Final Thoughts on Suffering

I finished the book "Suffering and the Sovereignty of God" by John Piper and Justin Taylor. I am becoming more convinced that suffering is the tool that God uses in our lives to cause the greatest growth and bring us into a position to minister to others in their pain and suffering.

Here are some final quotes from the book:

Profound good in our lives often emerges in a crucible of significant suffering. Jesus himself "learned obedience through what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8). Often faith and love shine most clearly, simply and courageously in a dark place. And what marked you for bad? Often our typical sins emerge in reaction to betrayal, loss, or pain. Hammered by some evil, we discover the evils in our own hearts (Rom. 12:17). And perhaps most often, in the hands of our kind and purposeful Father, the bad and the good both come out. A trial brings out what is most wrong in you, and God brings out what is most right as he meets you and works with you (Ps. 119:67). The endurance of faith is one of the Spirit's finest fruits--and you only learn to endure when you must live through something hard.

The problem that we deal with here in the West is that we don't like to confront grief or suffering. Through medicine and wealth we have avoided a lot of the suffering that the rest of the world still experiences (though our façade of invincibility was at least temporarily washed away with 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina). Suffering is a universal experience so we can't avoid it forever. However, when it does come, we fast-paced Westerners like to "deal with it" as quickly as possible...I believe this avoidance of grief in our culture results from not knowing how to deal with pain. We get uncomfortable when we hear people question God. We like to give easy answers to try to minimize the pain. When someone says that they feel God has forsaken them, we think we must quickly preach the truth that he will never leave us nor forsake us (Heb. 13:5), or they will fall away and lose their faith. Part of the problem is that we do not see such pain and deep grief as normative in the Christian life. Yes, we all know that suffering is normative, but we don't take the time to really talk about the pain involved in suffering. After all, it isn't suffering if it doesn't hurt.

There is much more in this wonderful book but I obviously can't record it all here. If you are going through a time of pain or suffering, or if you'd like to know how to come alongside someone who is, I would highly recommend this book.