In our spiritual lives, as in our professional lives, and in sports and hobbies, we improve and excel by handling failure and learning from it. Only in cultivating discipline, endurance, and patience do we find satisfaction and reward. And those qualities are most devel­oped through some form of suffering.

Mountain climbers could save time and energy if they reached the summit in a helicopter, but their ultimate purpose is conquest, not efficiency. Sure, they want to reach a goal, but they desire to do it by testing and deepening their character, discipline, and resolve.

God could create scientists, mathematicians, athletes, and musi­cians. He doesn’t. He creates children who take on those roles over a long process. God doesn’t make us fully Christlike the moment we’re born again. He conforms us to the image of Christ gradually: “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18).

In our spiritual lives, as in our professional lives, and in sports and hobbies, we improve and excel by handling failure and learning from it. Only in cultivating discipline, endurance, and patience do we find satisfaction and reward. And those qualities are most devel­oped through some form of suffering.

God Uses It for Our Good

Instead of blaming doctors, drunk drivers, and criminals for our suffering, we should look for what God can accomplish through it (see Romans 8:28).

Why do God’s children undergo pressures, suffering, and deadly peril? Paul answers clearly: “that we might not rely on ourselves but on God” (2 Corinthians 1:9).

A victim of a great evil told me, “I learned that God wasn’t going to go down my checklist of happiness and fulfill it. I learned what it meant to sur­render to his will. Before, I wanted certain gifts from him; now I want him.”

For turning us toward God, sometimes nothing works like suf­fering. C. S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world” (The Problem of Pain). God uses suffering to bring us to the end of ourselves and back to Christ. And that’s worth any cost.

I write these words not from a lofty philosophical perch, but in the crucible of my precious wife Nanci’s battle against cancer. This is not theory to us; it is life. And we sense not only God’s presence, but also His purposes.

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