed at everything from persecutors, to temptation, to a long list of medical conditions: malaria, migraines, eye trouble, and on and on. Nobody knows for certain.
The word translated “thorn” can also mean a stake, the kind you drive into the ground. Not a splinter. A stake.
Your thorn may be physical or emotional, public or private, a person or a pain. Maybe you have prayed for it to be removed and it hasn’t been. It may be that God is keeping you humble so that you keep walking close to him. I have written more about this in strength in weakness.
Don’t rush past it
So let’s gather it up. God may allow suffering to turn it into a positive result, to build within you a need for him, to cultivate character, to examine your faith, to further your obedience, to make you a comforter of others, or to humble you. And sometimes none of these reasons will fit your situation neatly.
Even then, let me encourage you not to hurry past what you are going through by trying to escape it. There is an old poem that says the writer walked a mile with Pleasure and learned nothing, then walked a mile with Sorrow and learned a great deal. That is often how it works.
And remember that no one has suffered like God himself. He gave his one and only Son, sinless, to die the most excruciating death imaginable, bearing in his body the sins of the world. If you have never received him, accept Jesus today. Believe that he suffered in your place and that God raised him from the dead. He may not remove your thorn, but he will give you a comfort nothing in this world can give. Come just the way you are.
If you need prayer, share your request in the comments under the video on YouTube.
Until next time, may God grant you and yours his strength for today.
