The path it takes is various, but one day soon, suffering will bypass a courteous request for entry and will intrude on your home and life.
Perhaps it will take the commonly used roadway called personal sin. Through the impact of your own sinful choices and desires, you will suffer. Or perhaps it will take a road somewhat less-traveled called the sins of others. Many smaller side streets feed into this street — pathways like gossip, slander, greed, anger, violence, theft, abuse, unkind words, unforgiveness, and persecution. Or there is always a third way suffering makes its way to your life — the ever-popular expressway called living in a fallen world. Here, no direct sin is involved, but suffering enters our lives because of the frailties of our flesh (we forget, we physically fall, we don’t understand, we communicate inadequately…) and because the world around us also is under the curse of the Fall (earthquakes and tsunamis, cancer and colds).
Whatever road suffering chooses to take to your life, we can be certain that it will arrive either in large or small amounts — and its arrival is probably soon and it will incite in us various levels of discomfort and grief.
Yet when we suffer, there is comfort to be found in the midst of it. A few of those comforts from Scripture:
In every suffering, we can know of the sustenance and fellowship of Christ. If our suffering is from our own sin, we can know the sweetness of Christ’s forgiveness (how else will we ever know the magnitude of His grace?). And if our suffering is because of the sin of others or the fallenness of the world, we can know the provision of God to care for us through that time. As an example, Paul not only knew of the strength of God to sustain him in shipwrecks, persecution and the weaknesses and failures of the churches he loved (2 Cor. 11:23-12:9), he also knew God’s sustaining grace on the brink of his death, writing, “the Lord will rescue me from every evil deed…” (2 Tim. 4:18). And shortly after penning those words, he was put to death. Did the Lord fail Him? No, the Lord demonstrated the infinite and eternal nature of his deliverance one moment after Paul’s death.
In every suffering, we have an opportunity to fill up and demonstrate the sufferings of Christ on the cross to a watching world (Col. 1:24). Only a limited number of people saw Christ suffer on the cross. When we suffer well, we demonstrate what it meant for Christ to suffer (1 Pt. 2:21-23).
In every suffering, we have an opportunity to experience the fellowship of Christ that cannot be known without that suffering (1 Cor. 10:13; Phil. 3:8-11).
In every suffering, we have an opportunity to be equipped to comfort others (2 Cor. 1:3-7; 4:10-12). Not only do we know the comfort of Christ when we suffer, but we also then become vessels that can minister that same comfort to others.
In every suffering, we learn to give thanks. In everything (1 Thess. 5:18). When we suffer, we learn to thank the Lord for His greatest provisions for us, and not the mere trivialities for which we are most prone to thank Him — things like meals and covering and friends and family and transportation. Spurgeon penned these words while suffering physically (probably from chronic kidney disease): “Although great pain often disturbs the judgement [sic] I thank God I have not been allowed to doubt the goodness of the Lord in afflicting me, I bless his holy name for every sharp pang, and I entreat him to bring forth some good think out of this present evil. If he will but glorify himself in me or by me I shall be the happiest of men.”
Yes, suffering is undoubtedly making its way towards your life; it is unlikely that there are any barriers will close off all the roads it might take to your home. Yet in the kind providence of God, the presence of suffering in your life and mine can still be used for much eternal benefit.
Words of Grace 