Suffering and the Christian Life

Suffering came up in the sermon this last week. We talked about the guy in John chapter 4 who came to Jesus asking for his son to be healed.

When I first read that passage I saw it as an example of a “shallow” faith. And thus the first point of the sermon – sometimes our faith is self centered.

And it is. But suffering, and sometimes on this deep level, is a part of life for all of us. Christians and otherwise, we all come to a point of suffering. We live in a world that is not what it is supposed to be. We are insecure. We are afraid of the future. We are afraid of so many things! And frankly, whether we like to admit it or not, we are mostly helpless.

Despite what we have been told (or what we would like to believe) the point of Christianity is not so that we can get better or that we can have some control over our future. The point really is that we might be able to say along with the suffering Job, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”

We leave the uncertainty unresolved. We leave the pain unhealed. We leave the insecurity insecure. We leave the wound exposed and we seek to see Jesus on the cross. We see ourselves before him on the cross, trusting in him and his suffering.

Learning to embrace our brokenness instead of avoiding it or getting fixed helps us to live with a daily understanding that this life is not about us. It is all about Jesus.