The School of Suffering

Suffering 13

Note: Having begun this series on suffering with definitions and descriptions, we then moved on to some scriptural and current examples. Last week we shifted and began to offer some answers to the great question, "But why did this happen?" We began with two reasons, that suffering is sometimes the consequence of our sin and other times judgment on us for our sin. Today I will offer a third reason, that suffering is a school that develops or grows us into Christian maturity. I cannot write this better than I already have in a chapter in Freed From Sin. Here is that chapter.

          I like to be comfortable. I would rather sit on a hard bench than stand up, and if a cushioned chair is available, I am going to leave the hard bench for you. I would rather walk than run, and I would rather ride than walk. I suspect you are like me. I have never yet seen a line outside of a gym. Our flesh likes to be pampered, indulged, and spoiled. We do not like to suffer.

          The problem with this approach in the context of holiness is that being at ease in Zion has never yet brought a body to the place of conformity with Jesus Christ. It is suffering that God holds valuable in His economy, not comfort. Peter tells us to suffer according to the will of God (I Peter 4.19). In other words, there is some suffering that our Heavenly Father has purposely designed for us to endure for reasons that seem good to Him. It is His wish, His desire, His will for us that we experience it.

          I Peter and Job are the best books in the Bible to study suffering, but we find an absolutely foundational truth tucked away in an obscure corner of Hebrews. Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. (Hebrews 5.8). Obviously, this is talking about Jesus Christ. Just as obviously, Jesus did not ever have a time in His earthly career when He was not completely obedient. Incomplete obedience is partial disobedience, and disobedience is sin. Jesus was not a sinner; therefore, this verse cannot be telling us that He came to the place of learning to obey by way of suffering.

          What does it mean then? One of things sometimes misunderstood about Jesus is that there were things He had to learn. And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature (Luke 2.52). Yes, He was God, but in choosing to robe Himself in human flesh, He chose to empty Himself temporarily of some aspects of His deity. God is omni-present; Jesus was not. God has never learned anything; Jesus did. As a child, He had to learn how to walk, how to tie His laces, and how to read. As a young man, He had to learn how to use Joseph's tools. At some point (I think about the age of twelve) He had to learn Who He was. It was not that He was ever stubborn, rebellious, or unwilling; no, for those are sins. It is simply that He had to mature and to grow in his ability, in His capacity, so to speak.

          Included in the other areas in which He needed to grow was obedience. He was never disobedient, but His obedience had to increase in capacity, too. As a young man, He sat in the Temple and solemnly declared His willingness to obey His Heavenly Father when He stated, I must be about my Father's business (Luke 2.49). Although at the age of twelve He was completely willing to do His Father's will, He was not yet ready to follow through on the ultimate expression of that will – His death on the cross. His obedience had to grow for another two decades to that point, so to speak. And it did. He humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2.8).

          Indeed, I could even go so far as to say that obedience to His Heavenly Father during his earthly career is the central lesson for Christians. It is what jumps out at you again and again as you examine His life. Four times alone in the book of John He references this. I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father (John 5.30). For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me (John 6.38). I do always those things that please him (John 8.29). As the Father gave me commandment, even so I do (John 14.31). Christ was never disobedient, but Scripture teaches us that He had to learn the fulness of obedience, which He clearly did.

Christ Bearing the Cross
Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin
c 1970

          How did He learn to increase, to grow His capacity to obey? In what school was it taught? Beloved, He learned it in the school of suffering. Yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. Or, as the writer of Hebrews phrased it elsewhere, For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings (Hebrews 2.10). No one was ever so obedient as Jesus Christ; no one ever suffered as much as Jesus Christ. And the two halves of that sentence are not a coincidence.

          Our situation, while different in that we must first grow away from disobedience into obedience on our way mature obedience, is still similar. If we want to grow in the grace of holiness, we must grow in our capacity to obey. This will include seasons spent in the school of suffering. In his matchless paean to suffering, his first epistle, Peter says as much. Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin; That he no longer should live the rest of his time in the flesh to the lusts of men, but to the will of God (I Peter 4.1-2).   

          How does suffering do this? The short answer is that suffering minimizes or, perhaps I should say, mortifies our flesh. Remember, our flesh likes comfort; it does not like suffering. It shrinks away from suffering, pulls back from it. Peter shows us that suffering in the flesh (a phrase he used three times in those two verses) does something to decrease our lust, causing us to cease from sin.

          There are two ways to apply this understanding. One is to interpret this as meaning we ought to actively try to harm our own body, as if we can in this manner minimize our lust and bring ourselves to the place of holiness. In Catholicism, dedicated members of Opus Dei wear barbed garters under their clothes so that they may live in constant agony. In the picturesque Spanish town of Guardia Sanframondi, every few years penitents parade through the streets while scourging themselves with metal whips and pins. Supposedly, such self-inflicted physical pain draws the favor of God and brings one closer to Him. This is utter nonsense. The Word of God teaches us to take care of our body (Ephesians 5.29). Sadistically tormenting our own flesh is not the answer.

          On the other hand, if God brings suffering to us, a proper reaction on our part produces precious things. Namely, suffering in the flesh minimizes our attention to it and minimizes its claim on our lives. Conversely, suffering allows us to maximize our sensitivity to spiritual things.

          Some of you reading this are puzzled at the moment. "Minimizes our attention to our flesh? Minimizes its claim on our lives? That's nonsense. I live in constant pain, and I've never had to pay more attention to my body in my life." I think I understand this, yet at the same time, if that suffering is accepted in the right spirit, it produces in us the humility necessary for spirituality.

My reading spot on my most recent prayer
retreat just this month.

          Nearly ten years ago, I set aside a few days to go into the woods alone for my first prayer retreat. Just prior to this, I had taken an extended course of a powerful antibiotic for the first time. Unbeknownst to me, that antibiotic would kick off an inherited genetic flaw linked directly to an obscure condition called Meniere's Disease. First identified in the early 1800s by French doctor Prosper Meniere, it is an incurable condition that manifests itself principally in headaches, dizziness, vertigo, tinnitus, and eventually deafness. Associated with these, to one extent or another, are nausea, fatigue, hyperacusis, photophobia, and a condition with the curious name of brain fog (think of what happens to a computer trying to run too many programs at once).

          Nearly a decade of intimate acquaintance with this disease has taught me how to manage it, but when it first struck, I was completely at sea. I had no idea what had happened to me. I only knew that as I drove alone west out of Chicago toward the Mississippi River I was terribly sick. I was dizzy. The only way I could drive was by focusing my eyes on some fixed point in the distance and sitting bolt upright and still in the seat. I could not look down at the instrument panel, aside to my mirrors, or around me at passing cars or other scenery. When I stopped and got out, I had trouble walking in a straight line. My ears felt like someone had inserted a balloon and then proceeded to inflate it near to the point of bursting. Several hours later, after arriving at my little one-room cabin, I collapsed onto the bed physically drained.

          During the next few days, I spent most of my time on that bed. Periodically, I would feel good enough to attempt a prayer walk. But soon enough the symptoms would activate again, and I would stumble back to my bed. At one point, in the initial grips of a despair that would through the years become an old and familiar foe, I wept. All I wanted to do was pray. All I wanted to do was walk with Him. All I wanted to do was experience God. And I could not even stay out of bed, let alone concentrate well enough to enter into prayer of any depth.

          Curiously enough, you would think such physical frailty would focus my attention so completely on my health that I would be unable to concentrate on growing spiritually. The opposite has occurred. Empathy toward the physical ailments of others has grown in me, and that empathy has made me a better pastor and a better friend. Humility has been inserted into my life through crevices pried open by the crowbar of weakness. Faith, in the sense of dependence on God, has come to rule the secluded moments immediately prior to my public ministry. Gratitude for a longsuffering wife, for patient children, and for a kind and flexible church warms my heart. Even when I am misunderstood by others for actions I take as a result of an invisible disease, I am reminded of how often my Saviour was misunderstood.

          Please do not misunderstand me in turn. In the third paragraph of the introduction of this book, I laid aside any claim to personal holiness. I am not picking it up now. The distance between where I am and where I should be in the likeness of Christ is breathtaking in its expanse. But He has taught me, beloved. He has grown me; He has stretched me; He has developed me in the school of suffering. It is in this school we realize how frail our flesh is. It is in this school that He reminds us of just how temporal this world is while He draws our attention to the next one. It is in this school that we come to see God alone as the source of all comfort, strength, and peace. It is in this school we come to depend less and less upon ourselves and more and more upon Him. It is in this school our flesh is mortified, and our spirit is enlivened. It is in the hothouse of the school of suffering that the fruit of the Spirit is grown to ripeness.

          Remember, as in all things, Jesus leads us by example here, too. Whatever pain He calls you to endure, He endured worse. Whatever burden He calls you to carry, He carried more. Whatever bitter cup He calls you to taste, recall to your mind that He drank from it more deeply and more often. He did so without anger, without doubt, and without complaint. No wonder He learned obedience!

          Heretical branches of modern Christianity promote a prosperity gospel that is entirely unattached to the Word of God. They do so because it sells. More orthodox branches of Christianity are little better, promoting a God who pours out only what seems good to us – peace of mind and heart, complete acceptance, unconditional love, continual forgiveness – crowned with eternal life as the frosting on the cake. All of these last are true about God, yes; but they are decidedly one-sided. He also calls us to suffer, to live as strangers and pilgrims on the earth, to deny ourselves, to labor for Him, and to pay the price. This side of eternity God is not in the business of making us comfortable. He is in the business of making us holy, and at some point, that always entails suffering.

          For most of you reading this book it has come to you already. For a few of you, it has yet to arrive. But for each of you, the truth is the same: suffering is not a hindrance to holiness, but a help. You do not have to seek such suffering; rest assured, He will bring it to you in His time. No, you do not have to seek it, but I do advise you not to run from it. In fact, with a bit of fear and trembling, I urge you to embrace it. It is a hard school and a long school. But it is a wonderfully precious school, for it draws us to Him. And that is where you want to go.