THE GIFT OF SUFFERING

 

We are being transformed through the way we think (Romans 12:2). Consequently, our mind needs to be Biblically reoriented. We need to regard suffering as one of God’s gifts, as something we should welcome. Instead it has become a source of shame and failure that needs to be eliminated. However, once we begin to regard suffering as needful gift, we can begin to rejoice and even boast about our weaknesses, failures, and infirmities—the basis of self-acceptance:

·       Romans 5:3–5 …we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

God allowed Satan to afflict Paul so that he wouldn’t grow proud because of the revelations he had been receiving. He even refused to heal him of his “thorn in the flesh.” God explained to Paul:

·       2 Corinthians 12:9–10 …“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Paul even claimed that his weaknesses and infirmities had become the gist for ministry and ultimately community:·       2 Corinthians 1:3–5 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.

Suffering Grows Us into Christ-likeness: 2 Corinthians 4:8–11 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

Suffering Teaches Us to Trust in God: 2 Corinthians 1:8–10 For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.

Suffering for Others: Colossians 1:24 Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church. The Martyrdom of the Apostles had proved that they truly believed what they had written. Even the Curse of the Fall was Intended to Serve God’s Loving Plan:

·       Romans 8:20–21 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Understanding suffering is needful in many other ways. It enables us to respond to the skeptic: “Your God is not love but of hate. Just look at babies dying of starvation.”

Often the death of babies is the cost of sin. Ultimately, the Christian trusts that, even if we do not have all the answers, God does.

Does this open us to the charge that we believe blindly? No! We don’t reject science even though it cannot answer the basic questions like, “What is matter, gravity, and light.” Why then reject our Biblical faith because it cannot answer every question!

The Bible even warns: Isaiah 55:8–9 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

The Evangelist to the Samaritans

 

 

God is close to the brokenhearted (Isaiah 57:15; Isaiah 66:1-2, Psalm 34:17-18, Psalm 138:6), but I rejoiced to see it clearly demonstrated when Jesus had encountered a broken, confused, and nameless Samaritan woman at a well:

·       John 4:25–26 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”  

What had led to this affirmation  about the coming Messiah, then followed by Jesus’s forthright disclosure of His Messianic identity,  “I who speak to you am he!” And why not to the learned Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, who had previously come to Jesus, looking for answers:

·       John 3:1–2 Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.”

Clearly, Nicodemus was a seeker, yet Jesus humiliated him:

·       John 3:10–12 “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.  If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?”

This made me marvel even more at Jesus’ words to the unnamed woman to whom Jesus revealed: “I who speak to you am he!”

Why had Jesus revealed Himself so plainly to the woman but not as directly to Nicodemus? At first, it hadn’t seemed that the woman amenable. After the woman complied and offered Jesus water from the well:

·       John 4:13–14 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The woman seemingly answered sarcastically: John 4:15 …“Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

Rather than Jesus answering, “It’s not a matter of either living water or liquid but both,” He turned the focus on her:

·       John 4:16–18 …“Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

 

Initially, she must have felt embarrassed and exposed before Jesus and tried to change the subject:

·       John 4:20 “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”

Jesus then corrected her misguided understanding of the Biblical faith: John 4:24–25 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth,” and not necessarily in certain location. The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.”

Jesus was now ready to make His most profound and stirring disclosure: John 4:26 “I who speak to you am he,” and with these words, this degraded thirsty woman was transformed into perhaps the greatest evangelist to the Samaritan people.

Why her? When we realize that we are nothing, we are enabled to see that the promised Messiah is everything, the understanding that is slowly made evident to all of His servants:

·       Galatians 6:3 For if anyone thinks he is something, when he is nothing, he deceives himself.

What a blessing to know that, without the Messiah, we too are like this degraded Samaritan woman who had gone through five husbands! However, in the Messiah, we are co-heirs with Jesus:

·       Colossians 2:8–10 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.

Again, why her?

·       Luke 18:14 …For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Any who exalt themselves have fallen to self (or Satanic)-deception. However, this debased woman had little choice but to admit that she was a sinner, whose only qualification was that she had met Jesus.