Season 5 Episode 5: What is God Doing in My Suffering?

Alex (00:03.886)

Brenda, we're in season five talking about suffering and this has been a hard series because we're exploring some of the common ways that suffering trips us up. And we've covered some difficult questions like why do I suffer? Where is God in my suffering? In episode one we talked about ways that suffering causes us to doubt and fears that we struggle with in suffering. And then in our last episode we talked about knowing God

attributes that anchor our souls. And we think about an anchor as being something that helps us not drift away, that keeps a boat in place, especially during a storm. And so we want to be anchored by the idea that God is loving, wise, and in control as we weather life's storms. And so today we're going to answer the question, what? We've done the why and the where, and we're going to ask, what is

Alex (01:04.18)

I think we hear and probably we've also struggled with ourselves is that the what God is up to in our suffering is that he's punishing us.

Brenda (01:15.577)

Yeah, and I hear that a lot, Alex. And really, it produces a real unhealthy fear of God in us. I was just on the phone yesterday, I was out walking my dog and talking to a sweet friend of mine with a prodigal daughter and she was just weeping and then she said this. I think God is punishing me for not being a good enough parent.

Alex (01:37.11)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (01:37.705)

And it just broke my heart, right? And I know if it breaks my heart, it has to break God's heart too. It's not to say that there are not things in her parenting that couldn't have been better or different, but to feel like God is punishing her is really problematic and we're gonna delve into that. Last week I met with another woman and who is facing some current struggles and to be honest with you, they're not even struggles that I can see that are really a result of her sin. She's actually suffering greatly as the result of other people's sin,

Alex (02:04.43)

Hmm.

Brenda (02:07.779)

the comment that she thought God was punishing her for her past. And we were talking about the Old Testament because it can be confusing. We read a lot about God's judgment even on his own people, but in the New Testament we see that God has placed all of our punishment on Christ. And so I think as we read the Bible, you know, the Old and New Testament, we have to we have to be careful and we have to consider the whole counsel of God as we look at this idea of what is

Alex (02:25.237)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (02:38.099)

The way I like to think about it, I guess the way it helps me when I think about punishment of God, I like to think about it in terms of punishment versus discipline, because I think they can feel the same, but they're very different. The motivation is very different. Punishment has to do with paying someone back for the wrong they've done. And honestly, you know, we know that our Bible tells us that this is going to happen to people who don't place their trust in Christ, who don't believe that Jesus took the punishment for their sins, like somebody has to pay for sin.

Alex (02:47.636)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (03:07.979)

And so punishment will come to those people, but discipline is a whole different matter. Discipline is a course correction. And it's really always God's way of redirecting us back to him. It might come, Alex, in the form of instruction. You know, we read God's word, and we are course corrected. But if that doesn't work, then God knows how to give us a divine spanking. And the book of Hebrews makes it clear that God disciplines those he loves. So always think about it this way.

Alex (03:21.564)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (03:37.419)

I'm at a playground and children and the children are misbehaving, which child am I gonna correct and spank? Not everybody else's, but my own. And so the Bible tells us that discipline is a sign we are loved and God's child.

Alex (03:46.2)

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Brenda (03:55.229)

And you know, if we believe God is just out to get us, it really is gonna distort our view of God. And how much worse is our suffering going to be? Because if we think God is up there with a hammer waiting to pound us, we are certainly not gonna run to God. We are gonna run away and cower from him.

Alex (04:11.691)

Yeah.

Yeah, it's so true. I think it's good to make this distinction between punishment and suffering and for us to really cling and really hold on to the fact that God doesn't punish those who are in Christ, that Jesus took that punishment and that yes, God does use discipline to shape us and he uses discipline to further us in our sanctification process, but that is not punishment. I think that sometimes

We also fall into another trap is that some people become overly scrupulous as they think about God disciplining them. So when suffering comes into their lives, they go on this sin hunt within themselves where they are examining every thought, word, motive, and they become overly scrupulous. And it makes sense, doesn't it? Like we want our suffering to be relieved so we feel like

will be over. But I just like to remind people that it's the Holy Spirit's job to convict us of sin. It is His job. It is what He does. And so He's not playing a game with us of like hide our sin or keep our sin from us. And so I just always want people to remember that we don't need to become overly preoccupied with our sin. If God is disciplining us, I believe the Holy Spirit is going to show us clear places to repent. And if we ask Him for that and He does

Brenda (05:14.089)

Absolutely.

Alex (05:41.936)

doesn't show it to us, then we might have to recognize that the suffering we're experiencing is because we live in a fallen world with broken people. And we need to kind of let go of the sin over examination that we tend to do.

Brenda (06:05.834)

Yeah, so as we...

said we want to really look at the question today of what is God doing in my suffering. You know we understand the true purpose for our pain it can give us great hope and hope is what gives us endurance and endurance is oftentimes what we need to persevere in a trial. So if we remember and believe that God is infinitely wise and perfectly loving then we know him and if we

Alex (06:39.318)

Yeah, I see this playing out in different ways. I see when people are looking for purposes in their pain, like it's good to know that we have purpose in our pain, but we have to remember that what God is revealing as His purposes in our pain is often general instead of specific or particular. So God doesn't always show us His particular purposes or His specific purposes.

but I think there's a danger sometimes in looking for very specific purposes in his pain. And I'll give you an example from my own life. Of course, years of struggling with chronic pain, and I'm always trying to figure out, you know, what is God doing in this? So I think one day I'm laying in the bed and I decide that God is using... Oh, I figured it out. Like God is using this chronic pain to make my children be people who are compassionate and caring and know how to anticipate others.

needs. And so I let on to that and I'm like, well this suffering is worth it if my children will become compassionate and caring and can anticipate each other's needs. And then of course what happens because they're kids and 15 minutes later they're fighting and they're not compassionate, they're not caring, and they're not even close to even wanting to know what someone else's

Alex (08:09.232)

why I'm suffering collapses at that point and I'm left disillusioned again of where is God and what is he doing in my suffering because he's not doing the particular thing that I decided he needed to be doing in that suffering.

Brenda (08:12.492)

Yeah.

Brenda (08:25.421)

Wow, that's really a good word.

Alex (08:28.67)

And then I see another danger we fall into is like we want to see his plans and purposes in the now versus seeing his overarching plan and purposes. So we've said before that God's doing a thousand different things in what he's doing. And when we look in the scripture, we see the Old Testament saints, they really had no idea all the things that God was doing. We only see that now as we look back on their story and we see God's big story of redeeming

Brenda (08:55.046)

Mm-hmm.

Alex (08:59.624)

through their stories the way they point to Christ, but what God is accomplishing in me today through my suffering often will set off a chain reaction and only God really knows what's going to happen and who may come to faith as this chain reaction unfolds or as a legacy of one who suffers well unfolds and so we have to be really careful to continue to have that big story perspective and not

has to happen right now. I have to see this come to fruition now.

Brenda (09:33.069)

Yeah, I think those are all such good cautions and certainly traps. I think we fall into easily. But there are some things that we can say we know God is doing in suffering, Alex. And these are the places that we want to spend the rest of our time today. And, you know, there might be more, but we've identified at least four ways God uses suffering to mature our faith and deepen our walk with Jesus. And those four are, we are refined like.

Alex (09:45.943)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (10:04.204)

We relate with Christ. We reflect Christ to others and we reveal Christ's glory. So again, we have a beautiful little alliteration, refined, relate, reflect, and reveal. And so let's just go ahead and unpack these. You take the first one, refined like Christ.

Alex (10:14.463)

Yeah.

Alex (10:21.782)

Yeah, so here we're just talking about that God uses our suffering to make us more like Jesus, and we've touched on this before. And, you know, many times when people are struggling or suffering, we hear people quote the Romans 828 verse, and we might cringe a little bit, but we need to remember that when the scripture says that God is working all things for our good, we need to ask the question, well, what is the good that he's working? And Romans 29 answers that question,

Brenda (10:47.865)

Exactly.

Alex (10:51.796)

verse, we forget about it. And Romans 29 says, for those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. So suffering is something that God uses in our sanctification, so we'll grow to look more like Christ and the place that we often grow most quickly and are shaped most nearly to the image of Christ is in our suffering.

Brenda (10:51.981)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (11:17.577)

Yeah, Alex, but I want the gain of Christ without the pain. But it doesn't really work that way. I remember the story about Elizabeth Elliott. Some of our listeners may be too young to remember her. But as a young mom and wife, she and her husband went to be missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador, where he was brutally murdered by the Aca Indians. She left the jungle with her young daughter after his death. Her husband died only to return,

Alex (11:20.506)

Exactly. I'll gain no pain.

Brenda (11:47.511)

time later to complete the mission that he set out to preach the gospel to this tribe and these are the tribe of men who killed her husband and she had the joy of going back and actually seeing them embrace the gospel and then she went on to become a prolific writer and speaker but one day I heard the story that she was at a conference and a young woman approached her and was so excited she was so taken back by the story and Elizabeth's intimate walk with Jesus and

says, I want to be just like you. To which Mrs. Elliot replied, yes, but are you willing to endure what I have endured? Exactly she's very stoic.

Alex (12:27.37)

Yeah, sounds just like something she would say. No nonsense. Yes.

Brenda (12:33.185)

Yeah, no nonsense, very stoic, like, yeah, sure you do, but are you willing to go through what I've been through? And, you know, the thing we just have to remember is that suffering changes us profoundly, and honestly, it either changes us better for the worse, but we all know people who have suffered greatly and now they walk with Jesus deeply. There's an area in my own life that has been very, very painful, and I wouldn't choose to go through it again,

Alex (12:38.751)

Hmm.

Brenda (13:03.239)

And I think if you've had or have a suffering situation in your life and you've gone far enough down the road to see some of what God is doing and conforming you to the image of Christ and then these other things we're gonna talk about, you really can say that in all earnestness. Like, I wouldn't go through it again, but I am so thankful for what it has produced in my life.

Alex (13:24.438)

Mm-hmm.

And in addition to what it's produced in our lives, the next one being able to relate to Christ, being able to see the way that our suffering deepens our trust and our fellowship with Jesus, I think that that's probably the nearest and dearest to me is seeing that, you know, apart from my suffering, sometimes I wonder if I would ever really look to the Lord. Like it is in suffering when I most clearly recognize my need for Him.

Brenda (13:49.034)

Mm-hmm.

Alex (13:55.668)

to Him. It's in suffering where I've grown in a deeper knowledge and experience of Him because there's definitely a way that we experience God in our suffering that we don't experience Him in any other way.

Brenda (14:11.093)

Yeah, I think the Apostle Paul.

really illustrates this. He welcomed suffering because he understood he could not fully know Christ apart from the experience of suffering. And that's just that statement alone. Like, you can't know Christ apart from the experience of suffering. He told the church in Philippi, I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. Now, I'd like you to stop there, Alex. That sounds good to me. I want to experience him

Alex (14:37.086)

Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Brenda (14:43.747)

to suffer with him, sharing in his death, and so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

That is a bold statement and maybe even a crazy one. I don't know. But some translations say we fellowship with Jesus in his suffering as we understand his suffering better and we realize he understands our suffering. And I know that to be true in my own life. It is a precious, precious truth. And I maybe am old enough, I don't know, grown enough in my faith that I can actually pray this with or say these same words that Paul's saying

Alex (14:56.501)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (15:22.807)

I look back again I can see how my suffering has deepened my walk with Jesus. But I will say if you're young or if you've not faced a lot of suffering yet, that seems really harsh. And yet we are here to tell you, hold on my friend, there is a sweetness in your suffering that you will not gain any other way than to walk, than to have Jesus walk it with you.

Alex (15:27.576)

Mm.

Alex (15:41.406)

Yeah. Yeah, it's so true.

Yeah, and I think again for me, like you said, seeing the ways that your suffering has changed you for me, seeing the ways that Jesus has become real has made suffering be something that feels a little less hard because Jesus feels a lot more real. The third way we talk about suffering changing us is that it causes us to reflect Christ. We reflect who He is.

So it's easy to love and trust and obey God when life is good, but how do we respond when hardship comes? And you know some people think that Christians need to be like walking on air, floating on sunshine, living above the suffering of the world to show that we're living the abundant life in Christ and we have no worries, but I really think that does a real

Alex (16:45.108)

we actually reflect Christ to the world as we suffer well. It's when unbelievers look on and wonder who is this God that she would cling to him in all her suffering. I know the Puritans used to say that God entrusts us with suffering and he entrusts it to us as we as we cling to Jesus and we display him

Brenda (17:03.318)

Yeah.

Alex (17:15.148)

not only gives us the ability to put Christ on display when we are suffering, but it also gives us the ability to reflect the comfort of Christ. So when we suffer, we've known and received his comfort, and then we're able to pass that on. So we are reflecting him in how we suffer well, and then how we give away the comfort that we've been given to others who are suffering.

Brenda (17:41.741)

Yeah, I love that idea of the Puritans, that you've been entrusted. My husband actually says that a lot. I'm not sure if he got that from a Puritan. Probably somewhere along the way picked that up. But when we really think about this idea of being entrusted, it's even going to speak more to our next episode about how do we steward our suffering, if it has actually been entrusted to us. So the final thing we can know about what God is doing in our suffering is he is revealing Christ's glory.

uses suffering to reveal ultimately the glory of Christ through rescuing us from sin and suffering and our greatest suffering in this life is sin and death and Jesus overcame the power of these at the cross and one day his full glory is going to be on display when the presence of all this is removed

Alex (18:34.814)

So, Paul told the Corinthians in chapter four, verse 17 and 18, that all of our trials, which seem heavy now, are actually light compared to the glory that goes on and on in heaven. Believe it or not, Brenda, these are my life verses that I picked in middle school. Why? A 13-year-old would pick these verses. This is totally beyond me. But they are. Just... What?

Brenda (18:59.561)

Why a 13 year old is picking a verse period is beyond me and my life. So that is amazing. So sweet and tender.

Alex (19:08.346)

That's just a little fun fact there. But you know when I look back now I think what was I going through to need to cling to the promise, but it was middle school let's just go there, but to be able to cling to the promise that our suffering now will bring Christ's glory in the next life. So this is a little bit of a long story but I think it's worth sharing that Tim Keller captures this idea.

Brenda (19:20.429)

Oh, yeah.

Alex (19:36.4)

He talks about waking up from a horrible nightmare where every member of his family was tragically killed. This is what he says, it was as if I had lost my family and awakened to discover I had them back. I wanted to wake them all up and hug them. I loved them before the nightmare, but not like I did after the nightmare. That nightmare taught me something valuable and it was this, the joy of finding them wasn't a joy in spite of the nightmare, but a joy enhanced by the nightmare.

the nightmare. The nightmare actually punctuated my joy. He goes on to say, if heaven is a compensation for all the stuff we wanted but never had, that is one thing. But if the new heaven and new earth is our hope, and it is, it will make everything horrible we've experienced nothing but a nightmare. And as a nightmare, it will infinitely correspondingly increase our future joy

Alex (20:36.28)

we had never suffered. To say that our suffering is an illusion or to say we won't we will be compensated for our suffering is one thing but to say that the suffering we experience now will one day be a servant of our joy does not just compensate for it undoes it.

Brenda (20:54.569)

I just love that. I love that story. Man, what hope we have that one day everything sad is going to come untrue. And honestly, it reminds me of childbirth, okay? I had a terrible experience with my firstborn and I can remember the hours of labor and the complications that led to a c-section, but Alex, even though I can remember so much about it, I feel no pain.

Alex (21:07.178)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (21:22.021)

Even though I know it was painful and at times terrifying, I can't muster up one bit of fear or pain or discomfort or any of that.

Alex (21:25.446)

Hmm.

Brenda (21:32.605)

And then certainly as I look at my children and grandchildren, I know the pain was completely worth it. But I think it's a really interesting concept when we think about like Jesus, when he came back, he showed Thomas the scars on his hands, right? And so sometimes I think our view of heaven is like we're going to get there and it's going to erase everything in the sense that we won't be our real selves and we won't know, but if you think about like at that point, things making sense

Alex (21:46.391)

Mm-hmm.

Brenda (22:02.337)

the realization of what God has done for us, for all eternity, we're just gonna be sharing the stories, I think, of our rescue, but there won't be any pain in it, and we'll only see the glory in it.

Alex (22:10.079)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brenda (22:14.053)

And that's just gonna be, it's gonna be beautiful. I can't wait. One of my favorite things when I think about heaven is sitting with people and interviewing them about what God, what was their life story? And now as they're on the other side, how they can just tell it without pain and without shame, but just to be putting the glory of Christ on display with every single story. I just, I love that.

Alex (22:22.382)

Hahaha

Brenda (22:43.765)

So there's one more thing that I think that we need to say about what God is doing in our suffering. And that is he's a bookkeeper taking account of evil.

And I like this idea of a bookkeeper because we do see this idea of God like keeping accounts. I even think about the scripture that talks about He is writing down our laments and keeping our tears. You know, He's very interested in what's going on in our lives, the good and the bad. And after Paul and I watched this really disturbing movie highlighting human suffering, I was reminded of the verse in Proverbs 15.3 that says,

Brenda (23:23.195)

good. And a robust theology of suffering, Alex has got to include both. What God is doing with his children and what God is doing with the wicked. And God is going to deal justly with the ungodly. He is going to punish evildoers. While God does not settle all of his accounts today, he promises that one day they will all be settled.

Alex (23:46.628)

Mmm, yeah.

Yeah, it's a good reminder, especially when we're suffering at the hands of another. It's a good reminder that vengeance is his. I like the image, bookkeeper is another good visual theology that I don't have to keep the record he does. So in all of this, when we ask the question, what is God doing in my suffering? We could say that God will not save us from suffering, but that he saved us through it

Brenda (24:06.233)

That's right.

Alex (24:18.052)

continues to use our suffering in our salvation story. And that's also what we're going to be looking at in our next episode. So I hope that these four hours today will help when we're doing self-counsel or when we're helping someone else that we might not always understand in the minutiae what God is up to, but we can know that he is up to good things. And in our next episode, episode four, we're going to ask the question then, if God is

his purposes in our suffering then how can I learn how to suffer well? So we hope you'll join us.

Brenda (24:54.253)

Yeah.

Yeah, and Alex, I just wanna say one other thing, and that is if you've not joined our conversational counseling Facebook page, we really wanna encourage you to do that because we'd like to have conversation about our content here, and we'd love to hear from you what you're learning. You can add to the conversation, you can ask questions, and we'll come back and answer those. So certainly be sure you like, share, rate, and do all the things that can help get these podcasts out. We really appreciate when people do that.

Also, go online and join, go to Facebook and join our conversational counseling Facebook page to be a part of the conversation. We want to hear from you and we don't want you to miss out.