Many times, I’ve asked God to change my suffering. I’ve had sleepless nights and stomachaches. I’ve studied, sought coaching, made plans, and pursued best practices. I’ve poured out prayer after prayer, asking God to take my pain away. I’ve wanted it to end.
I find it easy to see all that suffering takes, all I miss out on. I see what I’ve lost. But it’s easy to miss what God gives me in trials.
What if there’s more to suffering than what has been taken? The Bible says that in suffering and weakness, there’s great joy to be found. How is this possible? What good can there be in our pain? We’ll never experience this joy if we don’t recognize that some of God’s greatest gifts come amid our hardest moments.
God Draws Us Near
On your best day, filled with all the blessings of the good life like friendship, feasting, and song, it’s easy to forget God. We swallow down his gifts and live with self-sufficiency. This is why C. S. Lewis said, “We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”
We often only see what suffering takes but miss what God gives. Suffering feels like an invasion, an intruder robbing us of what we love and enjoy. But it’s more than an invasion; it’s a personal invitation from God. He shouts amid the storm to come and be with him.
God Reveals His Character
You’ve called out to God to change your life and he didn’t. Paul experienced the same. He pleaded with the Lord to remove his suffering, and God answered Paul as he often answers us: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). God says he won’t give Paul the gift of deliverance, but he’ll give him something greater: the grace of knowing his presence and power.
It isn’t in the joyful times that we most pour out our hearts to God; it’s when we’re anxious, lonely, betrayed, and overwhelmed.
There are aspects of God’s character and power we’ll never know if we don’t first experience our weakness. I only knew what it meant to count on God as my Father after my parents divorced. I wouldn’t have felt God’s comfort as a refuge had my wife and I not faced infertility and multiple miscarriages. I would never have known Jesus’s faithful presence as a friend had I not moved thousands of miles, leaving all my friends and family behind. I wouldn’t have known what it meant to rest in his righteousness had I not been slandered. I would never have known that God is my provider had I not struggled to pay the bills. I wouldn’t have known what it means that he knows my name without the experience of feeling inferior. I wouldn’t have known the freedom of forgiveness had I not seen my own sin.
God wants to give you more than mere knowledge about him; he wants you to experience him personally. Can you know the abundant life of the Shepherd without first knowing the valley of death (Ps. 23:4)? Do you know the full strength of the rock before the waves crash around you? God uses your weakness to bring you to a greater reliance on his perfect power. Through your weakness, he leads you to experience and enjoy all he is.
God Strengthens Us
Paul says, “I will most boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. . . . For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9–10).
To “boast” here means to have confidence and trust in God despite one’s circumstances. I know this is hard. The greatest pains in my life have been the unanswered prayers. I know who God says he is; I believe. But I’m not seeing him do what I know he can do. I’ve prayed, “God, I know you have power, so act. I know you hear my prayers, so please answer. I know you love me, so please show your love. I’ve seen you come through in the past, in your Word and for others. So why not now? Why not for me?”
Through your weakness, God leads you to experience and enjoy all he is.
To “boast” means we stay confident that God is good and wise and hasn’t abandoned us even when we don’t understand, even when we long for our circumstances to be different. Boasting in God makes us stronger because we stop leaning on ourselves and the hopes that fail us, instead finding our true source of strength and joy in him.
We all live with suffering. We all experience the disappearance of what we’ve loved and hoped for. You may feel this fruitlessness and the failure right now. But suffering is more than something to “get through.” God is doing a million things in your suffering, working out countless details we can never imagine. We don’t know most of what he’s doing, but we do know that if we belong to him, suffering is a gift.
The Gospel Coalition