Dealing with false expectations1
I love to read about revivals and about God working mighty things in people’s lives. These things lift my spirit and encourage my faith. But I have to be careful. A diet of too many miracles can give me an unbiblical view of what the Christian life is really like. The Bible is full of miracles. But the Bible is also very clear that suffering is normal for the Christian.2
The great heroes of the faith that we read about experienced both the miracles and the hardships. In many cases their great highs were more than matched by some very deep lows. I think of the mind-numbing grief and loneliness that Hudson Taylor experienced in China. He lost his wife after childbirth and then the child died as well. If we are not careful, we can focus on the blessings and the achievements and forget about their pain. And then, when we experience suffering, we think we must have got something wrong. We think we must be living a second-rate Christian life because we face so many trials… We can save ourselves much grief and unhealthy self-doubt by simply reading what the Bible has to say.
What the Bible has to say: Suffering is to be expected
The Bible tells us that suffering is normal in this life. We live in a fallen world. Sin’s curse affects everything. God has initiated a process whereby one day he will remove suffering and death. But that process is still very much underway. Paul explains in detail in Romans how God brings this salvation about through the death of Jesus on the cross. Romans 8 is the triumphal climax of that exposition. And yet that chapter has a great deal to say about suffering. He says in v23 that we “groan inwardly” as we wait for our salvation to be finally completed. He goes on to explain in vv24-25 that this is a wonderful hope. And hope means that we don’t have it yet.
Earlier, in chapter 5, Paul says that we glory in our sufferings. That verse (Rom 5:3) comes immediately after his summary statement that we have been justified by faith and have peace with God. In that statement he summarised his explanation of how the gospel works in chapters 2 to 4. This is significant! The great deliverance from sin and guilt by amazing grace has not delivered us from all suffering.
This truth crops up all over the Bible
Once you start looking for it, you discover that this fundamental truth is all over the Bible. The great psalm of comfort, psalm 23, recognises that there is a valley of death to go through. In Isaiah 43:2 God promised to protect his people. But it is noticeable that the waters, the rivers and the fire don’t go away. We still have to go through them:
2When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
Isaiah 43:2
Jesus himself never promised us an easy life. Quite the contrary! He told the disciples, “In this world you will have trouble…” John 16:33. In Acts 14, we read of Paul and Barnabas strengthening the disciples. They told them, “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God”. They sought to prepare the disciples so that the difficulties would not catch them off guard.
We too should prepare ourselves by recognising that suffering is normal in the Christian life. Scripture also urges us to see opportunities in our suffering. At our lowest moments, that may be too hard, and at those times it is right to grieve. The laments of the psalms can be a great help. They don’t try to pretend that all is well or paper over the grief. But there comes a time when we are ready to see things more positively. When we are ready, and not before, I suggest that we can see three kinds of opportunity in our suffering.
1. An opportunity to experience God’s comfort
2 Cor 1:3-43Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles
In 2 Corinthians, Paul has a great deal to say about his suffering. But he begins in a great outpouring of praise to God because this suffering enables him to experience God’s comfort. Many Christians will testify that they feel God to be especially close to them through difficult times. Tim Keller referred to this in his excellent book, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. He used the story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace to illustrate it. The king saw four people, not three, walking in the flames. Keller saw this as a literal fulfilment of God’s promise of Isaiah 43: 2. Don’t lose the preciousness of God’s special closeness as we go through dark times. Make time for him to speak to you. Let your suffering drive you to the Lord and not away from him.
2. An opportunity to grow
We should also recognise that our suffering is an opportunity to grow. Paul says that suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character and that character leads to hope (Rom 5:3-4). The word translated “character” here refers to the kind of maturity that we gain by passing a test. Peter uses a related word when he talks about how trials bring out the “proven genuineness” of our faith (1 Peter 1:6-7). Just as we strengthen muscles through exercise, so we develop faith and moral character through testing.
3. An opportunity to rejoice
Paul says in Romans 5 that we even rejoice in our suffering. This is because we know that our trials produce good things for us. That gives us wonderful and certain hope that one day God will complete our salvation. On that day we will be perfect and we will enjoy the unclouded presence of the Lord. James tells us to “Count it all joy” when we go through trials (James 1:2-4). His reasoning is much the same as Paul’s: trials that test our faith make us stronger in the long run.
Not everyone is in the right place to receive this! In many circumstances it will be insensitive in the extreme to counsel a Christian to take joy in their suffering. Mostly we will direct this at ourselves when the time is right, when we know that we need to move on from lament. There comes a time when we need to pick ourselves up and determine to see the good hand of God at work in our lives. When we start to look, we will always find something to be thankful for.
Conclusion
Suffering is normal in the Christian life. It can help us to understand that there are some things that God calls us to accept. Paradoxically perhaps, accepting that God is not going to change some things can help us to move on. That’s what Paul did. He understood that God was not going to take away the thorn in his flesh (2 Cor 12:7-10). From that point we can begin to see that our suffering gives us opportunities for closeness with God, for growth and for rejoicing. Trials bring us these opportunities in ways that nothing else can.
I still love to read about God’s miraculous interventions, and I still hope and believe for them. But if God does not intervene to change things that are hard, I know that he is no less with me. He is no less at work in my life and in the lives of those around me.
- Photo by Guido Jansen on Unsplash ↩︎
- Pete Greig experienced the same tension when he wrote God on Mute. He felt the need to counterbalance the impression that Christians always experience the miraculous (see my review). ↩︎