Somehow, someway, at some point, suffering will come knocking on your door. It may start as a quiet, even gentle, knock that gets louder over time, and you know that you will eventually have to open the door. Other times, it may kick the door down suddenly and violently. Perhaps Mr. Hardship will enter like the unwelcome he is but only stay for a little while before leaving. Other times, Mr. Hardship might barge in and take residence in every room of your life indefinitely.

When hardship will come, we don't know. How we will suffer may vary. But one thing is for sure: suffering will come knocking.

No matter how hard we try, we are unable to escape the brokenness of the world that is our present address. And no matter who we surround ourselves with, we are imperfect people living among other imperfect people, inflicting suffering upon one another. But because of the amazing, practical wisdom of God's Word, the glory of his presence and power, and the reality of mercies that are new every morning, we do not have to ignore the guarantee of suffering or pretend that it doesn't discourage us. We can stare Mr. Hardship in the face with open and expectant hearts. The hope of redemption is not just reserved for eternity, like I wrote about last month, but is a real, living, and present hope. This hope is rooted in the fact that our Lord is in us, with us, and for us right here, right now. This truth radically changes how we understand, experience, and respond to the suffering that has or surely will come our way. There is no valley of suffering deeper than God's grace in Jesus!

Suffering Is Never Neutral

Here is what every sufferer needs to understand: we never suffer only the thing we are suffering; we always also suffer in the way that we are suffering that thing. We never come to our suffering empty-handed. We always drag a bag full of experiences, expectations, assumptions, perspectives, desires, intentions, and decisions into our suffering. Thus, our lives are shaped not only by what we suffer but by also what we bring to our suffering. How we think about ourselves, life, God, and others will profoundly affect the way in which we think about, interact with, and respond to the difficulties that come our way. Our suffering is more powerfully shaped by whatever is in our hearts than by what is happening to our bodies or in the world around us.

What do we bring to our suffering? Just one example is poor theology. Even if our confessional theology is robust and we have a comprehensive knowledge of Scripture, at street level our everyday theology could be askew. Sometimes the kinds of things that we bring to our moments of suffering deepen the pain of the painful thing we are facing. The street-level theology we carry into times of suffering and trial are very important.

There are many examples of how bad theology worsens our experience of suffering. Just one is when we say something along the line of "I am suffering because God is punishing me for my sin." Perhaps a Christian is convinced that her disease was God's punishment for bad choices or decisions she had made. In a time when she needed to run to God, she did her best to hide from him and to hide from his people. She reasoned that her job was to endure the punishment she deserved. Clearly, such thinking is rooted in bad theology. The message of Scripture is that every piece of the guilt, shame, and punishment for our sin was completely and once for all carried by Christ. This means there is no more condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (see Romans 8:1-4). So, our suffering is not punitive; that is, it is not a direct punishment for sins we have committed.

How discouraging not only to go through hard and maybe even life-altering circumstances but also to think we are going through those things because we have fallen short of God's standard! It is hard to run to God for help, to rest in his care, to be assured of his love, and to believe that his mercies are constantly available and new every day when we are convinced that we are being punished by him. And it is hard to reach out for God's grace when we think he is already giving us what we deserve in our suffering. But the Bible never interprets our suffering this way; in fact, it teaches the opposite. Rather than connecting suffering to the bad things we have done, Scripture connects trials and difficulty to the good things God wants for us and is working to produce in us (see James 1:2-4).

The Trap of Doubt

Something else we bring to our suffering is doubt. Suffering does not so much change our heart as expose what has been in our heart all along. Difficulty has an amazing ability to reveal that which is inside us. Trials reveal our true thoughts and desires, our futile search for life and meaning, our false hopes. Suffering will always expose the true nature of our relationship to and communion with God. Suffering will be all the more painful if we question the presence, promises, goodness, or faithfulness of God. This is just another example of poor everyday-gospel theology.

Doubt is not in and of itself a bad thing. God has given us the ability to wonder and the desire to know and understand. He has wired into us the quest to have our questions answered and our confusion reduced. He has created in us an intolerance of irrationality and contradiction. Doubt can cause us to ask profoundly important questions. Doubt will make us think deeply about very important things. Doubt will allow us to expose and reject falsehood. Doubt can ignite a life that is reasoned, wise, and protective. Doubt can keep us from being all too naive or an easy target for deception. Because doubt drives us to know and understand, it has the power to lead us to the one who knows and understands everything. Our capacity to doubt can drive us to God--but not always.

Doubt in the hearts of sufferers is one of the enemy's most powerful tools. We get a glimpse of this in 1 Peter 5:9: "Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world." Peter's first letter is written to people who are suffering, and, as his letter is drawing to a close, the apostle pens those words. Why would Peter say, "Look around; you are not the only ones who are suffering"? Is he saying, "Stop whining, as though you are the only ones who suffer in this broken world"? Does he know that misery tends to love company? Is he giving his readers some kind of backhanded comfort? No, Peter is doing something deeply theological and insightful. He knows that, when we suffer, we are susceptible to the lies that the enemy whispers in our ears:

"Where is your God now?"
"Why have you been singled out?"
"Perhaps God does have favorites."
"Why is God ignoring your prayers?"
"Why do others have it so much easier than you?"
"Maybe God does not love you after all."

The function of all these lies is to sow seeds of doubt in our hearts when we feel the weakest and most afraid and are reaching out for help. The enemy is seeking to make us doubt the goodness, love, presence, and power of God. He knows that, if we begin to question God's character and power, we will quit going to God and seeking his help. Satan's lies are meant to damage and weaken our faith so that on the other side of our suffering (if there is another side) we will not love or serve God as we once did.

Peter understands that holding on to a childlike faith in God amid the painful experiences of life in this terribly broken world is spiritual warfare, and his statement is meant to give his readers weapons for the battle. He is saying, "Look around. In your suffering God is not singling you out, turning his back, ignoring your need, or forgetting your plight. Your brothers and sisters around the world all carry their own packages of difficulty. It is impossible to live between the 'already' and the 'not yet' without suffering somehow, someway. Your suffering is not a sign that you have been forsaken; rather, it is a sign that you live in a world that does not function in the way God intended but is in need of complete renewal."

In this counsel we find the wise words of a loving pastor who knows what his people are facing. Peter knew that the core attack against us in our suffering is not the attack on our bodies, our relationships, our possessions, or our circumstances but the attack on our hearts. We can live well with a damaged body, but spiritual damage to the heart has the power to cause us to live in a spiritually unhealthy way. Peter's statement is intended to protect his suffering readers from the spiritual damage to their hearts and lives that results from concluding that God is not good.

Fight the Enemy by Counting Blessings

When we are suffering, we must force ourselves to pay attention to our private conversation, that is, the words we say to ourselves that no one else hears. We are always talking to ourselves about ourselves, life, God, others, meaning and purpose, relationships, trouble, solutions, hope, the past, the future, and so on. Because of this constant internal conversation, we influence ourselves more than anyone else does, since we hear what we ourselves have to say more than we hear anyone else. But every sufferer must ask, Has my suffering caused me to begin to believe things that are not true and therefore to say to myself things that are not true? We need to question our own assumptions. We need to argue with our own hearts. We need to confront evidences of unbelief in our private conversation. Fighting the devil's lies means being aware of the talk of our own heart and defending our heart against any perspective that would call into question the wisdom, love, goodness, grace, and faithfulness of God. We must pray that God would give us insight into our own hearts and the strength to fight this spiritual battle even in moments when we feel profoundly weak.

There is no more powerful tool against debilitating doubt than gratitude. It is exactly at the point where we are tempted to doubt our blessings that counting our blessings is the most important. A thankful heart is the best defense against a doubting heart. Recounting evidences of God's presence, his grace, his faithfulness to his promises, his provision, and the reliability of what he has told us in his Word reminds us of God's goodness--and, because it does, it protects us against the lies that tempt us to deem him as less than good.

No matter how difficult or long-lasting our suffering may have been, there are blessings to be found. As a defense against doubt, it is really important to give ourselves to quiet moments of looking at the trail behind us and the things of life around us for evidences that God is good and worthy of our trust. In other words, we must do what the old hymn says:

Count your many blessings, name them one by one
And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

In our moments of doubt, we must not run away from our Lord. We must determine to run to him. Here is Jesus' welcome to us:

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30).

Our battle is not merely the difficult thing we are facing but encompasses the impact of the difficulty on our hearts. Scripture never looks down on doubting sufferers. It never mocks their pain. It never turns a deaf ear to their cries. It never condemns them for their doubt. It presents to the doubting sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help with our doubts and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever.