Expect Suffering and Grow from It
Tom Shrader addresses the difficult topic of suffering in the Christian life, emphasizing that believers should not be surprised when trials come. Drawing from 1 Peter 4:12 and James 1:2, he explains that suffering serves God's purposes in developing patience, maturity, and dependence on Him. Shrader provides practical guidance for responding to suffering, including committing to the Lord, avoiding the victim mentality, and understanding that God uses pain for spiritual growth.
“I really don't think fully understand that Christ is all we need until Christ is all we have.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: How to Stay Straight in a Crooked World (2012)
Recorded: 2012
Duration: 39 min
Themes: suffering, trials, perseverance, growth, pain, endurance, maturity, trust, facing trials, experiencing pain, new believer, struggling with hardship, questioning gods plan, going through crisis, feeling overwhelmed, seeking understanding
Scripture: 1 Peter 4:12, James 1:2-5, 2 Timothy 3:12, Romans 8:28, John 9, 2 Corinthians 1, 1 Corinthians 10:13, Daniel 1:8
Theological Themes: sanctification, spiritual growth, divine sovereignty, gods will, perseverance, biblical worldview, spiritual maturity, suffering theology
Full Transcript
This is week 10 of an 11-week series entitled, How to Stay Straight in a Crooked World. The implication is not just a moral issue, but now God saves us, God leaves us here for a reason. What's that life look like? It's not to say it's one size fits all, but I should see these elements in the life of everyone who says they're a follower of Christ.
So we would say prayer, and some of you are gigantic prayers who can handle two or three hours and just do it. Others, it's five or 10 minutes and that's all I can handle. My point was more elements to it. So this series is a little bit of that.
It started with establishing the Bible as the final authority in our life, and then living according to that, learning it, making decisions. We were at a funeral the other day, and just a great guy. He had given me, years ago, a little eight and a half by 11 sheet with a great picture of John Wayne. The caption was, life is tough, especially if you're stupid. I thought, that's exactly right, that's making good decisions.
Living Out Your Faith
So then we talked about how I have to take my faith and integrate it into my life. That means speak the truth, speak the truth boldly. It means to begin to live in a way that people see that I'm a follower of Christ, and then they'll glorify Him as I tell them about it. Last time and this time are two of my wheelhouse messages. One was on contentment. The other one today is on a topic that nobody wants to really talk about. When you hear it, you want to turn and run from it. Yet, hopefully by the end of the day, you're going to stop and say, okay, I see the value now.
Here's point number 10. Expect suffering and grow from it. 1 Peter 4:12, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeals among you. That's the basis for this. That and James 1:2 counted all joy when you encounter various trials.
The Promises They Don't Put in Books
I had been a Christian for maybe two or three weeks. Somebody told me there's something called a Christian bookstore. I had no clue. So there was one at Seventh Avenue in Osborne. It's a great store. So I went in there the first time. I'd been a Christian two or three weeks, and I'm just scarfing up these books, and I'm getting ready to check out. There is a leather-bound gold leaf book that's titled The Promises of God. I thought, gosh, I had to have one of those. I said, do you have any of these in paperback? Because I don't want to spend a bunch of money on these promises. He said, sure. He gave it to me.
When I began to read this book, the Bible, and that book, The Promises of God, I found promises in this book, the Bible, that didn't make it to that Promises of God book. Let me give you one. 2 Timothy 3:12. All who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. They didn't make it into that promise book. I thought, wow, I don't want to happen on that deal. It really was helpful to me as I began to just rethink what's the Christian life begin to look like. Even to make some distinction for our conversation today, between persecution and maybe suffering for Christ, and then just suffering of life.
The thing that we say as Christians, I'm not sure always fully embrace, is that I understood when I came to Christ, my path would not be strewn with roses. But yet somehow, you think it should be. If you wanted to zap me, I would have done it like in the last 10 years. I wouldn't be doing it now.
There was a guy, a business guy, came to know Christ, and we were having a little breakfast like six months into this. He said, the last six months have had more pain, suffering, hardship, difficulties, financial, relational, than ever before. That doesn't seem right.
Persecution vs. Life's Suffering
Now, I'll make a distinction and talk a little bit about persecution. Because it seems to me, in our kind of world, that's fairly minimal. At the time that Paul's writing, and that early church, they estimate about 25,000 Christians were martyred every year in Rome. Today, that number around the world, last time I saw a persecuted church, the number was 250,000. So the number's significantly higher, 10 times higher.
We look at our life, and I'm thinking, where is that persecution that we feel? It may be minimal by comparison. It may be a friend that snubs you. I have had men and women whose parents have kind of disowned them. It may be a job situation where you were passed over. But generally, when we think of persecution, whatever we look at in our life tends to be minimal.
Then we talk about suffering, and Peter makes a distinction between suffering for what's right and suffering for what's wrong. In one case, he's saying, it makes sense and it's noble to suffer for what is right, to make a decision based on some moral principle, ethical principle, some lifestyle, and to suffer for that, that makes sense. But when you do something stupid and you suffer, there's nothing particularly noble about that.
What Scripture Says About Trials
So what I want to do is talk about suffering probably more in the context of life than in the context of persecution. I'll give you a couple of passages. James 1, verse two through five, consider it all joy, my brother, when you encounter various trials, knowing the testing of your faith produces endurance. That passage from 1 Peter 4:12, beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeals among you, which come upon you for your testing. Don't treat them as though some strange thing was happening to you.
Martin Luther, and I'm paraphrasing here, said this: you can't begin to understand hope until you understand hopelessness. We might say it this way. I don't think we really fully understand that Christ is all we need until Christ is all we have. Hardship in life has a way of doing that, of creating a need. That's the beginning of the Christian life. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
Those that are spiritually bankrupt. Those that see this need that's far beyond them. So you can talk, and many of you, I'm sure, have friends that are in this bracket, and you talk to them about Christ, and they'll say, "I don't have any need for that." And the one thing we know is eventually they will. Most often what they mean is, "I have the financial resources to handle anything."
Well, here's what we discover. That money will buy us medicine, but it won't buy us health. And it'll buy us a bed, but it won't buy us sleep. And eventually all of us realize there's a need. And in a very rare instance, it may not even be we realize it in this life, but we really realize it, obviously, at a point of death.
David and Mary Lamb's Story
And this entire idea of suffering and pain brings me to a couple that have since passed away. They lived down in Tempe. They were on the last boat out of Shanghai when the communists took over, an Asian couple. And they went to India. And they got to India, and they're in the poorest of the poor of India. And as Asians with India, they're in the poorest of the poor of that.
Their names were David and Mary Lamb. And David was convinced that God wanted him to do a work in India. And so he somehow cajoled a guy into letting him use his storefront for a church on Sunday. They subsequently retired down in Tempe. And I would go about once a quarter and visit them and just let them tell me stories.
And David would tell stories how for the first two, three, four months on Sunday, he would preach and lead worship. And Mary would be the only person there. And then gradually a few people came along. And then one day a guy gave him a piece of property and he went out to look at it. And it was a complete swamp.
So what David did was go out every day and pray at the swamp that God would dry it up. And he went out one day. This sounds goofy, I know. And it was bone dry. And the next day a little flower popped up. And I had the privilege of going there and actually teaching. It became a school and an orphanage. And it's story after story after story.
Those do great things for your heart. I'm afraid sometimes we either don't see God work in our life or it's in such ways that we tend to minimize it. We want to see Him do big things. So I'm driving in today and I don't feel well at all. And I'm asking God, "God, help me feel better. Get me through this." I don't know that there's ever been a day when I've driven in and say, "Thank you that I feel well and can get through it."
God's Holy Involvement in Suffering
So this is part, and we're talking about small suffering here. It is rarely a week goes by that I'm not spending time with men or women or couples, families who are just in all sorts of hurt and pain. Physical. Relational, economic.
R.C. Sproul writes this: "To remove human suffering is to quit the pilgrimage of faith. God majors in suffering. He displays Himself in holy involvement in all suffering. Rather than be removed from our suffering and those circumstances, we should embrace and allow God to work in the midst of them."
So let me give you the example of this. Somebody comes to you and they're hurting. Your flinch is to help them, to fix it. And there's nothing wrong with that. I get it. As Spock would say, that's typically human. But we go too quickly and we fail to either diagnose the source of the suffering or learn the lesson from it.
Now, not all suffering is from sin. We've got that. Some, again, is just the wear and tear of life. But somebody comes, and I've talked about it before. We'll see it at the church all the time. People come in who are financially hurting. And what they want from us is money.
Learning Through Financial Struggles
What we're willing to do, sometimes is give them money, but always willing to sit down and say, "Listen, there's one of two problems here." The government, by the way, could learn this. "You're either spending too much or taking in too little." And most of the time, it's spending too much.
So we want to take a little of that edge off. We'll pay your utility bill and maybe even a house payment or two, but not at the expense of learning that lesson. In the midst of that suffering and pain, I intuitively want to run away from it rather than run to it.
The Truth About Romans 8:28
I'm in a group on Friday morning, and there's a group of guys, and maybe three or four times a year they meet for five or six weeks. We're working our way through a book, and tomorrow's session, which I don't think I'm going to make, tomorrow's session is on scripture memorization.
And I'm sure that in the course of that, I read it and I thought, okay, they're going to call. What scripture comes to my mind right away? And there will be a whole bunch of them, but maybe it's the flow of just life and where it is. But for me, right now, it would be Romans 8:28.
Now, we won't do it here, but if we're in a setting, if I'm visiting somewhere, I would at this point say, "Can anybody quote Romans 8:28?" And there's always somebody who wants to do that, and I'm always suspicious, frankly, of that person who's that eager.
When they quote it, here's how they'll typically quote it. When I say, "Can you quote it," most people will say, "All things work together for good to those who love God and to those who are called according to His purpose." And indeed, that is part of the verse.
But the entire verse begins with, "And we know God causes all things to work together." See, if I start that first way, it's all about me. If I start that second way, it's all about God.
It's an amazing verse. It's a verse that hopefully provides great comfort to us and gives us great insight to God and who He is. So in my Bible, this is not a teaching Bible, it's a little different, but I'll have that word, "and we know," that phrase, with a bracket around it, or a box, or a line, or something that causes me to look at it and go, "Okay, my eyes want to go to this. This is something I can know." Fact, not conjecture. So it's like James 1:2: "Consider it all joy, my brother, knowing," there's that word.
again, that the testing of your faith produces endurance. So in that verse in Romans 8, what Paul's telling us in that one verse—if we don't have any other verses in that Bible that you have, rip out all the other ones, you just have this one verse—from that verse we know God is both all-knowing and all-powerful.
Because we know the verse is true, and if He's causing things to work together for good, He'd have to be all-powerful to do something about it, and He'd have to be all-knowing to know what we need. If you eliminate either one of those, there's God in heaven going, "Oh, Tom, don't go down there, don't go down there, I see what's happening, but I don't want you to do it." So He's all-knowing, but not all-powerful. Or He's looking at your life and going, "Man, if I'd have known that, I would have fixed it."
The World Seems Out of Control
When I look at this, in the midst of this whole world, I had all last week off, and Sandy was in an uncharacteristically restful mood for her. She was swimming and doing all of her stuff, but pretty laid back. So I'd sleep and then turn on TV, and it's like everything I turned on reinforced the sense of things being out of control.
So I'd click on this, and I'd be in Greece, and I'd click on that, and it'd be the fiscal cliff, and I'd click on this, and Notre Dame would be in the national championship. It was all bad. Nothing was good.
In the midst of that, and that's why I try to encourage my friends to not listen to too much of the talk radio stuff, because in the midst of this, you can be overwhelmed by that, and pretty soon that stuff seeps into your mind and into your psyche, and you're beginning to operate as though things are out of control, failing to understand that, yes, they're out of your control, but they're not out of God's control.
What You Know Prompts What You Feel
This idea, concept, was born out of just sheer pain in people's lives, but I'm one night talking to a lady whose husband had been unexpectedly killed, and she said, "I'm so afraid. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do with the kid. I don't know what to do about the future. I don't know what to do about finance."
And I said, "Well, then let's look at what you do know," and she began to rattle these things off. So here's the summation of that: What you know prompts what you feel, and this really kicks into play when it comes to suffering. When suffering comes along, it tends to cause us to reevaluate and therefore sometimes change our theology.
Bad Theology Born from Pain
I had been a Christian for two or three years, and all of a sudden there was this book that was out, and I had all these people tell me I need to read this book. And so I went to the bookstore and I got it. There were a Christian or two who had endorsed it, and I got into it, and it was an awful book. It was filled with bad teaching, and I learned from that very early in my Christian life that people, when they're hurting, are going to grasp for anything.
Chapter 7 of this book, the name of the book was Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Chapter 7 of that book was titled "God Can't Do Everything, But He Can Do Some Very Important Things." And on page 148 of the book, the author encourages us to forgive God because He has limitations.
Now, that sounds easy for you to dissect, but I'm telling you, I got person after person after person carrying around big old honking Bibles, going to Bible teaching church, they're telling me they found great comfort in this. And the book is born out of an author's experience where he had a son who was killed and was in that dilemma of trying to understand everything and at the same time save God's reputation.
Feelings Aren't Our Guide
So I have to be very careful when I go, "It made me feel good." Well, so does cocaine. But that's not part of our counseling process. It's important to understand that God uses suffering and pain, not in just a punitive way, but for our own good.
God Uses Suffering for Good
Let me give you two examples from my life. I'm in Tucson. Somebody asked me two weeks ago, before the ASU-U of A game, "Who do you think is going to win this game?" I said, "That is easy. Because no matter what happens, the Sun Devils are coming home. They're leaving Tucson. That's a win."
So this is not hard to figure out. I'm in Tucson teaching. It's a Sunday. And I have a Sunday afternoon commitment here. So I've got to get out of there. I finish it. It's a big church. Finish the three services. I'm trying to sneak. And I hate it. I hate it when some guest comes in, drops his load like the pro from Dover, and then you never get access to it. I hate that. But I didn't have any choice. And I told them that up front. I said, "I hate this. I hate what I'm going to do. I don't have a choice."
So I snuck out the back way. And there's a lady. There's no way around them. It's one hall. There's a lady. And she has another lady in a wheelchair. And I was not up for it. But I don't know what to do.
A Lesson in Patience
So I go on by and say, "Hey, it's good to see you. How are you?" And the lady in the wheelchair said, "I was just in your service when the topic was suffering." And I said, "I feel so inadequate. Here's your situation and all that goes with it."
And her friend said, "Show them what you can do now." And she said, "OK." And the other gal had a stick with a flat metal piece on the end of the stick with a hole in it. And if the one friend put the stick in her mouth, she could then put this flat metal thing over the joystick and move her wheelchair.
So we were talking. And I said, "I don't think I can even begin to relate to the level of suffering you have." And here's what she said. She said, "I was the most impatient person in the world. And I started to pray, 'God, give me patience.'" And she said, "I'm so patient."
That's like Larry. I remember Larry Wright. He was praying as God was growing him. "God, make me humble. Make me humble." And the next week he got rheumatoid arthritis and hemorrhoids. And he said, "Boy, now it's really humiliating and humble." And this lady said, "I understand what you're—"
This is like the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm in a setting - I think I was at Forrest's home, I'm not sure - and it was a Q&A time. So I said, "Any questions?" And this guy stood up in the back. I'm not mocking him, I just want you to get a sense of what I heard. I said, "Yes, go ahead." And he said, "Er, I, the, er, ah." And this went on back and forth. I finally said, "I'm sorry. I just don't know what you're saying."
So I was all done, and the guy came up. His friend told me when he was 16 years old, he was in a car wreck. He was in a coma for 3½ months, came out of it. And this guy, a little more relaxed now, said, "My mind races beyond my mouth." I said, "Well, at least we have one thing in common." And I said, "What did you want to ask?" And he said, "I want to be an evangelist. I have so much joy in my life." And if you dissect it, what he would tell you is that joy came really out of the hardship.
So here are two sentences I wrote years ago. God has structured and organized our lives to include problems and suffering. Your mission is not to stop the suffering, but to find God in the midst of the hurt and the pain, not to be absorbed in the pain and try to find a way out.
Now, here's what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that you're some sort of a masochist and you stay in that pain and you just go, "This is life." I understand wanting to get out. But again, God teaches us in the midst of pain, I think, in the midst of suffering.
Why Do People Suffer?
So I want to do two things here. Answer that question: why do people suffer? And then what to do when the suffering comes, because there's an inevitability to it.
I did not do this, but I'm positive you can Google "why people suffer" or "benefits of suffering," and you'll get a list. Let me give you - I've got 25 here - but give you kind of a cliff notes of this. It produces patience, suffering does, and joy, and maturity. It helps us examine our life.
So it's John 9. Jesus comes along, there's the blind man. Jesus says to the disciples, "Who sinned? This man or his parents, that he's blind?" And Jesus said, "Well, it's neither. But he might become a display case for the work of God." When suffering comes into your life, one of the first reactions you have is to go, "Is there something I've done? Is there some sin that produces this?" And sometimes there is. I mean, there are consequences to sin and bad choices. So it may be that. It may allow us to take a look at our life, and that may be the compelling reason to stop or to change.
But then again, not all suffering is based on sin. It's all based on sin in the general sense - all of our suffering is from Adam, and that's why we sin, and get sick, and get the flu, and all that goes with it. But our individual lives, we may look at it and say, "No, this isn't some sort of penalty. It's either natural consequences of life, or God's just allowed this for some reason," so that everything that comes into my life is either caused by or allowed by God.
Now, for some of you, you've heard that so many times that it's like, "Come on, let's get on to something else." For some of you, this is big or new, and that catches you off guard, and that's why we come back to it over and over again. Everything that happens in this world is either caused by or allowed by God, and if that's not true, He's not God. So whatever it is, God could stop it, but He chooses not to.
Here's another reason for suffering: to reveal ourselves to ourselves. That's my favorite, I think. You're sitting back and you're saying, "Oh my gosh, if that happened to me, I could never..." And then all of a sudden, you find yourself in the midst of it. God gives you this incredible sense of grace and peace, and now you're in the midst of it and you're just moving along, dazzling your friends, confounding your enemies, probably. Or you may be going, "You know, I think I can handle anything," and now this comes along and this small little thing throws you completely off track.
Additional Benefits of Suffering
There's other reasons. It drives us closer to God. It prepares you for greater ministry. It allows you - 2 Corinthians 1 - you now suffer for a reason, so you can sit down with somebody and genuinely say, "I know how you feel. I've been there." So there's a whole bunch of benefits.
Ultimately, it allows us, I think - well, two things. Makes us teachable and then allows us to teach. And ultimately, hopefully, it shows us the sovereignty of God.
When Suffering Comes: Don't Be Surprised
So let me give you eight things. When suffering comes, number one, don't be surprised. 1 Peter 4:12, "Don't be surprised by the fiery ordeals." James 1:2, third time we've quoted these: "Consider all joy when you encounter various trials because you know the testing of your faith produces endurance." Consider all joy when there's the inevitability to it.
Which I've shared with you before that I, seven weeks ago, became a DirecTV subscriber, leaving Cox Cable after years of being on hold. But the DirecTV that I have is a little bit of a basic upgrade because I needed some sports channels. But basic cable. And on it from, I think it's 363 to 373 are all in quotes, "Christian TV." And I've used the analogy and it's just perfect. It's like drinking false doctrine out of a fire hose to turn this on. It's just one after another, after another.
Well, I'm on there the other day and one of the guys - there's two or three of them that are particularly offensive, this guy would be one of them - and he's talking about, "If you're sick, that's not the will of God. God's will is for you to not be sick, to not struggle." Well, I'm going, "Ultimately that's got to break down because we got to acknowledge everybody's going to die from something." As I read through the scripture, I see all sorts of suffering and pain. Life of Job. I see it in Paul. Paul's life said, "I had this thorn in the flesh."
God May Want You to Suffer
God may want you sick and He may want you struggling. If for no other reason, then you'll listen.
Commit Yourself to the Lord
Number two, commit yourself to the Lord. Suffering comes and I watched it. I've watched it in lots of people's lives. I watched it in Susan's life up close for seven years.
When hardship and pain comes, you wear out emotionally and mentally. And there's a tendency maybe to trust in the doctors or to trust in whatever it might be. And God says, no, trust in me.
In the book of Daniel, early in that book, Daniel's confronted by challenges. And in the midst of this, Daniel 1:8 says, "Daniel made up his mind that he would not defile himself." It's the sense of trusting in the Lord from the beginning, to make up your mind to trust Him.
Don't Try to Understand Everything
Number three, and if you're here today and antagonistic or questioning, you really won't like this. Don't try to understand all this. Why this? Why now? Why me? We don't know.
And I'll tell you something that I think is kind of an undercurrent there, and there's a certain arrogance that somehow God owes you an explanation for what He's doing in your life. He doesn't owe you anything. And His ways are greater than mine. And I don't understand why I do this.
I mean, I got a picture. I told you all four kids were home sick at Haley's house. And then the tragedy of all tragedies, then the night before last, Haley got it. But I got a picture of Yale, and here's this skinny little kid, and he's got his head on a towel, and he's hugging George. He loves Curious George. That's his favorite. He's got George in his towel, and he's on the bathroom floor with his little head next to the toilet. Man, it's a sad picture. I was there a lot of nights, but it wasn't because of the flu, and so I know the drill.
Well, why would you allow this? Why? I don't know. I don't want to miss the lesson, but I can't explain all that away.
You're Not the Only One
Number four, realize you aren't the only person who's ever gone through this. That's one of the things suffering and pain does. We become very internal in our thinking. Very focused on ourselves. Hard to get out of it because everybody you meet says, how are you feeling? And then you give yet another discourse on how you're feeling at the moment. And after a while, it's like, boy, I've done this, no one else has.
1 Corinthians 10:13: "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful. He won't allow you to be tempted beyond that which you're able to endure." Whatever you're experiencing, I'm telling you, is not unique to you. It's the human experience. Not that everybody goes through it, but millions have.
That's kind of like when I think about dying, I'm thinking 7 billion people have done this. I ought to be able to do it. I think about that all the time. I went in for that stent, and they're trying to give me all this information, which I know they need to do. And I said, listen, you've done millions of these things. Doesn't mean it's going to work, but you're not unique.
Pray About All Things
Number five, pray about all things. And what I do at this point is I'm going to God, and I'm acknowledging two things. Number one, that He cares. Number two, that He can do something about it. The minute I go to Him, I am outside of myself and showing my dependence upon Him.
So I come and I pray. What does that mean? It means there's a constant in my mind, reflection on Him, the situation, life.
Thank God for the Suffering
Number six, thank God for the suffering. So we just had, a week ago today, we had Thanksgiving. We're gathered around the Thanksgiving table. Let's take time to thank God. Thank you for our house. Thank you for my mom. Thank you for my dad. Thank you for my kids. Thank you for... did anybody say thank you for my cancer? Thank you that I'm sick?
Why would I do that? Well, let's go back. "Consider it all joy, my friends, when you encounter various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance." God's in the midst of producing endurance in your life. Suffering is spiritual aerobics.
Suffering Is Spiritual Aerobics
So I'm in this, I went down end of February. I haven't been to the gym since March. So I'm starting to walk again and Sandy took me out the other day and we walked a while and it's awful. It's starting all over again. And I feel so weak and I'm lazy by nature. I feel so weak and lazy that I'm going, I don't think I can do that. But I know if I don't do that, I never get any better. That's the thing about working out.
If you go back, if you're a gym person. I remember the first time, years ago, I decided I had to do something and I'm going to the gym. So I'm in the gym and I get on the elliptical machine. And I set it for, I'm punching buttons. I don't know what I'm doing. So I punch a button: 60 minutes. And then I don't remember what the level was, some outrageous level. So I did about three minutes. And my head is swirling and I'm going, this isn't working, so I got off of that.
And I thought, well, I'll do some weights. And there was a little girl over there, and I say little. She was Sandy's size height-wise, but not near her strength. And she's doing these. So I'm just following her through. Well, she's doing these and I get on the machine and I can't do anything. Well, I do about a little bit of the weights. And I said, well, let me try the cardio again. I had the same experience.
I mean, I don't want to be too graphic here. But I'm in the car driving home and I'm going, I'm going to be sick. And then I stopped the car on the side of the road and there I am returning the catch of the day. And I'm just sick. And that was my first time at the gym. And I had a real crisis moment the next day, when it was time to go back and go through it again. And it was gradually to where that built up to something.
Suffering is spiritual aerobics. It takes you to the edge. It makes you sick. But all of a sudden, you see God in it. You're drawn closer to Him. You see all the benefits.
There's two more things. Don't become a martyr. You can quickly develop a victim mentality in all of this. And the last thing is, and I can't even believe I need to write it, but I've seen people like this: don't suffer needlessly. People somehow create these things of suffering. They do it intentionally. There's some sort of sickness in that.
The Wisdom of Obedient Suffering
And it comes with two things. One is Larry's old famous quote: "I'd rather suffer obediently than prosper disobediently." Now, on the surface, that makes no sense. I'd rather suffer than prosper. And then he qualifies it a little bit and said, suffer obediently, prosper disobediently.
But here's the payoff pitch. I'd rather suffer obediently than prosper disobediently, because I know my obedient suffering is as temporary as my disobedient prospering.
The Eternal Perspective
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "The Christian hope of resurrection sends a man back to his life on earth in a wholly new way." When I get that eternal perspective, when I begin to see this, it's God's season. It's part of God's plan and God's story.
I was yesterday, had all my notes together, and I was thinking about prayer and kind of what the apparent contradiction, certainly a paradox, certainly some tension of suffering and praying and what I asked for. And I remembered a quote I'd heard years ago, and it was always attributed to a Confederate soldier, so I assume it's not true. But it had in it a phrase, and I thought, I wonder if I can Google it.
A Prayer of Paradox
So let me read you this. I love this. It's the prayer, and as I say, it's anonymous in its prayer:
"I ask God for strength that I might achieve. I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey. I ask for health that I might do greater things. I was given infirmity that I might do better things. I ask for riches that I might be happy. I was given poverty that I might be wise. I ask for power that I might have the praise of men. I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God. I ask for all things that I might enjoy life. I was given life that I might enjoy all things. I got nothing I asked for, but everything I hoped for. Almost despite myself, my unspoken prayers were answered. I am among all men most richly blessed."
And so God, we say, "God, I want you to cause me to go the distance. I want to be standing at the end. I want perseverance." Here's what God hears: "God, help me suffer." I know the testing of your faith produces endurance.
Understanding Suffering's Purpose
Suffering has a reason and a purpose in your life, and I see more people get just kind of derailed by that process. Sometimes and most often, it's just a momentary setback as you catch your breath and say, "What's going on?" But hopefully those things are helpful as you start to sort these things out, just to understand that suffering is a part of the normal Christian life has huge benefit to it.
Next week, we tie all this together with this idea of a thirst for daily renewal. What's that look like? And then on the last one, since it's that season of the year, we'll do a little "who is Jesus? What's this whole thing about?" So if you have some friends, that might be a great kind of introduction to the study if you want to bring them. And that would be, I think it's on the 13th.
So let's pray. Father, thank You for that. Thank You for what You teach us as we yield to You. God, help us understand that there will be suffering and pain, and we will be those people who maybe can pray, "I got nothing I asked for, but everything I hope for." And Father, our hope is in You. Good times, bad times, rich, poor. God, we trust You and You alone.
I pray for those that are here today that are really hurting, that somehow they don't think that this was a flippant approach to that or minimizes suffering and pain at all. It doesn't. God, we pray that in our life, You would use our hardship, suffering, pain to draw us closer to You, and that we would yield, become the men and women that You've called us to be. Father, do that work, would You please? We ask it in Christ's name, amen.