Pain. We take pills to ease it, hold prayer meetings to heal it, develop strategies to avoid it, and think up philosophies to explain it. We rarely, however, consider suffering as part of God’s plan for our lives.
Classic spiritual authors take a different approach to suffering. Take the 17th-century monk Brother Lawrence, for example. Lame in one leg and acquainted with illness, in The Practice of the Presence of God, he says: “I have been often near expiring, but I never was so much satisfied as then. Accordingly, I did not pray for any relief, but I prayed for strength to suffer with courage, humility, and love. Ah, how sweet it is to suffer with God!”
“The heart is stretched through suffering, and enlarged,” wrote renowned Quaker teacher Thomas Kelly. He believed that suffering helps us feel God’s burden for a world in pain and encourages us to respond.
Or let me give a more recent example. In 1967, a diving accident left Joni Eareckson Tada a quadriplegic. She told me this during a radio interview: “Christians sometimes want to erase suffering out of the dictionary. [But] if you read the Bible, you’ll see that it is often God’s best tool to make us more like Jesus.”
There’s nothing wrong with visiting a doctor when we’re sick, and we should pray when we’re ill (James 5:13-18). But Brother Lawrence, Thomas Kelly, and Joni Eareckson Tada discovered something deeper about suffering: God wants to use it to transform our character (Romans 5:3-5), make us mature (James 1:2-4), give us empathy for others (2 Corinthians 1:3-4), prove our faith (1 Peter 1:7), and make us like Jesus (Romans 8:28-29).
“How sweet it is to suffer with God!” are the words of people who can rejoice in suffering (Romans 5:3), because God’s purposes in it are their priority.
NLT 365-day reading plan passage for today: Deuteronomy 29:1-29
More:
Read James 1:2-15 and note how the same perspective on pain applies to the sufferings of persecution and temptation—not just illness.
Next:
When suffering comes, do you get angry at God or seek His purposes in it? How have you experienced God’s presence through suffering?
irishgypsy on February 23, 2013 at 6:17 am
This is always the toughest area for me to relate to my family and friends. That suffering can be part of God’s plan for us. They almost always reply “If he loves me, why am I going through this”. And I myself have wondered why. But I know, w.ithout the Lord’s love and guidance I would not have made it through the battle
sheridan voysey on February 25, 2013 at 4:41 am
I resonate so much with this too, irishgypsy. I have a family member with numerous chronic illnesses and would just love for them to be healed. And, naturally, we ask why God hasn’t healed them yet (they will be healed in heaven!). This is a call to maturity for all of us that needs the Lord’s special grace.
Tom Kopper on February 23, 2013 at 10:29 pm
We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. Romans 5: 3
Dear brothers and sisters,* when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. James 1: 2
Even though pain, of any type, is uncomfortable, at the present-moment, but rejoicing, and having joy, is the result, the future-tense, when we will recieve our rewards in Heaven.
sheridan voysey on February 25, 2013 at 4:42 am
Thanks Tom. I do sometimes wonder who we’d become without pain. As Joni says, it is often God’s surprising tool to make us Christ-like.
winn collier on March 2, 2013 at 7:14 pm
enduring suffering via grace while also rebelling against the sin and injustice of the world that causes suffering – I always find this a tricky walk.