Suffering Is Never for Nothing

by Elisabeth Elliot

He can transform something terrible into something wonderful. Suffering is never for nothing.

I’m convinced that there are a good many things in this life that we really can’t do anything about, but that God wants us to do something with.

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

The 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.

Job was never given a clue about, where Satan challenged God in Heaven.

But he never doubted that God existed and he said some of the very worst things that could possibly be said about God.

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

So never hesitate to say what you really feel to God because remember that God knows what you think before you know and certainly knows what you’re going to say before you even think it.

for the first time in my personal experience, with that awful why. Like Job, I didn’t doubt for a second that God was up there, that God knew what He was doing. But I couldn’t imagine what He could possibly have in mind. And God’s answer to my why was “Trust Me.” No explanations. Just, trust Me. That was the message.

It was necessary for Shadrach and Meshach and Abednego to go into the fiery furnace because God had a message not just for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego but also, you remember, for the king.

Every one of us, I’m sure, sooner or later, has to face up to that painful question. Why? And God is saying, trust Me.

If your prayers don’t get answered the way you thought they were supposed to be, what happens to your faith? The world says God doesn’t love you. The Scriptures tell me something very different.

Modern man equates good with happiness.

That is what the Christian faith is about. It deals head-on with this question of suffering, and no other religion in the world does that.

Now faith, like love, is not a feeling. We need to get that absolutely clear. Faith is not a feeling. Faith is a willed obedience action.

Whatever is in the cup that God is offering to me, whether it be pain and sorrow and suffering and grief along with the many more joys, I’m willing to take it because I trust Him.

Lord. Paul says that in everything we ought to give thanks. It’s not the experiences of our lives that change us. It is our response to those experiences.

Similarly, you and I have no idea of the things that are going on in the unseen world, except we do have an idea that they are for our perfection, for our fulfillment, for our ultimate blessing.