The Way of Jesus:
Entering Our Suffering

Pain and suffering are a part of life. We will all walk through devastating circumstances at some point.

So how do we deal with overwhelming suffering and grief? How do we move through these painful life moments?

Jesus never belittles someone’s pain. But he also doesn’t necessarily “fix” it in the way someone hopes or asks for. However, through his life and death, he does offer us some things to consider when dealing with pain and suffering in our own lives.

Jesus enters our pain.

In his time on earth, Jesus was moved by compassion towards hurting people. He healed people, comforted people, cried with them, and cared for them. He noticed their pain and didn’t turn away from the uncomfortableness and rawness of being with someone in pain.

In fact, throughout the Old and New Testament, we witness a God who doesn’t leave us alone in our suffering. Moses, David, Hagar, Joseph, the psalmists—their stories and words, though woven with times of suffering, testify to a faithful, caring, and intimate God.

What’s more, Jesus allowed himself to experience suffering so that he could so closely identify with us in our suffering and brokenness. He knew hunger and homelessness. He knew what it felt like to be rejected and hated. He knew what injustice felt like. He felt betrayal and he felt physical pain caused by others. And ultimately, he faced a terrible death on the cross.

Jesus is a fellow sufferer, and we can find both an intimacy and a hope in that.

The prophet Isaiah called the Messiah “a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief,” and goes on to say that “it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down… he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole” (Isaiah 53:3-5 NLT).

In her book Confronting Christianity, Rebecca McLaughlin writes,

“In this prophecy, grief, suffering, and sickness are rolled up together with sin and guilt and loaded onto the Messiah’s back. And when Jesus comes, he carries that load. He bears the moral weight of guilt and sin in our place. But he also bears the heartbreak of our suffering. Jesus holds us close as we lament. He weeps with us as we weep. He knows the end of the story, when he will wipe every tear from our eyes. But this does not stop him from cleaving to us in our pain. In fact, pain is a place of special intimacy with him.”

This is an intangible but indispensable truth of our faith. We can reach out and cling to God because he first reaches out and clings to us. While we may find it hard to completely understand, we hear it over and over again in the stories of those who have clung to Jesus during their suffering and found a not-entirely-explainable peace and life-sustaining presence in their intimacy with God.

“Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me” (Psalm 23:4 NLT).

People who have endured cancer, spouses who have been able to rebuild after infidelity, people coping with job loss. They hurt deeply. They wrestle with their faith. And they choose to allow God to shepherd them into and through the grief and pain. When we listen to their stories, one thing we might notice is that they can still praise God, not because he erased their pain or eliminated all the bad, but because he intimately sustained them through it.

Because Jesus enters our suffering, we should enter each other’s suffering.

Jesus shows us how we should live if we want to follow him. As Jesus reveals his love and presence to us in our times of overwhelming pain, so we too should be a source of love and presence to others who experience suffering.

In his letter to the church at Corinth Paul writes,

“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” (2 Corinthians 1:4 NLT).

You have painful experiences in your life that can testify to God’s presence and equip you to come alongside another hurting person. People don’t forget when someone shows up and cares.

It’s important to note that following Jesus doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be honest about our pain and loss. The Psalms remind us to name our anguish and lament our suffering. The Bible is full of painful stories of hurting people. This is the reality of our broken world, and this is why God entered our brokenness when Jesus came to earth to be with us and die for us.

But the Bible is also honest about our human tendencies to respond to suffering with unhelpful behaviors like bitterness, vengeance, unchecked worry, and doubt in who God is. We probably know people who have responded in these ways and possibly ended up walking away from God.

Suffering is hard, sometimes unimaginably so. We do not get to choose the suffering the comes our way and it can feel so relentlessly unfair sometimes.

But the choice we do have is how we will move through our suffering.

So pray. Be honest with God about it. Don’t ignore or bottle up your feelings, but don’t let them become the center of your decisions. Rather, spend time in Scripture and seek out the truths found there. Allow God to shepherd you through. We’ve said before that God’s work is about redemption and renewal. He can redeem even our pain. And how we respond to suffering gets noticed by a watching world. God invites us to trust him even amid our darkest valleys. And remember, sorrow and pain are not the end of the story.

Action Step

We have a choice with how we move through suffering. Do an honest evaluation. What are people seeing coming out of you during times of stress and pain?

Daily Scripture

Read each day’s Scripture passage and journal your responses.

Acts 13 | Acts 14 | Acts 15 | Acts 16 | Acts 17

What to do when you meet
with your group:

Begin with a short prayer.

Ask God to open your eyes to his perspective on things. Take turns each week.

Questions.

Begin by discussing how you are loving others.

What opportunities has God given you to love other people through serving, speaking truth in love, or pointing them towards Christ since we last met? How did you respond?

Talk about what God has been stirring in you through your time in the Word.

Share about one of your quiet times in the Bible.

Practice mutual confession.

Questions about section 1.

Share some of your thoughts from the Action Step.

Have you had opportunity to come along side someone else in their pain and suffering? What did you do? What might you do differently next time?

End your time by praying for each other.

Pray for people you know who are experiencing trauma and pain right now. Pray for them to allow God to shepherd them. Pray for an opportunity to be present with them in their pain.