I'm Suffering to Be Saved

And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

I don’t really mind being melancholy. Crazy I know, but it leaves you at a slightly philosophical, slightly #woke state that no other feeling quite provides.

Charlie, the main character in the book and film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, puts it pretty eloquently. “I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.”

I think the church in America has not handled suffering well. On the one hand, there’s an under emphasis on it as a concept and over emphasis on its counterpart, joy. We are taught that being a good Christian means white knuckling against depression, muttering prayers under our breath to quell any and all negative thoughts, feelings, or ideas we might have, and, finally, ignoring any idea or notion of lament. Any idea of frustration. Any semblance of lifting up our hands, our hearts, and our souls to heaven to ask, “Why, o God, why? Why did I not get the promotion? Why is my wife leaving me? Why is my child diagnosed with that? Where are you in all of this? And what have I done to deserve this?”

Alternatively, there’s another crowd who relish any and all opportunity to undergo suffering. This is where I would land. In a bizarre, masochistic attempt at martyrdom, this ideology believes suffering is where salvation is found. That to be undergoing hardship, loss, or struggle is a sign of growth and progression in the faith journey. Hungering for that deep and Instagram worthy breakthrough, we lean into the pain, not realizing that the pain is not what brings us salvation. Pain couldn’t even if it wanted to. Pain doesn’t have a face.

Jesus is pretty clear throughout the four gospels that picking up your cross is essential to following Him daily. So whether your cross be ambition, lust, addiction, jealousy, anger, an ideal marriage, or several thousand Instagram followers, or whatever it might be this week, clearly Christ would have us nail it to the cross, so that it will die so that we might be healed.

An extreme challenge, to put it mildly.

Yet, the question begged then is this; why should I pick up my cross? Why should I follow Jesus? What would it profit me to gain salvation?

The answer? Life and life to the full. On the road of growth and maturity, though struggle and hardship are signposts of a life well lived and a life well fought, it is not the struggle and hardship that bring this life and life to the full.

Rather, it is the dawn of the kingdom of God, moments and stages in our lives where heaven and earth do mingle together, and healing takes place wherein the glory of God is manifest. It is the times when we realize we are so very small yet apart of something so very big. It is when that still small voice whispers so loudly that the clouds, the trees, the wind, the mountains, the seas, and all the things of the earth resound as that still small voice says to us, directly, “this is my Beloved child, in whom I am well pleased.”

Nothing compares to this. Nothing could ever come close.

Therefore, though I embrace suffering and understand that through it comes perseverance, through perseverance, hope, and through hope, character, it is not for character that I am suffering.

It is for Christ that I live. It is for Christ that I die.

It is for Christ that I suffer in order that through it, Christ might come and save me.