The enemy is seeking to make us doubt the goodness, love, presence, and power of God. He knows that, if we begin to question God’s character and power, we will quit going to God and seeking his help. Satan’s lies are meant to damage and weaken our faith so that on the other side of our suffering (if there is another side) we will not love or serve God as we once did.

Somehow, someway, at some point, suffering will come knocking on your door. It may start as a quiet, even gentle, knock that gets louder over time, and you know that you will eventually have to open the door. Other times, it may kick the door down suddenly and violently. Perhaps Mr. Hardship will enter like the unwelcome he is but only stay for a little while before leaving. Other times, Mr. Hardship might barge in and take residence in every room of your life indefinitely.

When hardship will come, we don’t know. How we will suffer may vary. But one thing is for sure: suffering will come knocking.

No matter how hard we try, we are unable to escape the brokenness of the world that is our present address. And no matter who we surround ourselves with, we are imperfect people living among other imperfect people, inflicting suffering upon one another. But because of the amazing, practical wisdom of God’s Word, the glory of his presence and power, and the reality of mercies that are new every morning, we do not have to ignore the guarantee of suffering or pretend that it doesn’t discourage us. We can stare Mr. Hardship in the face with open and expectant hearts. The hope of redemption is not just reserved for eternity, like I wrote about last month, but is a real, living, and pres¬ent hope. This hope is rooted in the fact that our Lord is in us, with us, and for us right here, right now. This truth radically changes how we understand, experience, and respond to the suffering that has or surely will come our way. There is no valley of suffering deeper than God’s grace in Jesus!

Suffering Is Never Neutral

Here is what every sufferer needs to under¬stand: we never suffer only the thing we are suffering; we always also suffer in the way that we are suffering that thing. We never come to our suffering empty-handed. We always drag a bag full of experiences, expectations, assumptions, perspectives, desires, intentions, and decisions into our suffering. Thus, our lives are shaped not only by what we suffer but by also what we bring to our suffering. How we think about ourselves, life, God, and others will profoundly affect the way in which we think about, interact with, and respond to the difficulties that come our way. Our suffering is more powerfully shaped by whatever is in our hearts than by what is happening to our bodies or in the world around us.

What do we bring to our suffering? Just one example is poor theology. Even if our confessional theology is robust and we have a comprehensive knowledge of Scripture, at street level our everyday theology could be askew. Sometimes the kinds of things that we bring to our moments of suffering deepen the pain of the painful thing we are facing. The street-level theology we carry into times of suffering and trial are very important.

There are many examples of how bad theology worsens our experience of suffering. Just one is when we say something along the line of “I am suffering because God is punishing me for my sin.” Perhaps a Christian is convinced that her disease was God’s punishment for bad choices or decisions she had made. In a time when she needed to run to God, she did her best to hide from him and to hide from his people. She reasoned that her job was to endure the punishment she deserved. Clearly, such thinking is rooted in bad theology. The message of Scripture is that every piece of the guilt, shame, and punishment for our sin was completely and once for all carried by Christ. This means there is no more condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (see Romans 8:1–4). So, our suffering is not punitive; that is, it is not a direct punishment for sins we have committed.

How discouraging not only to go through hard and maybe even life-altering circumstances but also to think we are going through those things because we have fallen short of God’s standard! It is hard to run to God for help, to rest in his care, to be assured of his love, and to believe that his mercies are constantly available and new every day when we are convinced that we are being punished by him. And it is hard to reach out for God’s grace when we think he is already giving us what we deserve in our suffering. But the Bible never interprets our suffering this way; in fact, it teaches the opposite. Rather than connecting suffering to the bad things we have done, Scripture connects trials and difficulty to the good things God wants for us and is working to produce in us (see James 1:2–4).

The Trap of Doubt

Something else we bring to our suffering is doubt. Suffering does not so much change our heart as expose what has been in our heart all along. Difficulty has an amazing ability to reveal that which is inside us.

Read More