What are God’s promises in the midst of suffering?
Isaiah 43:1-2O Israel, the one who formed you says, “Do not be afraid, for I have ransomed you. I have called you by name; you are mine. When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you.”
We belong to the Lord. He knows us by name and will not allow anything to cause us eternal harm. We may go through deep waters of trouble and intense fires of trial and testing, but we will not go through them alone.
Psalm 30:5His anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime! Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning.
Psalm 126:5-6Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy. They weep as they go to plant their seed, but they sing as they return with the harvest.
Psalm 147:3He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.
No experience in this life lasts forever. Sometimes the only thing that keeps us going is the reminder that this time of suffering will pass. Trust that one day we will look back and it will be a memory seen in the light of eternity. If we stay close to God, even our suffering can be a testimony to God’s faithfulness and a reason to rejoice in what he has done through the hard times and what he is going to do for us in the future.
2 Corinthians 1:3-5All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ.
Suffering can make us more sensitive to God’s presence in our lives and also to the suffering of others.
Romans 5:3-4We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.
James 1:3-4You know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.
Suffering teaches lessons that we can learn no other way. When we look to the Lord, he promises to bring blessings out of hard times.
Revelation 21:4He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.
God promises that all suffering will one day end. It will be no more. Without an eternal perspective, the suffering we experience in this world doesn’t make sense.
Romans 8:38-39I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The greatest comfort in life is knowing God will never leave us. Nothing can remove us from his presence. No matter what we are going through, he’s there to comfort, sustain, encourage, and direct us. First on the list of things that cannot separate us from God’s love is death. It is, for believers, merely the point of passage from time into eternity, from seeing through a dark glass into clarity; from knowing in part to fulling knowing as we are known.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.
2 Corinthians 5:1-10We know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee he has given us his Holy Spirit. So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live in these bodies we are not at home with the Lord. For we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him. For we must all stand before Christ to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.
Our constant temptation as humans is to limit our view of life to this world rather than remembering that God has actually planned and prepared an eternal life for us. We should ask God to help us see future glory as a weight that counterbalances all the troubles in this life.
