Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

by Paul David Tripp

I cried out for God’s help, with those exact words, because I was too shocked and confused to know what to pray for. I grabbed hold of his promises.

Independence is a delusion that is quickly exposed by suffering.

During these months I was confronted with the reality that much of what I thought was faith in Christ was actually confidence in my physical condition and pride in my ability to produce.

all. It was humbling to confess that what I thought was faith was actually self-reliance.

In fact, the Bible is so honest about suffering that it recounts stories that are so weird and dark that if they were a Netflix video you probably wouldn’t watch it.

And it’s not just that the Bible tells the story of suffering honestly and authentically; it also gives us concrete and real hope.

Remember that the hope of redemption is not just reserved for eternity but is a real, living, present hope.

So with gospel courage read on, knowing that there is no valley of suffering so deep that God’s grace in Jesus isn’t deeper.

You and I never come to our suffering empty-handed. We always drag a bag full of experiences, expectations, assumptions, perspectives, desires, intentions, and decisions into our suffering. So our lives are shaped not just by what we suffer but by what we bring to our suffering.

Physical health and productivity should produce deeper gratitude and worship, not self-reliance and pride in productivity. I am thankful for what my weakness has exposed and for being freed by grace from having to prove any longer that I am what I think I am.

Weakness simply demonstrates what has been true all along: we are completely dependent on God for life and breath and everything else.

wasn’t singled out; God hadn’t forgotten me or turned his back. I wasn’t being punished for my choices, and I wasn’t receiving the expected consequences for poor decisions. My story is about the regular things that happen to us all because we live in a world that has been dramatically damaged by sin. In this world sickness and disease live, and our bodies break down or don’t function properly.

Here’s what is so important to understand, and what may be the principal contribution of this book: 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.

The way to understand any single Bible passage is to remember that Scripture interprets Scripture.

your suffering will be all the more painful if you question the presence, promises, goodness, or faithfulness of God.

It never goes well when you ask another flawed human being to be the source of your happiness.

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

The only safe place to look for a sturdy well-being of heart is the Creator.

Suffering confronts us with the fact that life is not about us but about God.

Suffering is real, and its physical, spiritual, and relational effects are real. We should all take comfort in the fact that the Bible never treats suffering as anything but a real, significant, and often life-changing human experience.

There are about sixty-seven lament psalms. That means that roughly 44 percent of the content of the psalms is given over to psalms of suffering and sorrow.

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.

We all live based on our particular interpretation of those facts.

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.

your heart to temptations as never before, but it is also a workroom for grace. This book is about how, in suffering, to identify and defend yourself against the dangers while you celebrate and seek the comforts of God’s grace.

Suffering of whatever kind, with whatever it may bring your way, creates a focused awareness that is part of the burden that every sufferer bears.

The power of what you are suffering to control your meditation is a huge spiritual issue for every sufferer. What controls your meditation will control your thoughts about God, yourself, others, your situation, and even the nature of life itself.

The more you focus on the thing you’re suffering, the bigger, more complicated, and more impossible it becomes.

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. What has your trouble done to your meditation?

On this side of our final home, life is constant spiritual warfare.

The reality is that spiritual warfare is mundane, normal Christianity because our hearts are always a battleground between fear and faith, between doubt and hope, and between what is true and what is false.

Yes. True.

Problems have loomed so large that they’ve blinded them from the One who is their only hope.

It’s important to remember that we were never created for independence.

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

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

Fear of God, that thankful and reverential recognition of his glory, sovereignty, and power, is how rest and hope can be found in the face of what seems difficult and hopeless.

Nothing that you and I face in this broken world is ultimate or eternal. It is important to recognize that what we fear will not last forever and that suffering, in the eternal scheme of things, will not last forever.

The temptation to assess your life by looking horizontally rather than vertically is graphically depicted in one powerfully diagnostic psalm, Psalm 73.

Every good father does hard things with his children, not because he hates them but because he loves them and gives them what they need, which is not always the comfortable thing they want.

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

Envy is a punch in the stomach when you’re already out of breath. It’s bad news when you already feel that you can’t bear anything more. Envy is the enemy of hope. Envy is a mortal danger to be avoided.

thing. In the middle of his despondency and withdrawal was one fatal conclusion: he had quit believing that God is good.

The doubt of wonderment is a normal part of a healthy life of faith. God won’t always make sense to you, and when he doesn’t, bringing your doubts to him is good.

The minute your functional theology tells you that God is not good, it’s very hard to hold on to the confessional theology that declares he is.

I’m persuaded that there are many more sufferers in this place than we tend to think. I am also convinced that many of them don’t know that they’ve reached these conclusions. The reason so many sufferers aren’t aware that they’ve given up on God is that the process of theological change hasn’t been self-consciously philosophical; it’s been much more of a traumatic emotional-situational process. The surprise of situational distress has produced deeply emotional questions that have led them to deeply theological conclusions, but it’s been nothing like the sort of theological debate found in a classroom.

Pray that God would give you insight into your own heart and the strength to fight this spiritual battle even in moments when you feel profoundly weak. Have you allowed the lies of the enemy, whispered to you in struggle, to sow seeds of doubt about God?

There is no more powerful tool against debilitating doubt than gratitude.

Since Jesus took all your judgment, God doesn’t respond to you with judgment but with the faithful, tender love of a father. He welcomes you to be honest, and he will always respond to your confession with mercy. In your struggle of faith, do you run from the Lord or to him?

The response of those people to suffering argues the point once again that it really is true that we never suffer just what we’re suffering, but we also suffer the way that we’re suffering.