Necessary Pain
Copyright 2005 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
It has been said that the only way out of our difficulties in life is to, with God’s help, go through them. This is a notion some 21st Christians of the West have trouble with. As befits a people deeply influenced by an "instant gratification" culture most contemporary believers desperately desire to be lifted out of the trials and tribulations they face. Many people choose to run from affliction. The idea is to avoid it if we can and to do whatever it takes to shorten the duration of the pain if we can’t. The problem is that God’s will is for our characters to be transformed through our troubles, not through there avoidance. It is in the crucible of trouble that our faith is tested, refined and deepened. Such redemptive suffering is not to be avoided, but rather endured, for God’s glory and for our ultimate good.
On the other end of the spectrum we are not called to be "holy masochists." Enduring suffering is one thing. Seeking it out and inflicting it upon ourselves is quite another. There is necessary pain in God’s economy but He does not exalt pain for pain’s sake. Jesus Himself asked that his own cup be taken from Him, if it were possible. He did not enjoy going to the cross. In dark Gethsemane we see the Son of Man, in his humanness, desperately desiring to avoid the physical and spiritual agony that awaited Him the next morning. But obeying the will of His beloved Father, combined with the joy set before Him at the prospect of our salvation, was worth the price of pain for Jesus. In order for His future children to get "out" of Hell He literally went through Hell for us.
The affliction we are asked to endure is not for the earning of our salvation. Our Lord completely accomplished that for us at Calvary. Rather our trials and tribulations are used by God to enable us to share in the sufferings of Christ so that we might be identified with Him in those sufferings and become more like Him. This is perhaps the essence of the sanctification process. If we try to short-circuit the process by temporarily avoiding necessary pain we set ourselves up for the greater pain that comes from the deliberate stunting of our spiritual growth. We lose, or at least delay, receiving the profound blessings that come with that growth. There are few things more blessed in the maturing Christian life than receiving the earthly crowns that come with our patient and reverent acceptance of earthly affliction.
Lest this all sound too daunting, too hard, I want to point out a wonderful thing God does in the lives of His suffering children. There are moments in the difficult seasons of the Christian life when our Father does lift us out of the trial we are going through. We sometimes call them "postcards from Heaven", "mountaintop experiences" or just "feeling God’s presence in a new way." However we express these incredible moments what they do is enable us to sense the intimate, blessed love of Jesus Christ and, simultaneously, to glimpse the final victory that awaits us at the end of our life’s journey.
The grace of God is what makes such moments possible. It is also His grace that enables us to endure and finally be transformed by the pain we know in this life. We can rest in this truth, no matter what our circumstances, if we choose to. We may not rest in it perfectly all the time. We have only to read the words of people like Job, Jeremiah and David to know that sometimes even the most devout of God’s people cry out in the midst of their affliction. But at such moments in our own lives we too can exercise the faith grace made possible in those men to stay the course and remain obedient to Him, even in great suffering. With such faith comes the comforting knowledge that our Lord not only knows what human pain is, but also enters into our circumstances to share in our own pain. God allows Himself to feel what we do and He gives us strength to walk through, and finally out of, every trial we will face on the road to Heaven.