Advancing in pain

The age old question is if God is good why is there so much pain. 

The pain is actually there to help us advance. We must not allow it to discourage or shame us, or ¹cause us to fall into self pity e.g. "You're a loser. Why keep trying? Just quit..." etc. 

But we must embrace it and embrace God and His love for us in our failure for our advancement to occur (God is for us, not against us. Nothing separates us from God's love...Rom 8:31-39). 

"...Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 

Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 

and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us..." - Romans 5:2-5 ESV 

As long as we look at failure as losing and not a stepping stone to winning, we will not embrace it, learn from it, and advance. When we recognize failure is a key to advancing, we embrace it so we can learn more. 

Having our identity/value rooted in God as the bedrock of our existence and the very Source of love itself frees us from seeing failure as losing. The whole mindset of the Bible is that failure is a necessary stepping stone to progress and maturity. 

"When all kinds of trials and temptations crowd into your lives my brothers, don’t resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends! Realise that they come to test your faith and to produce in you the quality of endurance. But let the process go on until that endurance is fully developed, and you will find you have become men of mature character with the right sort of independence..." - Jas 1: 2-8. J B Phillips translation. 

This is foundational to understanding and embracing pain instead of a avoiding it. 

Another vital key to the value of failure is humility. To understand we will never reach the maximum potential we were created for without God (which failure helps us to see) causes us to look to Him in greater dependence. Greater dependence on God as the Source of life, love, and all things is the essence of humility. Only through humility can we reach the potential God intends for us and He designed us for.

How do we discover God's love in our pain? click here

For a further discussion on the primary role of pain click here

For a further discussion of how God uses evil for our good click here...and here.

The greater the evil the greater the opportunity for healing/

grace click here.

For a discussion on the key lesson from the book of Job, click here.

For a discussion on the value of paradox, click here.

For a discussion on the necessity of humility click here

____________________________________

Footnotes:

¹nor let pain embittered us. At the root of anger is the belief we know better than God what is best for us and/or the world. Yet we are finite, not all knowing or all powerful.  Only God is infinite in all things. 

And not only so but he is also all loving. He not only knows what's best and does what's best but wants it for us also.

But many object and say "how can God be all  loving and continue to allow all the pain in the world?" What's our proof He is all loving? He became a man just like one of us and fully embraced our pain so that we might ultimately be free of it forever.