Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

by Paul David Tripp

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.

What in the world was God doing?

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

Physical suffering does force you to face the reality that your life is in the hands of another. It reminds you that you are small and dependent, that whatever little bits of power and control you have can be taken away in an instant. Independence is a delusion

Suffering has the power to expose what you have been trusting all along. If you lose your hope when your physical body fails, maybe your hope wasn’t really in your Savior after all. It was humbling to confess that what I thought was faith was actually self-reliance

suffering is spiritual warfare.

Scripture never looks down on the sufferer, it never mocks his pain, it never turns a deaf ear to his cries, and it never condemns him for his struggle. 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.

Remember that the theology of suffering in Scripture is never, ever an end in itself but is designed as a means to the end of real comfort, real direction, real protection, real conviction, and real hope.

This hope is rooted in the fact that your Lord is in you, he is with you, and he is for you right here, right now.

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

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.

Perhaps we curse physical weakness because we are uncomfortable with placing our trust in God.

Weakness simply demonstrates what has been true all along: we are completely dependent on God for life and breath and everything else. Weakness was not the end for me, but a new beginning, because weakness provides the context in which true strength is found.

You see, weakness is not what you and I should be afraid of. We should fear our delusion of strength. Strong people tend not to reach out for help, because they think they don’t need it. When you have been proven weak, you tap into the endless resources of divine power that are yours in Christ.

unrealistic expectations always make suffering harder.

you and I never suffer just the thing that we’re suffering, but we also suffer the way that we’re suffering it. Each of us brings to our suffering things that shape the way that we suffer. We all suffer, but we don’t suffer the same way, because our suffering is shaped by what we carry into the difficulties that come our way.

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.

Like a stream, your attitudes, choices, reactions, decisions, and responses to whatever you are facing flow out of your heart. The heart is the center of your personhood. The heart is your causal core, as dry soil soaks in the liquid of a stream. Suffering draws out the true thoughts, attitudes, assumptions, and desires of your heart. So it’s helpful to consider the kinds of things we bring to our suffering that cause us to trouble our own trouble.

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).

Suffering doesn’t so much change your heart as expose what has been in your heart all along.

Change is a constant reality. But we all tend to get lulled into thinking that what we have today will be with us tomorrow and the tomorrows that follow.

If you don’t take seriously the groaning condition of our world, you will live with naive expectations of what your life will be, you will be unprepared for the trouble that comes your way, and you will be susceptible to the myriad of temptations that come your way.

although the dominating power of sin has been broken in them, the presence of sin still remains,

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

We forget that every success we’ve achieved has depended on forces we could never control, and we forget that all our natural abilities are gifts from God.

When you live self-reliantly, and the unexpected, the unplanned, the unwanted, or the painful comes your way, you panic.

Suffering exposes the danger of self-reliance. It reminds us that we were not designed to live independently but in dependence on God and others.

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.

You know they don’t mean it, but it seems that they always end up minimizing the gravity of your experience. They want to help, they think they’ve helped, but they haven’t.

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.

The largest body of content in the psalms is given to lament, in which the psalmist “laments” or mourns the situation he is in and the distress he is facing.

Not only does the Bible not minimize our suffering, but it also gives a lot of room for the voicing of our cries.

None of us would be willing to exchange our life, no matter how hard it has been, for the life of Jesus while he was here on earth. He suffered not just in one way but in every way, and he suffered not just for a period of time but for his entire life.

I want to get you to think about and finally find comfort in the fact that our experience of suffering is never just physical. The pain that stops us in our tracks, that makes us want to pull the covers over our head and not face the day, and at moments makes us wish that we could die, is never just physical.

suffering is spiritual warfare.

Suffering always puts your heart under attack.

Suffering is never just a matter of the body but is always also a matter of the heart.

We live out of our hearts (see Prov. 4:23; Mark 7:14–23; and Luke 6:43–45), and our hearts are an ever-flowing fountain of interactivity.

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

You and I are never just influenced by what we suffer, but our CES influences the way we suffer.

As people made in God’s image, none of us lives life based on the raw facts of our experiences. We all live based on our particular interpretation of those facts. In this way, the central battleground of suffering is not physical, financial, situational, or relational. The impact of suffering on all those things is real, often long-term, and sometimes breathtakingly difficult.

Suffering is emotionally exhausting and spiritually burdensome.

God is inextricably connected to and intimately involved in our suffering.

She determined that rather than accusing God, she would trust him. She consumed anything and everything that would point her to the blessing of knowing God and being the object of his love and grace.

For John, suffering was the context for the end of his street-level trust of God; and for Freda, suffering became the context for the deepening and maturing of her faith. So it is with suffering; it never leaves you the same.

Yes, you may continue to suffer, or its effects may remain, but you now live with a changed heart, a sturdier faith, and a joy that suffering cannot take away.

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

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

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. It causes you to notice what once would not have gotten your attention and to carry concerns that you’d never carried before.

What controls your meditation will control your thoughts about God, yourself, others, your situation, and even the nature of life itself.