Scripture reminds us that being burdened and despairing of life itself can strengthen our faith (2 Corinthians 1:8–9). This is because the deepest trials make us rely not on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead. The more we endure with Christ and find him sufficient, the stronger our faith becomes.
Suffering as a Test of Faith
In times of intense pain or turmoil, we cling to what we have placed our hope in. In this way, suffering reveals whether our faith is a mere childish hope or a factual reality. Here we see suffering as a call to live out a better and more faithful witness to the world.
Suffering gives us an opportunity to overcome our human nature and accept God's grace more often. It gives us more opportunities to open our hearts to God and His grace.
Suffering helps us go deeper.
If life goes well all the time, we start to rely on things like our circumstances, finances, other people, or ourselves instead of Jesus. Suffering points us back to him. Everything else we rely on will fail us at some point.
Suffering can make us more resilient, better able to endure hardships. Just as a muscle, in order to build up, must endure some pain, so our emotions must endure pain in order to strengthen.
The bottom line: when we suffer we have an opportunity to grow in our endurance. To learn the art of going beyond what our comfort zone would dictate. This is the place of true growth! Endurance produces Character - Consistent endurance leads to the establishment of what we all want but very few have, character!
Suffering exposes the inadequacy of hooking our hope to the temporary treasures of the created world and positions our heart to hook our hope to the Creator in ways we've never done before. God leaves us in this broken world because what it produces in us is way better than the comfortable life we all want.
Romans 5:3-5
3 Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
The cross is God's ultimate response to the brokenness of humanity – and that includes your pain and suffering. He walks through every season of life with you, seeing that exhaustion and frustration life can bring, reminding you that He is so compassionate towards you that He's already responded.
Suffering that comes as a result of “taking up our cross to follow him” strengthens us by helping us experience a greater oneness with Christ until the day we find eternal rest in his presence and glory. We can be confident, that although we suffer as Christ did, we also will be glorified as Christ is.
The best way to draw closer to God in suffering is to listen to his voice. As Spirit-filled people, He is already speaking to us on a daily basis, but it can be confusing to discern the voice of our flesh from the voice of God without knowing how to identify it (see Genesis 3).
When Jesus took on human flesh in the Incarnation, He forever redeemed our human suffering. Therefore, suffering always teaches us about God, about ourselves, and about our relationship with him. If we “offer it up” we surrender all the pain to the redeeming power of the cross of Christ.
Offering up our suffering is a powerful way to become like Christ and love others as He loves them. Becoming like Christ and loving like He does is what we were created to do. We are called to love in a radical way, like the divine Son. We are able to love this way because of grace—the gift of Jesus in our lives.
Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
When we are suffering, God is right beside us. Nothing can separate us from His love. He wants to show us His love through His church, and give us a purpose through His Word!
Because God loves you, you can show your trust in Him by talking about all your feelings and circumstances with Him — the good and hard — through prayer. Don't let your emotions rule your life; bring them to God so He can help you address them. He is not disappointed or frustrated by your struggles, doubts or pain.
why does suffering so often lead to a loss of faith? why sometimes the opposite? Because people can't belive God can charge on world with so much violent and suffering.
Psalm 56:8 says, “You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” God knows our suffering and tears. He sees how we suffer, and He is near to us in our suffering. No tear that you have cried has gone unnoticed by your heavenly Father.
Jesus understands and can sympathize with our suffering. Jesus understands our suffering because He suffered in our place. In Isaiah 53:5-9, we read of Jesus' suffering on our behalf. He was wounded, bruised, chastised, and whipped for our sins.
As in all of the examples above, chosen suffering can help us achieve different levels of pleasure and meaning. Unchosen suffering, such as chronic illness or the death of a loved one, might sometimes make us stronger in the long run or give us a sense of meaning, but it's not necessarily good in and of itself.
(2) There is often a complex and dynamic relationship between happiness and suffering. There is a Chinese saying: “the extreme form of happiness produces sorrow.” Just as happiness may lead to suffering, so does suffering lead to happiness.
Suffering is an integral and essential part of any real pursuit of success. Nothing about success comes easy, but every painful story has the potential to have a successful ending. You may as well accept suffering as a traveling companion, rather than resist it and create more struggle.
And the researchers found that shared pain not only increases a sense of solidarity, it can also boost actual group cooperation.
The saying that suffering is the essence of success means the willingness to suffer for what we love and for our plans in life. One can suffer and be a victim without doing anything. This victim mentality means you feel your suffering is the result of other people and not get noticed.