Saturday, March 17, 2018
Suffering
2 Corinthians 1:5
For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
Wait, what? Suffering?
In today’s brand of feel-good, always healthy, prosperity preaching there is no place for suffering. We are walking in authority and living victoriously, our daddy is King and we are royalty, so don’t talk defeat to me.
Now, don’t rush off too quickly and find the scriptures to prove that we have authority, or that we are more than conquerors, or that we are a royal priesthood, and so on, those are well known. The matter is that those are not the only things to be known.
No one could argue that the Apostle Paul wasn’t walking in authority, or that he wasn’t victorious, or that he didn’t understand that he was royalty. It is he who wrote that “Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” Romans 8:37.
Again, it was Paul who wrote, “Now thanks be to God who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place.” 2 Corinthians 2:14.
But that is not the whole picture. Because of the habit we have of cherry picking a verse here and a verse there we sometimes miss the big picture. We should start with the big picture and then zoom in so that we could have a context in which to make sense of the detail.
Let us take, for example, the verse above from Romans chapter 8. Paul was there talking first about life through the Spirit, and then present suffering and future glory. A lot of what we hear today is present glory and no suffering.
And don’t get me wrong. Those of us from the old school were set up for this error since back then. We were taught a chorus that went like this. “The time to be happy is now / And the place to be happy is here / And the way to be happy is to make others happy / And we’ll have a little heaven down here” or some variation of that.
We skip the whole apostolic teaching, the whole teaching of scripture for that matter. There is the whole saga of Job to contend with very early in Biblical history. There is the Psalmist, the sons of Korah, in Psalm 44:22 “Yet for Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” This certainly is the story of Jesus who won the victory through the sufferings of Calvary. And then there is this, “to you it has been granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in Him, but also to suffer for His sake,” Philippians 1:29.
The New Testament Apostles actually held up suffering as a privilege, we have been given the honour of suffering for Christ. “So they departed from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name.” Acts 5:41
James and Peter, coming from the early experiences including the one just referenced in Acts 5, had this to say in their letters, “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials,” James 1:2. And, “if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter.” 1 Peter 4:16.
Here is Jesus on the subject before them, “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Matthew 5:11,12.
Going back to Paul in Romans 8, when Paul made the declaration that we are “more than conquerors” he was making the larger point that we know God’s everlasting love as He carries us through “tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword” not engineering our avoiding them miraculously.
When God allows suffering to come our way He provides comfort, as we see in our key verse today. The passages we have looked at above also shows that earthly sufferings pay big heavenly rewards. But more importantly, suffering is a tool in the hand of God by which he is able to shape us and perfect us. This God first did in Jesus, and then held Him up as the example for us to emulate.
This idea of God accomplishing His purpose in our lives through suffering, first in Jesus and then in us, is clearly outlined in Hebrews 2:10, “For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both He who sanctifies and those who are being sanctified are all of one, for which reason He is not ashamed to call them brethren.”
We spend so much time and effort on finding the path of least resistance. Personally, I am often bothered by all of the positive feelgood prophesies I hear from prophetic ministers. Only good things are in everyone’s future. We shouldn’t go searching for suffering, but, take away the suffering and we have lost the opportunity for God’s perfecting of our lives.
“I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church,” Colossians 1:24
Think on these things:
- Have you had to endure any suffering in your life?
- Have you ever been ‘put on a spot’ for the cause of the Gospel?
- Did you see any suffering in your life as a tool God was using to shape you?
- Are you prepared to suffer for the sake of Jesus?
Prayer focus:
Let us pray today that when suffering comes our way we would be patient and rejoice.
In His Grace
Pastor Alex
