Christ Like Suffering - 001

It’s a subtle, comfortable lie, a spiritual anesthetic that’s been circulating in certain corners of the church for decades. It whispers, “If you truly have faith, if you’ve confessed the right words, if you’ve sown the right seed, then God is obligated to grant you an exemption.” An exemption from what? From the common cold, from the broken car, from the child’s grave, from the cruel word, from the long, dark night of the soul.

It is the belief that salvation is a spiritual immunity card, that giving your life to Jesus should guarantee a life of constant health, abundant wealth, and, most seductively of all, a blissful absence of significant problems. We could call it the “painless Pentecost” theology, and it’s a setup for utter devastation.

We need to confront this head-on because it is not merely a minor theological error. It is pastorally catastrophic.

You have heard it framed in many ways. It teaches that God’s perfect will for every believer is a life of unending success. That you have the power to "name it and claim it." That your job is to perform the correct spiritual actions, a certain level of faith, a certain prayer, and a certain financial donation, and God is then obligated to respond with material, physical blessings. It creates a deeply transactional view of God. He becomes a divine vending machine, or maybe a celestial butler, whose sole purpose is our immediate comfort and happiness.

This belief is seductive because it baptizes the Western world’s favorite idol, personal happiness and material success, in Christian language. It tells us that our holiness is secondary to our happiness. It fundamentally reframes God’s purpose for us, from conforming us to the character of Christ to ensuring our personal ease and comfort.

But here is where the cruelty sets in. When suffering inevitably comes, as it must, for every single human being, the believer steeped in this theology is led to a terrible, self-condemning conclusion: Their pain is their fault.

They are already burdened by the tragedy, the job loss, the chronic illness, and the unexpected death. Now, on top of that grief, they are handed a crushing spiritual burden. They begin to think, "I must not have enough faith." There must be a hidden sin. God must be displeased with me. Instead of finding the assurance of God’s comfort in their trial, they feel abandoned, guilty, and confused. It is a brutal theology that isolates the sufferer at the exact moment they most desperately need the embrace of God’s unconditional, non-transactional love.

The New Testament stands in stark contradiction to this comfortable lie.

If the aim of the Christian life were comfort and ease, then Jesus was a terrible model for it.

His own life was a profound path of suffering and self-denial. He was without a permanent place to lay his head (Mat 8:20), often opposed and misunderstood by His own family, and, ultimately, rejected and murdered. The Son of God, the Messiah, the perfect human, did not live a life free from hardship. He lived a life marked by it.

And to those who would follow Him, He did not promise exemption. He promised the opposite.

To His disciples, Jesus gave a definitive promise that is often conveniently forgotten in our pursuit of a painless faith: “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

The promise is not an escape from the fire. It is preservation through the fire.

Think about the apostles, the first generation of Spirit-filled believers, the ones who preached Jesus' resurrection and founded the church. If the gospel guaranteed health and wealth, surely they would have been the first to experience it. Yet, their lives read like a catalog of affliction. Paul himself lists his "afflictions" in 2 Corinthians 11, imprisonments, countless beatings, near-death experiences, stoning, three shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger, thirst, cold, and nakedness.

This man, who was so closely aligned with the power of the Holy Spirit, the one who saw heaven and wrote half the New Testament, considered this unimaginable agony to be his “light and momentary affliction” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Peter, the Rock, tells us something even more direct: “For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake” (Philippians 1:29). Did you catch that language? Suffering is a gift, something “granted” or favored. It is a sign of grace, a mark of authentic faith, not a sign of God’s displeasure. The consistent New Testament teaching is that suffering is an expected, normal, non-negotiable component of genuine discipleship.

In this conversation about suffering, a crucial point often gets obscured.

It is an inescapable biblical truth that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8). The God we serve is still a miracle-working God. We cannot throw out the powerful, delivering God of the Pentecostal experience just because we are addressing the lie of the painless life. He still heals. He still delivers. He still breaks the bondage of addiction and disease. I suspect that sometimes, a spiritual movement focused on teaching endurance can accidentally stop praying for a breakthrough, treating the struggle as the only purpose.

This is a dangerous theological overcorrection.

We must never stop believing in the miracle. We must never stop asking. The scriptures constantly command us to pray without ceasing and to bring our every need before Him. We must continue to confess and proclaim that "by His stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). We believe in the healing, the deliverance, and the immediate intervention of our sovereign Lord.

But here is where our faith is truly tested, where it separates itself from the transactional spirit of the age.

We must remember the magnificent confession of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The scene is Babylon. The demand is simple: bow or burn. They stand before the furious king Nebuchadnezzar, ready to be thrown into the fiery furnace. Their reply is the absolute pinnacle of pure, unconditional faith, a faith that still embraces the possibility of deliverance while rejecting it as a demand.

They declared, “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God whom we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king” (Daniel 3:17). A clear statement of God's power. They knew what their God could do.

Then they added the single, most important conditional phrase in all of scripture for the man or woman in crisis: “But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up” (Daniel 3:18).

The faith is not "He will deliver, therefore I will obey." That is a contract.

The faith is "He is able to deliver, and I pray He does, but even if He chooses to use this fire for a greater purpose I cannot see, my surrender to Him, my worship, and my loyalty will not change." This is a covenant.

Our loyalty is not conditional on His comfort. It is absolute, rooted in His goodness and sovereignty, not in the immediate outcome of our circumstances. We pray for deliverance with sincere hope, but we submit to the fire with genuine worship. This shift is everything. It reclaims the biblical hope for the miracle while denying the lie that suffering means spiritual failure.

How do we reorient ourselves? How do we thrive when the lie has been exposed and the pain is still very real?

The first step is to recognize that we are not called to a life of ease, but to a life of intimacy with Jesus Christ.

This is the great shift. The ultimate goal of the Christian life is not comfort, but holiness, Christ-like character, and eternal, joyful union with God.

This changes everything about how we view the pain in our lives.

When you abandon the lie of the painless life, you can begin to recognize that God does not merely permit suffering; He is a master artist who actively repurposes it. The pain is not a pointless, random tragedy. It is, in His hands, a divine instrument, a furnace of affliction, that purifies our faith and forges His character within us.

The Apostle Paul gives us a glorious framework for this work: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4).

Suffering produces endurance (perseverance). Trials test the limits of our own strength and force us to rely on a power beyond ourselves, the very strength of God.

Endurance produces character (proven character). The sustained act of faith, the hard-won spiritual stamina, reveals what is truly in our hearts. Like a metal tested by fire and proven genuine, the heat of the trial burns away the dross of our pride, self-reliance, and shallow attachments. It forces us to cling to what is real and eternal.

Character produces hope. Having seen God faithfully carry us through past trials, our confidence grows that He will carry us through future ones and ultimately bring us safely home. This hope is not a vague optimism; it is a confident expectation rooted in the faithfulness of God.

Suffering is never the end of the story for a believer. It becomes the classroom, the workshop, the very soil in which the most beautiful fruit of the Spirit, long-suffering (makrothumia), is grown. This is a supernatural patience and patient endurance that God Himself cultivates in us. We are not alone. The Holy Spirit is our Paraclete, the one called alongside to help, ensuring that in our deepest pain, when we do not know how to pray, He intercedes for us with “groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).

The truth of the Bible is that your scars become your credentials. God takes the pain and equips you for the ministry of comfort. He comforts you in your affliction so that you can comfort others with the very comfort you have received (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

Your greatest agony is redeemed from a private, meaningless tragedy into a public platform for God’s grace to flow through you to a hurting world.

If you want to know, “Where is God in my suffering?” the Christian faith offers the definitive, shattering response: He is on the cross next to you.

The cross is the ultimate explanation of why evil and suffering exist, God's ultimate justification of Himself. God does not stand aloof, shouting philosophical answers from heaven. He descends, taking on our human frailty, and enters fully into the noise and the agony of our existence. He does not merely observe our pain; He has worn it.

He is the abandoned one, the victim of profound injustice. The cross demonstrates that there is no depth of human pain, abandonment, or despair that God has not personally entered into and experienced.

It is the place where He defeats evil itself, absorbing the full, concentrated force of all the world's sin and death, and exhausting its power. His resurrection is the public announcement that suffering does not get the last word.

So, here is your reorientation: your faith is not about using God to get what you want in this life. It is about God using everything in this life, especially suffering, to make you who He wants you to be for eternity.

This suffering you are experiencing, however heavy and consuming it feels right now, is not a failure. It is, as Paul said, a “light and momentary affliction...preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17). The pain is temporary; the glory it produces is infinite and everlasting.

We are called to run with endurance, embracing the fellowship of His sufferings as the certain pathway to knowing the power of His resurrection and the joy of His eternal kingdom.

The answer is not a neat and tidy formula that resolves every intellectual puzzle. The answer is a robust and livable framework for navigating the mystery.

This has been an introduction to the journey. We’ve acknowledged the lie and laid down the biblical standard, seeing that true faith is defined not by the comfort it receives, but by the allegiance it maintains even if the comfort is withheld. But there is so much more to confront. We need to go deeper into the heart of the matter. We need to look at the powerful, intellectual objections of the atheist who sees no purpose in pain. We need to challenge the very assumption that all suffering is intrinsically bad. We need to look at our own lives, where we willingly choose pain every day, the athlete, the parent, and the scholar, and see how that choice provides an analogy for God’s greater plan.

We have to go to the Word, to the very beginning of the whole conversation.

I invite you to join me as we begin this new series, a biblical exploration that deconstructs our assumptions and reframes our reality around the cross. We’re going to walk through the problem of pain, not to find easy answers, but to find a sustaining presence and an unshakeable hope.

The first question that haunts the heart of every person, the one that will launch our series, cannot be ignored. The question is unavoidable; it refuses to be silenced, and it’s the place where our journey must begin.

You do not have to carry this burden in isolation. The worst part of the lie we have exposed is the way it makes you feel utterly alone, that your pain is a secret sign of your failure.

That is a lie, too.

Stop whispering your grief. Stop pretending you are fine for the sake of appearances. Look around you. God has given you a family. The body of Christ is not just a building; it is a company of fellow travelers, every one of them carrying a cross, every one of them intimately familiar with loss and struggle.

We are not called to be spiritual islands. We are a community of the wounded, held together by the scarred hands of a Savior who knows what it means to cry out, "My God, why have you forsaken me?"

If you are hurting today, reach out. Find that friend. Talk to that pastor. Send that text. Your pain is not a secret to be hidden; it is a story that, when shared, breaks the power of isolation and transforms into a testimony of endurance. You are walking a road that has been well-worn by saints who came before you, and you are walking it alongside thousands who are on it right now.

If you'd like a prayer to follow you can use this one: