“And since we are His children, we are His heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share His glory, we must also share His Suffering” (NLT).

Suffering is topic of the Christian faith that is often left behind or shoved in the corner, especially with the rise of what has been called the prosperity gospel and even our trend in Christianity towards moralist therapeutic deism. However, suffering is a very real and powerful part of the Christian faith, because it is a very real and powerful part of human existence. The life of Christ did not shy away from the hardest and darkest part of the human experience, rather we saw with Christ that even God suffered.

I believe that all suffering is a result of sin. I either suffer because of the consequences of my personal sin, or I suffer because of the wide range consequences another’s sin. We all suffer because of the wide range of consequences brought forth by The Fall, when the first act of disobedience entered the human story. Christ’s Suffering – capital S suffering – as the writer of Roman’s puts it, is of the most important of all suffering.  Christ did not suffer because of anything He did. As God, I don’t believe that Christ would be affected by the wide range of consequences of others’ sins. Christ’s Suffering was significant because He chose to Suffer in our place. Christ was glorified by Suffering.

Life is hard. Suffering is inevitable, because suffering is part of the human condition. Sweeping our hurts and failures under the rug and dulling our hearts to the pain will not being us peace from our suffering.  Only facing our suffering head on and walking through the valley of the shadow of death will allow us to heal from our hurts and overcome our failures. As the psalmist said, “I will fear no evil, for there you are with me. Your rod and staff comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). When we suffer, Christ also Suffers with us. Christ took upon himself all our suffering and nailed it to the tree at Calvary. 

We must embrace suffering when it comes into our life. Not because it is pleasant, comfortable, or even kind – it most certainly will not be. Oswald Chambers, in his devotion for January 1^st, wrote: “God’s order has to work up to a crisis in our lives because we would not heed the gentler way…He produces a providential crisis where we have to decide – for or against.” (My Utmost for His Highest). We must embrace suffering, because by it we have a choice – we run to God and cling to Him or try to do it ourselves. Suffering teaches us surrender. God will use suffering to bring us to a point where we must completely, wholeheartedly, unconditionally surrender to His perfect and loving will. It is only when we choose to surrender that God will take action to do in our life something in which we were entirely unable to do for ourselves. By surrendering in our suffering to God, we begin to share in Christ’s Suffering. We also share in His glory. As James 5:3-5 reminds us, “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” (ESV).