Day 19

How the Self Dies — Through Suffering

Today's Scripture: 1 Peter 4:1 (NLT)

There is a teaching in the New Testament that the modern church, in its eagerness to make the gospel attractive, has often softened beyond recognition. It is the teaching that suffering is one of God's chosen instruments for putting the self to death in the believer. Peter says it as plainly as it can be said: "He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin." There is a connection between suffering, rightly received, and the death of the flesh that no other means can fully accomplish. And the believer who refuses suffering, who flees it at every turn, who builds an entire life around its avoidance, will find that there are layers of the self that simply will not die without the strange, painful, sanctifying work that only suffering can do.

This is not a popular teaching. It is not a comfortable teaching. It is not the teaching of a Christianity that wants to be marketable to a culture obsessed with personal flourishing. But it is the teaching of the New Testament, and we cannot honestly walk through a month on death to self without facing it.

What does suffering do that nothing else can do? It exposes the flesh in places where we did not know the flesh still lived. We thought we had crucified our anger — until the unjust accusation came, and the anger boiled up like new. We thought we had crucified our fear — until the diagnosis came, and the fear surged through us as though we had never trusted God a day in our lives. We thought we had crucified our self-pity — until the prolonged hardship came, and we found ourselves drowning in self-pity as if we had been drowning in it all along. Suffering does what no sermon can do. It excavates. It reveals the depth of the flesh that was hiding beneath the surface, and it does so by applying a pressure that only pressure can apply.

And then, having exposed the flesh, suffering invites us to bring that exposed flesh to the cross — not the suffering, but the response to it. The suffering itself is not the savior. The cross is the savior. But suffering is the great revealer, the great surfacer, the great press that brings to the top of the soul what was hiding underneath, so that we can then deal with it honestly before God instead of pretending it was not there.

This is what Peter means when he says, "He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin." Suffering, rightly received, breaks the back of the flesh's deceptions. The believer who has been through real suffering with God — not around it, not bitter at it, but with God in the middle of it — comes out the other side with a sobriety about the flesh that the unsuffered believer cannot have. They have seen what was in them. They have seen what God is in the middle of it. They have seen the difference between the two. And they will never quite be the same.

This is why the saints of every generation, when you read their lives carefully, often pass through long valleys of suffering before they emerge into the fullness of their ministries. It was true of Joseph. It was true of David. It was true of Paul. It was true of the prophets. It was true of the apostles, who almost without exception died as martyrs. And it has been true of every great mover of the kingdom in every generation since. There is no spiritual depth without spiritual cost, and the cost is often, in some form, the cost of suffering.

Now hear this carefully, because the truth has been twisted by many who taught it badly. God does not delight in your suffering for its own sake. He is not a sadist. He does not orchestrate your pain because pain pleases Him. The Father takes no pleasure in the suffering of His children, and any teaching that suggests otherwise is a slander against the heart of God. But the Father, in His wisdom, allows suffering to come into the lives of His children because He knows what suffering can do that nothing else can — and He loves us too much to leave us shallow when He could make us deep.

If you are walking through suffering as you read this, do not let it be wasted. Do not let it embitter you. Do not let it drive you into the kind of self-pity that closes the soul to the very work the Lord is trying to do in you. Take the suffering, with all its exposure of what is in you, and bring it honestly to the cross. Let the suffering reveal the flesh. Let the cross put the flesh to death. And let what rises in the suffered soul be a depth, a tenderness, a steadiness, a closeness to Christ that you could not have reached by any easier road.

The strange mercy of suffering, for the believer, is that nothing else digs so deep, and nothing else builds so well on what it digs.

Prayer

Father, I confess that I have often fled suffering rather than walked through it with You. Forgive me. Where suffering is currently in my life, give me the grace to receive it rather than resist it. Let the exposure suffering produces drive me to the cross, not away from it. Use the pain You have permitted to do the work in me that only this pain can do. Amen.

Today's Challenge

If you are walking through something painful right now, take time today to bring it openly to God. Do not edit your prayer. Tell Him everything you feel. And then, in the same prayer, ask Him to use this suffering to put to death anything in you that needs to die. Trust Him with both the pain and the work.

"Suffering is the great revealer; the cross is the great healer. Together they do what nothing else in the universe can."