Right now, you might be going through trials that are rocking your world. You’re hanging on for dear life. You’re in the thick of something menacing and awful. So here’s what I want you to know: God is using this. He’s not being cruel. He doesn’t hate you. He’s making you into the saint he’s called you to be.

God does not want you to be a fragile Christian. Let that sink in for a moment. God does not want you to fall to pieces every time hard things happen. He doesn’t want you collapsing under pressure or spiraling into despair when trials arrive at your door. That’s not his design for you, and it’s not the promise of his word.

Romans 5:3-4 says, “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

There’s a divine progression here. Suffering isn’t random cruelty. It has a purpose. God uses it to produce endurance in you—the strength to take a punch and keep going. That endurance then gets forged into godly character. And that character produces a hope that doesn’t waver when the next storm rolls in.

Think about the strongest Christians you know. The ones who are unflappable. Steady. Rock-solid in their faith. I’ll bet you my paycheck they’ve been through some hard things. They’ve cried rivers of tears. They’ve poured their hearts out to God in the dark hours. And God used all of that pain to turn their spines into steel.

This is the typical way God works. Show me a godly, steadfast saint who’s been walking faithfully for forty years, and I’ll show you a man or woman who has been made strong through suffering.

On the other hand, show me a Christian who’s always had the good life, who’s had everything handed to them on a silver platter, and who’s never really been tested—and very often (though not always) you’ll find someone who hasn’t learned endurance yet. They’re fragile. They haven’t had their weakness trained out of them.

Now here’s the hard truth: godly Christian character is not forged in a Sunday school class. You don’t become unshakeable by listening to podcasts about perseverance or reading books about trials. Those things help, for sure, but they’re just one piece of the puzzle. The other piece, the one we don’t like to acknowledge, is that God beats these truths into your soul through pain.

That’s an unfortunate reality, but it is the reality. Godly character is very often forged in the flames of adversity.

The Wrong Response

Here’s where we need to get honest. When suffering comes—and it will come—you have a choice to make. Many Christians today don’t make the right choice. We’ve gotten so comfortable, so soft, that we feel like we’re being uniquely afflicted by God whenever hard things happen.

We may not like it, but it’s the truth: this is just the way life is.

Read More