Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

by Paul David Tripp

This means through all of this drama, I have not been left alone to deal with Mr. Hardship on my own. My Savior has been with me, for me, and in me, and he works to take very bad things and produce through them very, very good things. He has done that for me, and he will continue to do that.

thankful, no, not for the pain, but for the One who is there with you in your pain.

Physical suffering exposes the delusion of personal autonomy and self-sufficiency.

Independence is a delusion that is quickly exposed by suffering.

It presents to the sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help, and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever.

Paul Tripp states that “Scripture never looks down on the sufferer”. How does that encourage you?

you never just suffer the thing that you’re suffering, but you always also suffer the way that you’re suffering that thing.

So our lives are shaped not just by what we suffer but by what we bring to our suffering. What you think about yourself, life, God, and others will profoundly affect the way you think about, interact with, and respond to the difficulty that comes your way.

Health and success are intoxicating but also vulnerable.

Now, here’s what happens in times of suffering. When the thing you have been trusting (whether you knew it or not) is laid to waste, you don’t suffer just the loss of that thing; you also suffer the loss of the identity and security that it provided.

your suffering is more powerfully shaped by what’s in your heart than by what’s in your body or in the world around you.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. (Prov. 4:23)

Rather than suffering being connected to the bad things we have done, Scripture connects trials and difficulty to the good things God wants for us and is working to produce in us (see James 1:2–4).

It never works to ask people to give you meaning and purpose. It is unrealistic to look to someone for inner peace.

Suffering is intensified when we elevate people too high in our hearts and then they fail us.

Taking too much credit always leads to placing too much trust in yourself.

Suffering exposes the danger of self-reliance.

Sin causes us to be driven by selfish desires, a spirit of entitlement, and a silent list of demands. Sin causes us to want our own way, to want sovereignty over things we weren’t designed to control, and to want to coerce others into the service of our agenda.

It’s not about our plans for us but about his will for us.

The crisis of faith that often accompanies suffering is the result of a collision between our will and God’s will and our glory and his glory.

So her life became her personal messiah, giving her what it was never meant to give.

But the Bible does even more than that—it presents to us a suffering Savior.

The One to whom we cry when we cry out in pain knows our pain because suffering of some kind was his experience from the moment of his birth until his final breath.

Here is what is so important to understand: suffering is spiritual warfare.

Suffering is never just a matter of the body but is always also a matter of the heart. It’s never just an assault on our situation, but also an attack on our soul. Suffering takes us to the borders of our faith.

Too many of us, while battling the cause of our suffering, forget to battle for our hearts.

We push everything in our lives through our conceptual, emotional, spiritual grid (CES).

Suffering yanks profound questions and cravings out of us. It forces us to examine and consider things in a new way or for the first time. It makes us wonder in ways we’ve never wondered, to doubt what we previously assumed, to crave what we’ve never desired, and to think in ways we’ve never thought.

What most of us fail to understand is that the impact on what our heart does with what we suffer is as powerful as the thing that we are suffering.

We suffer as the creatures of God. We suffer as the subjects of God’s sovereign rule. We suffer as the redeemed children of God.

Suffering is dangerous because it exposes your heart to temptations as never before, but it is also a workroom for grace.

May the result be more and more people whose suffering does not produce a lasting legacy of weakness and disillusionment but increased strength and greater joy.

Suffering opens your eyes, focuses your mind, and produces awareness like you never had before.

He was able to calmly do the unthinkable, because for years his daily thoughts had been focused on the goodness, faithfulness, and power of his Lord.

What controls your meditation will control your thoughts about God, yourself, others, your situation, and even the nature of life itself. And as you meditate on what you are suffering, your joy wanes, your hope fades, and God seems increasingly distant.

You are not dealing just with what you are suffering but with the pain of how your meditation causes you to understand it, feel about it, and respond to it.

Remember, God will never ask you to deny reality, but if you allow your difficulty to control your meditation, you will end up hopeless and afraid.

“Stop allowing your heart to be controlled by fear because fear only leads to evil.”

Fear is a good thing in the face of danger, but it makes a cruel god.

“Behold, the hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each to his own home, and will leave me alone. Yet I am not alone, for the Father is with me” (John 16:32).

So you have to fight to see life with the eyes of faith and not through the lens of fear.

Fear of God does not remove suffering from your life but dramatically changes the way you suffer. When you fear God, the equation is not you compared to the size of your trial, but your God compared to it.

It’s as if we buy blessing by doing the right thing and avoid hardship by refusing to do the wrong thing. Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done.

Envy tempts you to crave what is temporary while you devalue what is eternal. This never leads you anywhere good.

The real burdens of suffering are made significantly more difficult when you carry them in a heart spiritually weakened by bitterness.

When envy becomes the soil in which bitterness grows, your suffering will become a lens through which you look at everything.

Bitterness puts a dark cloud of negativity over your life, and because it does, it robs you of your hope, and because it robs you of your hope, it erodes your motivation to do the good and constructive things that every sufferer needs to do so as not to lose his way in the midst of his difficulty.

Envy Underestimates the Goodness of God

Blindness to God’s presence and goodness and to the caress of his grace only makes the heavy burdens of suffering seem even more impossible to bear.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16–17, “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.”