I won’t see anything to rejoice in and my suffering will seem pointless. I will walk away before I get to see the end, experiencing the hardest part of my trials without ever getting to the good part. I will start judging God’s faithfulness and love based on what I can see and whether God answers my prayers the way I desire. In the moment, it is painful it certainly doesn’t feel good. The cross displays it and the Holy Spirit seals it.īut if I do not trust God and believe that he loves me, I will not see how my suffering could be good. God’s love has been poured into me, and all of Scripture proclaims that love. I need to trust that God wouldn’t allow anything that isn’t best for me, and that everything in my life is put there for my good (Romans 8:28). It is a living hope in a Savior who loves me, not in an outcome I feel entitled to. My hope is not that my situation will turn out a certain way, or that God will give me exactly what I want, but rather that God will always do what’s best for me. To find hope through suffering, I cannot be tied to a specific outcome. Some of the difference lies in how we understand and experience hope and suffering in our walk with God.

I am grateful that God chose to reveal himself to me through suffering, yet grieved when others only see the suffering and not the loving God behind it. What’s the difference? Why does suffering increase faith and hope in God for some and destroy it for others? For some, like my friend, suffering leads to rebellion and anger, crushing their hope, not bolstering it. But we do not go directly from suffering to hope. Here, the Christian’s suffering will ultimately result in a hope that won’t put us to shame. “I can rejoice in my suffering, knowing God is using it to produce in me what I could not produce in myself.” More than that, 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” (Romans 5:3–5). Paul says, “We rejoice in hope of the glory of God. No one comes through suffering unchanged. Suffering is a catalyst that forces us to move in one direction or another. But suffering was producing something unshakeable. I found an inexplicable peace and hope that I had not experienced before - my easy trouble-free life had not yielded anything but an enjoyment of the present. It was then that my faith radically changed. I needed peace and I couldn’t find it anywhere besides Christ.

I cried out asking God to help me to trust him, to reconnect, and to find hope in what seemed like impenetrable darkness. I realized, however, like Peter, that there was nowhere to go, because only Jesus had the words of life (John 6:68). When things kept getting worse, I angrily stopped talking to God, wondering if he was even listening. What Suffering Produced in MeĮach time something else went wrong, I begged God to fix it, to take away the pain, to restore things to the way they were. Then a marriage crisis almost undid me, and just as I started healing, our infant son died unexpectedly. After I became a Christian as a teenager, I felt sure that God had promised me an easy life and all I had to do was live it.įor years I felt God fulfilled his part, but my confidence eroded after my first miscarriage. I too have had unwritten, unilateral contracts with God where I tried to live a righteous life and in return expected God to bless me by fixing all my problems - especially if I prayed and read the Bible. “My hope is not that my situation will turn out a certain way, but that God will always do what’s best for me.” She was tired of doing the right thing because it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. She asked angrily, “Is this how a good God treats his children?” and went on to list all that God had not done for her, despite her faithfulness. She had prayed and asked him to change her situation, but things continued to get worse. I still remember our last conversation about God, as she told me that he had not come through for her. Several years ago, a close friend walked away from faith.

For suffering produces endurance