When you experience a season of suffering (and all Christians do at some point in their lives), it’s important to learn any lessons God is trying to teach you in the midst of your pain.
Now, hear me out, because I want to be crystal clear on this: Not every season of suffering is identical. Some suffering we bring on ourselves. Some falls our way because of the sin of others. Some is part of the trials of daily life. Some comes to us specifically because we are believers. To collapse all of these experiences into one bucket would do violence to those who are hurting.
So the reason you have found yourself in a season of suffering may vary. But one thing is always true: If you are hurting, that is an opportunity to lean into God. It is an opportunity to learn something from God you might never know otherwise.
Listen to what Jeremiah says: “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him” (Lamentations 3:26–28 ESV).
“It is good” that we should bear our suffering and wait on the Lord, because God often does his best work in us when we suffer, even when we don’t know why we suffer.
Sometimes in our suffering, God is trying to take out some idol from our lives. (I’ve been there.) Psalm 119:71 says, “My suffering was good for me, because it taught me to pay attention to your decrees” (NLT). God sometimes uses suffering to get our attention. When this happens, we usually know exactly what that idol is, because the Holy Spirit lets us know what he’s doing.
Sometimes our suffering is an opportunity for God to teach us humility. I often think of the rather obscure Old Testament story of David and Shimei (2 Samuel 16). King David was on the run. And this guy Shimei starts following him on the road, shouting and spitting at him and pelting him with stones. One of David’s men is like, “Let me go and relieve this guy of his head.” David says, “No—even though I don’t deserve this, I think God told him to do it, to humble me and teach me how to trust in him.”
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Sometimes God uses times of suffering to prepare us for ministry. In fact, Scripture so often describes places a period of waiting after God’s call that I would call it the normal pattern. God called Moses to deliver the children of Israel, but then he gets sent to the desert for 40 years. Paul gets called to be Jesus’ apostle to the Gentiles (Acts 9) but is not commissioned as a missionary until what scholars say is a minimum of 17 years later (cf. Acts 13). David was taken out of the pasture as a shepherd and anointed to be king, but instead of going back to the palace to try on royal robes, he went right back to the pasture for about seven years—where we know now that God did some of his best work in David, where David learned the courage to face the lion and the bear and probably wrote the 23rd psalm.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
Sometimes, through pain, God is giving us the ability to relate to others in ways we couldn’t without the pain.
The famous 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon (who once told his congregation he was confident he’d spent more days in depression than any of them) said, “I would gladly go into the depths of depression a hundred times in order to learn how to cheer a downcast spirit, that I might better know how to speak a word in season to the weary.”
Maybe you have experienced that: God has let you walk through some painful chapter so that you can identify with and minister to someone else. You have lost a child, walked through the tragedy and pain of abortion, dealt with cancer, been cheated on. God didn’t want that pain for you. But you’ve seen how he has used it as you’ve ministered to people in similar situations.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
You see, sometimes the good lesson God wants to teach is not even in you! Have you ever seen the “cardboard testimonies” in church? They’re incredibly simple, but often incredibly powerful. People walk across the stage during a worship song, and on one side of the cardboard sign is a one-sentence description of their life before Christ. Then, they flip the sign over, and there is a description of their life after Christ. The best one I’ve ever seen was a middle-aged woman whose sign read, “I was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer.” The man next to her held up his sign that read, “I was the doctor who diagnosed her, and I was an atheist.” When he flipped his sign over, it read, “Through her joy in the midst of suffering, I came to know Christ.” Then, the woman flipped her sign over: “Worth it.”
There is coming a day when we all flip over our cards and say, “It was worth it!” It was good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord, because even when we couldn’t see it or understand it, he was doing his greatest work in and through us.
