The Purpose Of Suffering

It is good for me that I have been afflicted, That I may learn Your statutes.

Psalm 119:71

After spending thirty-five years in a wheelchair following a diving accident that left her paralyzed at age seventeen, Joni Eareckson Tada said, “I think that we all want to know Christ, that we want to know the power of His resurrection. But not many of us want to share in the fellowship of His sufferings, and nobody wants to become like Him in His death.”

The apostle Paul said in Philippians 3:10 that “being conformed to [Christ’s] death” is how we know “the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings.” We are conformed to His death by dying to our old sinful nature. And that hurts!

God, motivated by His goal of having us become like Jesus (Romans 8:29), brings us face-to-face with that which is least like Christ. Maybe it’s our impatience, our anger, our love of creature comforts, our fear of the future, our desire to do things our way. Dying to those things is the only way we will become like Christ, which is God’s ultimate plan for us. If God is showing you, perhaps painfully, something that needs to go—let it go!

The power of Jesus and fellowship with Jesus are realized when we learn to embrace suffering like Jesus.