Advancing in pain

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

But maybe that's the wrong question and the answer is not what we usually think. Maybe God allows pain to remain to humble us and help us see our need for Him, with the long-term goal of our spiritual advancement and ultimate gain. 

Christ said, "...What does it profit us if we gain the whole world but lose our own soul?"

Isn't the opposite also true? What if we lose the whole world and gain our eternal soul? Is this not far more valuable than having the things of this world? How we answer these questions may determine our ultimate destiny and therefore well worth asking.

While pain is ultimately the fruit of our rebellious distrust of God, He still uses it for our good. If God could not bring good out of evil, evil would not exist. Christ's death would be the ultimate example of this profound paradox. 

Acts 2:23 "this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men."

What a mystery that God used lawlessness to bring to us the greatest gift of eternal restoration to the Father who is the Source of life! 

Therefore, we must not allow suffering 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 pain and embrace God and His love for us in our pain and failures 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 ²hope 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 loss, failure, or mistakes as losing and not stepping stones to advancing, we will not embrace them with thanks, learn from them, and let them develop our maturity and advance our walk with God. When we recognize our losses, failures, and mistakes are vital to our spiritual advancement, we embrace them with gratitude and experience God's grace, mercy, and love in them. 

Having our identity and value rooted in God as the bedrock of our existence - and the very Source of love itself - frees us from seeing failure or loss as losing. The whole mindset of the Bible is that ³failure 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 with thanks instead of becoming disillusioned, angry, or bitter over suffering and seeking to manipulate our circumstances to avoid it. 

The importance of humility

Another vital key to the value of loss or failure is humility. To understand we will never reach the maximum potential we were created for without God (which failure or loss 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 and designs us for.

Christ himself, who deserved far better, did no less... i.e. he experienced the greatest suffering and humility. And that for our benefit as well as His Father's glory.

"...Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. - Philippians 2:5-11 ESV

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

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Footnotes:

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

And not only so, but he is also all-loving. He not only knows what's best (all-knowing) and does what's best (all-powerful) but wants it for us also (all-loving).

But many object and say, "How can God be all-loving and continue to allow all this pain in the world? What proof do we have that He is all-loving?" 

Glad you asked! He became a man just like us and fully embraced our pain so that we might ultimately be free of it forever.

² "...we rejoice in hope of the glory of God..." What a curious expression. What is it about the glory of God that gives us hope. To explore this further click here.

³This is contingent on our seeing failure as a means by which God can ultimately advance us. If we do not, it will embitter us.