Bearing Up

“Suffering produces endurance.”

The doctor’s diagnosis was wrong, and the steroids he prescribed have puffed your face up like a chipmunk for two weeks and accomplished nothing. The car had to go to the mechanic again, and you’re pretty sure it’s for the same thing you just got “fixed” three months ago. You spent more time stuck on the highway in heavy traffic today listening to the clatter from your wheel well than you spent on the job.

You are somewhat less than amused.

Inquiring about your day, Grandma sagely observes, “These things are sent to try us” as she sets the table for dinner. That’s fine for her; she spent most of the day in her rocker with the cat and a book. Yet, as annoying as that cliché sounds to you right now, there’s a grain of spiritual truth in her observation that is worth examining.

Sources and Degrees

When Paul writes in Romans 5 about the long-term value of suffering, the Greek word he uses is a broad term that encompasses many different sources of pain and affliction, including both God and other human beings. Moreover, the New Testament writers also quite frequently use the same term to describe the sorts of undesirable and unhappy things that happen quite naturally and normally in a fallen world. (For the less-natural afflictions, they often use the terms “wrath” or “persecution” to distinguish the source.)

But the Greek term in view also encompasses many degrees of suffering, from that experienced in nearly every life at one time or another to the future, unprecedented display of God’s wrath and justice on earth in the end times.

• With respect to the former sort, the writers of the New Testament use this same term for the pain of childbearing, which, we are often told, is the most natural thing in the world, and exceedingly common.
• Stephen uses to same word to describe the famine of Joseph’s time. How common are famines? In the twentieth century alone, famines killed between 70 and 120 million people.
• Paul uses it in 1 Corinthians to refer to the “troubles” inherent in the compromises and priorities necessitated by married life.
• James uses it to describe the difficulties of being without husband or father.

The Just and the Unjust

Each of these four examples is a natural event in a fallen world, and Christians and unbelievers alike experience them. They are not normally evidence of God’s wrath or the consequences of persecution, but are rather the cost of doing business associated with choices we make.

• Having a baby hurts, but that sacrifice of self by mothers all over the world has a huge upside. Women who do not experience childbirth are often the greater losers in life, in their own minds if not in those of others.
• Losing a father or husband is a great sorrow, but it can also lead to a stronger relationship with heaven and provide endless opportunities for the Lord to display his grace through the generosity of his people. Most widows and orphans would prefer the memories of a good relationship to having had no relationship at all, even if that choice would have saved them pain.
• Marriage can require all sorts of compromises and sacrifices that the single life does not, but those who have happy marriages in Christ would not have it any other way.
• Even a famine is most frequently part of the planet’s climate cycle, for which we have many other reasons to be grateful, and may provide the impetus for migration to better climes, as it did many times in scripture under the leading of the Lord.

Sent to Try Us

If we are honest, the “troubles” and “sufferings” we experience as twenty-first century Western Christians are mostly of this natural sort, unlike the apostle Paul and his first century Christian peers, whose afflictions were often directly attributable to their determination to serve Christ and spread his name throughout the world of their day. All the same, we are not wrong to observe that even the ordinary trials of life, when we respond correctly to them, produce the same positive results as the persecutions the apostles and saints experienced. “Tribulation works patience”, as the KJV put it. The statement is true regardless of the source or degree of the tribulation. Our Lord uses the tools available to him at every point in history.

What’s critical is responding to suffering correctly, isn’t it? The thing about which we rejoice is not the arrival of some new, unexpected misery, but rather the fruit it produces if we allow it to do so: first endurance, then character, then hope. All these things are greatly to be desired, pleasing to the Lord and useful to our families, friends and neighbors.

What I don’t often think about is this: acquiring godly endurance, character and hope cannot be accomplished apart from going through increasing levels of difficulty. The process works like building muscle in that you move from lesser weights to greater as you go along. The man who bears up under a moderate load of affliction may now be ready for a greater burden. That’s not the Lord being sadistic, or inflicting stress, frustration, pain, trouble or sorrow meaninglessly. It’s our Father lovingly making use of us to show forth his character and glory to a world desperately in need of seeing it. If everything always goes swimmingly for you, something is very much out of the ordinary. It’s greater cause for prayer and concern than regular difficulties, which ought to be the Christian expectation in this life. The believer who is most greatly afflicted in this life is probably closest to Christ in those moments.

Peaceful Fruit

“For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” The writer to the Hebrews sees value in all discipline, not just the big, identifiable hardships but the ordinary daily frustrations and troubles. We cannot know, when afflicted by these apparently natural events, which of them is being used by our loving Father to reproduce his likeness in us.

Big and small, it’s possible they all are. Wouldn’t that change the way you react the next time you hear that irritating sound that means you have to replace your wheel bearings?