When your life falls apart, it’s hard to see God’s love for you.
I think this is entirely natural because we have made a deal with God that is supposed to ensure our health, prosperity or happiness. The deal we make with God goes like this: If I serve God by doing x, God will ensure I live a good life (which is how I define it). However, God is not in the deal making business. Because God is love, he won’t reduce his relationship to us with a deal.
The last couple of weeks I have been writing about how to embrace God’s love for us in a world that is broken. There are three things that help me embrace God’s love for me. Two of them are understanding that: 1) God Pursues and 2) God Suffers. Let’s talk about the third thing that helps me embrace God’s love.
3. God Transforms: God is more interested in my heart than he is in my happiness. Suffering on this side of heaven is not wasted with God. As hard as it is to hear this news, my suffering isn’t all evil. My suffering can be useful and transformative to my spiritual development in understanding his deeper love for me. There are numerous examples of this thought in the Bible, but I find myself coming back to Joseph’s story to illustrate this point.
Joseph came to this conclusion in his own suffering when he said to his brothers in Egypt, “You meant it for harm, but God intended it for good.” As a result, Joseph took the most hurtful betrayal he had experienced in life, gave it to God, and God used it to demonstrate his love for us.
Therefore, only when I suffer can I demonstrate the depth of the passionate love God has for us. When I suffer personally, I have a unique opportunity to put God’s love on display. However unjustly I have been treated, I can now have the opportunity to reveal God’s love with how I choose to respond to the particular evil I have experienced in my life. I can demand justice, or I can offer forgiveness. I can wallow or I can worship.
It is a tough pill to swallow, but when I suffer I have the opportunity to be transformed. Share on X
When I suffer, I can be transformed into a person who only talks about God’s love for people to actually demonstrating God’s love to others. When I say, “Not my will but yours,” I can play out the story of the cross. I can sacrifice for others in order to demonstrate God’s crazy love for us.
My conviction in all of this is that as a pastor, we don’t let our personal experience of evil undermine who God is (He is Love) nor how we can be like him (imitating Him by loving others sacrificially). Many people share with me their emotional or physical trauma. I think helping people understanding where this pain comes from and how it affects them is good. However, helping people see that God’s main goal is to move through their trauma to lead us into a deeper experience of his love is better. Knowing that my suffering is an opportunity to be transformed helps me embrace God’s love for me in a deeper way.
How has God used your suffering to transform you?
