Suffering Is Never for Nothing

by Elisabeth Elliot

And I’ve come to see that it’s through the deepest suffering that God has taught me the deepest lessons. And if we’ll trust Him for it, we can come through to the unshakable assurance that He’s in charge. He has a loving purpose. And He can transform something terrible into something wonderful. Suffering is never for nothing.

“Suffering is having what you don’t want or wanting what you don’t have.”

deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God.

Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God.

“Joy is not the absence of suffering but the presence of God.”5

I learned in that experience who God is. Who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise. And so I can say to you that suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth. I Am. I am the Lord. In other words, that God is God.

God is big enough to take anything that we can dish out to Him.

God, through my own troubles and sufferings, has not given me explanations. But He has met me as a person, as an individual, and that’s what we need.

“If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”

Perhaps some future day, Lord, Thy strong hand will lead me to the place where I must stand utterly alone. Alone, O gracious lover, but for Thee. I shall be satisfied if I can see Jesus only. I do not know Thy plan for years to come, my spirit finds in Thee its perfect home. Sufficiency. Lord, all my desire is before Thee now, lead on no matter where, no matter how. I trust in Thee.

The fact that He does love us, that means He wants nothing less than our perfection and joy.

why doesn’t God do something about it? And the Christian answer is, He did. He became the victim, a lamb slain from before the foundation of the world.

I was tempted, as all of us are, to say, “Well Lord, You promised to help me, but You do have a kind of a funny way of going about it. This is not my idea of the way God is supposed to help one of His servants who is trying to be obedient and trying to be faithful.” And what does God say to an argument like that? Same thing He’s always saying. “Trust Me.” “Trust Me.” Some day, even you will see that there’s sense in this. Your suffering is never for nothing.

How many choices have you got to go back to those alternatives? You either believe God knows what He’s doing or you believe He doesn’t. You either believe He’s worth trusting or you say He’s not. And then, where are you? You’re at the mercy of chaos not cosmos.