Faith in Suffering

Last night at a Bible study, as usual we began with prayer requests.

One after another, someone shared a need. Every single one had to do with someone who was enduring some kind of suffering. A woman with a recent cancer diagnosis. A man recovering from surgery. A person battling an addiction. People who are affected by wars abroad.

Every request was framed, in some sense, as a plea for healing. There is nothing wrong with that. Jesus healed the sick, moved by his compassion. He told us to ask, to let all our requests be known to God in prayer. We are right to pray for healing.

But as the requests rounded the table, I could not help but notice what no one thought to mention.

No one asked for God to work through the sufferings mentioned. We spoke of a woman who had faith that God would heal her cancer, but we did not speak of the faith that persists even if God does not, if he allows the trial to continue. No one asked that, through these sorrows and trials, ailments and addictions, that God would draw the sufferer closer to Him, to His suffering, to His wounded side.

We prayed, rightly, for the suffering to end. We did not pray for what God might accomplish in us while it lasts.

Why not?

Perhaps because, somewhere along the way, many of us learned to see suffering as a problem Christianity has to explain rather than the place where we meet the heart of Christ most intimately.

When we talk about people who have faith while suffering, we usually mean "faith that God can heal." That's real faith. It's good. But Scripture goes deeper than that. It recognizes, sometimes, God's answer to our suffering is not to remove it, but through it, to draw us closer to Him, to refine us, to purify us, to allow us to participate in Christ, Himself.

Because God does not give us merely an intellectual "answer" to why suffering happens. He does something better. He enters into it, and meets us there. Explaining suffering might satisfy our intellectual objections, or it might not. But when we find our Suffering Lord in the midst of our sufferings, it satisfies the heart. It grows our love. It unites us more wholly to Him.

Paul knew this kind of faith in suffering quite deeply. He writes about it this way: "I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).

The Greek is striking. Paul uses the word antanaplērō, “to fill up in turn,” to describe his sufferings as somehow completing what is “lacking” in Christ’s afflictions. He cannot mean that the cross was insufficient; the rest of his letters make it clear that in his theology, what Christ accomplished was entirely sufficient.

What he means is that the only thing lacking in Christ's suffering is our participation in it. He is saying that the body of Christ, the Church, continues to live the pattern of the Head.

Christ suffered in his own flesh once; he goes on suffering, in a mysterious way, in the flesh of his members. When we endure suffering, it is a way of taking up our cross, and following. It brings us to where His love was quite literally poured out for us in the most profound, shocking, and beautiful display of His divine heart in history.

Paul’s pain is not wasted. It has been taken up into Christ's love. And then, look at what Paul does. He turns that into an offering, a prayer, for the sake of the church.

Think about that! My sufferings, alone, can't accomplish much other than to leave me in pain. And when I suffer, if all I do is suffer something I wish I didn't have to, there's no merit it in. All I can think about is what it's doing to me. My fears take over: what if I don't recover, what if it gets worse, what if the pain intensifies, what if it leaves me unable to go on with life as I'm accustomed to do?

No, our sufferings have no merit insofar as they remain our sufferings. But when we unite our sufferings to Christ's suffering, in some mysterious way, Paul teaches us that Christ endures our suffering with us, right there on the Cross, and that by our union to Him as members of His body, our sufferings participate in His merits... and become what is one of the most powerful prayers we can offer for the sake of ourselves, and especially, for the sake of others.

Paul says it in a more personal way when writing from prison to the Philippians: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death" (Philippians 3:10).

The word for “sharing” is koinōnia, the same word used for fellowship, communion, the deep "exchange" of what's one's own, that receives likewise what belongs to the other. It is a sharing in common.

Paul does not see his sufferings as some kind of "interruption" in his life, merely a regrettable consequence of living in a fallen world. He sees even the world's fallenness, and therefore his suffering, as wholly redeemed in Jesus. A genuine participation, a communion, a fellowship with Christ.

In suffering, he holds something in common with Jesus that he could not know in any other way.

Notice, too, how he holds it all together: he wants to know the power of the resurrection and the sharing of the sufferings. He does not pick either "Jesus crucified" or "Jesus raised." He does not say, "I'll take the empty cross, not the crucifix," nor does he say, "I prefer the suffering Jesus to the victorious Jesus." He sees it all as one movement. It all belongs together in Him.

Healing and suffering are not opposites. There is no Easter without Good Friday. And Good Friday does not leave Jesus in the tomb, either. All of this is a part of God's love, drawing near to us at the deepest level of anguish, and in the most profound experience of victory, healing, and restoration.

So, how can we embrace suffering like Paul? What does he teach us that suffering actually does for our souls?

Paul, writing to the Romans, lays it out sequentially: "we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).

The word translated “endurance” is hypomonē, which literally means “remaining under.” It is not stoicism—the idea that if we just act like nothing matters, we won't have any anxiety. Rather, such endurance is the ability to bear a burden without being crushed beneath its weight. How do we do this? Because we are not enduring the burden alone. Someone—the very Son of God—is enduring it with us.

Follow that sequence through. Where does it end, for Paul?

Not in bitterness, not even in heroism. It ends in love, "poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit." Suffering, received in faith, expands our heart, remakes our heart in the image of the very Love that led our Lord to the cross. It chases out all the vain things that we've hoarded up our hearts, and leaves us open, empty, not that we might remain empty—but that our hearts might be filled by His love, alone.

This explains why so many saints in history spoke of suffering as a purification, or a purgation. The point isn't that "pain" is fun, or even good on its own. It's that pain is redeemable, suffering itself now has meaning precisely because the ultimate source of all meaning, the Divine Logos, the Word made flesh, entered into pain and suffering and turned the very thing most of us fear and flee into the instrument of salvation. He soaked it in holy blood, poured out in love.

Pain, like a refining fire, strips away what is false. It burns off the illusion that we are in control. It silences the alluring voice of all our lesser loves.

It leaves the soul poor, in the way that Jesus called "blessed" in the Sermon on the Mount. Why is it blessed to be so poor? Because with empty hands, we are ready to receive. So long as our hands are grasping at worldly things, at our reputations, at our comfort, at our wealth, even at our earthly lives, our hands cannot receive the gift He wishes to place in them.

Look at what Isaiah says. He never says that with God we'll avoid the fire of life. Rather, he says something much better: ”when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2).

The fire is real. Just as it was in the fiery furnace in Daniel. But it's never more real than the one who remains present within it. Who stands with us, who carries our suffering, who endures it alongside us, so that we might find in our suffering not merely pain, but the heart of God, Himself.

When Paul begged three times for his own affliction, which he called a "thorn in the flesh," to be removed, the answer he received was not the healing he asked for. He got something better, and it refined him: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

God did not say the thorn was pleasant, or comfortable, or even good in itself. He said His grace was enough. There is a world of difference between these two dispositions. When we suffer, to we fixate on the pain, the anguish, our fear? Or, do we find in faith the one who suffered first, who suffers with us, still?

I realize asking you to pray this way in the midst of a trial is a big ask. It doesn't come naturally. So how do we even start?

First, don't stop praying for healing. Keep asking. Like I said, God can heal. We can have faith that, if it be His will that His power is glorified in healing, that's what He will deliver. But we should not, either, demand it as though we're certain that the greater work God intends to do is in our bodies—often the greater work He means to offer, the better gift, is the fruit that suffering bears in our souls. So, add a second petition alongside the first: “Lord, unite these sufferings to Yours. Through this trial, however long you wish me to endure it, let it not go to waste. Rather, draw me nearer to you. Show me your love. Refine me in Your image." Let both prayers stand together, the way resurrection and cross stand together.

Second, when you pray for someone who is suffering, pray not only for their body, but also their soul. Ask not only that Christ would remove the pain or the trial, but ask that Christ would be present within it. Present even in a hospital room, as if that very room were situated at the peak of Golgotha. Pray that the one who is enduring the trial, the illness, the sorrow, would see clearly His presence, His communion, His companionship. That their pain would not leave them feeling abandoned, but more intimately connected to Christ on account of everything they're going through.

Third, in your own trials, large or small, practice offering them up. Say simply something like, “Jesus, unite this suffering to Yours. Meet me here.” And if you're so bold, pray, "Lord, thank you for loving me so much that you've permitted me to suffer with You!" This isn't about getting a good "feeling" about what you're going through. You might say that prayer and feel no change at all, the anguish may very well persist. Faith is not a feeling. It is an act of trust that what you hand over is received, that in Him, no darkness, no sorrow, no suffering is ever wasted.

Finally, consider how it is you picture God. Have you avoided meditating on His passion, as if it were merely a one-time event? Certainly He suffered for our sake, but have we cast that aside as a one-and-done, as if the Cross were merely a historical relic? Have we turned aside from His suffering because we cannot bear it? If we cannot bear His suffering, How will we ever endure our own? For it is in His suffering that all our sufferings are redeemed. We who suffer with Him, are also raised with Him. Because His sufferings did not leave Him in the grave. If your picture of God is like some kind of cosmic therapist, the one who "soothes" us, you're missing out on the most powerful answer to suffering He offers: His very presence.

If you only know Him as the One who removes suffering, you will feel betrayed when he does not. But if you come to know Him who enters suffering, who meets us there and stays at our side, drawing us into His side, whose love does its work precisely in the pain, in the dark, then no night will be without his presence. And then, you'll know the one who heals us at the deepest level, not just in body, but in soul.

Because God isn't just in the business of making us "feel better," of treating bodies. He's in the business of re-forging us in His image, uniting our hearts, our lives, our entire selves, to Him.  That our entire lives, body and soul, would be crucified in His image, that we would rest in the depths of His heart forever.

 

God Bless,

Judah