In my last post, we saw how God uses suffering to protect us from future harm. Related to that, in this post we’ll see how God uses suffering to purify us. This, of course, is folly to the non-Christian. Only those who, as Jesus said, “hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matthew 5:6) will understand this benefit of suffering. Those who hunger and thirst after righteousness will maybe not enjoy suffering—suffering by definition is suffering and thereby not enjoyable—but Christians can respect and even rejoice in suffering as they realize what it is accomplishing in their lives.
So, if you are enduring a hardship—sickness, persecution, troubled teenage antics, family problems, whatever—you can rejoice that God can use that in your lives for your good. As it says in Hebrew 12:7, 11: “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?…No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.” So, are you going through hardship? Then endure it as discipline and enjoy it as a sign that YOU REALLY ARE A CHILD OF GOD! God is making you into the kind of person fit to inherit His Kingdom.
Now you might be thinking, But I don’t want to go through suffering! I know, we’re often like little children who don’t want a bath. We once had a two-year-old foster girl and when Jean E. would get her clothes off to get her in the tub, sometimes Jean would turn her head for a moment and that tiny girl would run away (amusing because we only lived in a two bedroom apartment so reacquisition didn’t take long).
Me and the Unpardonable Sin
So here’s an example of how our Father used suffering in my life for my good. I became a Christian in junior high school and when I was a sophomore in high school, I experienced my first major trial—I thought I had committed the unpardonable sin of the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit! I was a mess. I was devastated. I sought counsel from this or that person, one after another, as to whether I had actually committed that unforgivable sin (I wrote about the unpardonable sin in detail in the Christian Research Journal). For short periods I’d decide I hadn’t and I’d feel okay, but then I’d think something that made me think I had committed the unpardonable sin and I would again be horrified. This deep depression lasted for several months. Finally, I realized that the only way I was going to feel okay was to focus on Scriptures like John 5:24: “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.” This and other verses (e.g., John 3:16) don’t say, “You will have eternal life unless you’ve committed the unpardonable sin.” They just say, If you believe you will have eternal life. Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Therefore, those who confess “Jesus is Lord” and believe that “God raised him from the dead” can safely and assuredly conclude that they have not committed the unpardonable sin, but will be saved. Now, as I said, I was an insecure sophomore and I’d often experience this overwhelming dread, but whenever I got scared about not being saved, I’d persistently recite these verses to myself in a loop until I regained assurance of my salvation—and peace of mind. This took a lot of work. I would sometimes recite these verses to myself for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes at a time. But when I’d do that, a peace would come over me.
Now here’s the strange thing. I was a terribly undisciplined person. I was a terrible student who couldn’t keep focused on anything (my GPA was 1.9). But the months of desperate focusing on these verses and reciting them in a loop until I felt better resulted in three amazing things. One, I got an immense confidence in my salvation. Two, I became a much bolder person. As the saying goes, the fear of God is the fear that removes all others. So true. I would think, “now that I have known the fear of hell and the salvation of God what people can do to me is nothing!” Three, I learned to have a disciplined mind. I learned I could force my mind to think certain things to the exclusion of other things. I desperately needed a disciplined mind to focus on schoolwork (within 18 months my GPA went from 1.9 to over 3.0), to resist lusts, to focus on heaven. In short: I thank God for allowing me to endure that suffering!! Many of the most valuable things in my life today had their beginnings in God purifying me through suffering.
I could share many personal examples about how the Father used suffering to purify me (having bone cancer certainly had a helpful impact) as I’m sure many of you reading this could share examples from your own lives about how God used suffering to give you His character. As we learn these things, James 1:2-4 makes sense: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”
In fact, those Christians who have suffered in various ways can, as I mentioned above, rejoice in suffering. Paul said in Romans 5:2b-4, 10: “We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope…. And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast.”
But, how does character produce hope? It’s simple, nothing has made me grow in my faith more than to see suffering produce godly fruit in my life! Why? Because when I go through suffering and then look back on it and see how God is conforming me into the image of Christ, it personally confirms to me that this whole Christian thing is absolutely, positively, true!! In other words, it’s not just that I think Christianity is true because of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus (which is amazing to the saint and confounding to the skeptic) but because I experientially have seen God work suffering out for my good just as He promised (Romans 8:28).
So God uses suffering to purify us and we can enjoy that because we are being made into fit inheritors of His Kingdom!
In my next post we’ll see another way God uses suffering to bless us.
