It takes faith to thank God in our sufferings. Did you catch what I just said? It is no problem for us to find God in our blessings, and to thank him for them. But it is not natural for us to thank God in our sufferings. Why are we quick to recognize that God is in the good things that happen to us, but not so much when bad things happen to us? It is easy for me to put together God and the birth of our children, a recovery from the flu, a promotion, the purchase of a new home, and to remember to thank him for it. But when I get sick, I lose my job, my friendships turn sour, my smooth life is disrupted, my first instinct is hardly to thank God for it. If I am honest, my first instinct is to ask God to make the suffering go away. I want God to fix it, and fix it fast, so I can go back to feeling good again.
I don’t like to think that God gives us trials and adversities for the sake of giving us trials and adversities. I don’t believe he brings them before us to torture, or even to irritate us. What kind of a father enjoys seeing his children go through suffering? Rather, I like to think that God gives us trials and adversities for a purpose. He brings them before us because he is up to something. Could it be that there is something in us God has set out in his heart to accomplish?
Not a single person can say his life has been unaffected by trials and adversities. Each of us has gone through sufferings. Each of us will go through many more before we die. Since we have to go through the suffering anyway, why not go to God and ask him what is it that he has set out in his heart to accomplish in us through the suffering? What have we got to lose? What is it that he wants you and me to learn? Where does he want you and me to change? At the end of the trial or adversity, if we say to ourselves, “Good, I am glad that’s over,” and return to our familiar lives, then we have quite possibly missed what God was doing. We went into the suffering, we came out of the suffering, but that’s about all we did. It was a real waste. But if we ask God what is it that he was doing, and we learned something and we changed, then God was able to finish what he had begun in us, and the suffering was totally worth it—okay, worth it. To borrow the words of James, God had just used our trials and adversities to “make us perfect and complete, not lacking in anything.” It doesn’t make the suffering any more bearable, but we would have to at least say there was value gained from going through the suffering. Could it be that this is at least part of the reason why James also said you and I are to consider it pure joy when we encounter various trials? If it is, and I do believe it is, then this is exactly the reason why we can and should thank God in our sufferings.
We have a decision in front of us. We can either find God in our sufferings. Or we can look at our sufferings and think they are just, well, sufferings. This is a matter of faith. It takes faith to recognize that God is in our sufferings. It takes faith to believe that God is up to something in our life. It takes faith to know that God is at work in us. Next time a trial or adversity comes into our life, look for what is it that God wants us to learn. Ask God what is it that he has set out in his heart to accomplish in us. Ask God where is it he wants us to change, and change, and thank God in our suffering.