Growth through Pain: Knowing Christ
July 2024
“That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death” (Philippians 3:10).
Dear Praying Friends:
Pain hurts. By definition. Suffering of any sort – physical, mental/emotional, social, spiritual – brings distress. We feel, rightly, that this shouldn’t be. God created this world “good” in every way. Suffering broke into Eden as an intruder, and things haven’t been right since.
Furthermore, we don’t know why this happened. Why did God allow Adam and Eve to sin, and thus inflict suffering and death on all their descendants? There is no satisfactory answer to this question.
But we do know that “all things work together for good for those who love God,” and that he will surely bring good out of evil (Romans 8:28).
One such “good”’ for believers is our deeper and clearer knowledge of Christ. Paul considered all his losses “garbage” compared to the “excellence of the knowledge
of Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8).
Take physical pain, for example. No matter how acute or apparently unbearable ours may be, we can be sure that the terrible sufferings of Jesus during his last day on earth mean that “we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). He knows. He has been there, and done that.
He knows about relational and social suffering, too. From the start, no one, not even his family and closest friends, understood him. His mother and siblings thought that he was out of his mind. His disciples rebuked him for choosing the way of the Christ and finally turned away from him. The religious leaders saw him as a demon-possessed lawbreaker, a false prophet, and a blasphemer. The Romans feared that he might somehow provoke an insurrection.
Finally, he not only felt abandoned by God, his Father, but he was truly rejected, though for our sins, not his (Isaiah 53:4-6, 10; 2 Corinthians 5:21). Could anything be more pitiable than his cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:45)?
Do we want to know Jesus more intimately? Then, as a friend long ago reminded Dori and me, we must “embrace the sufferings of the Cross.” There is no other way.
But what can be more precious than experiencing the “’fellowship of his sufferings,” proving the faithfulness of the one who said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), and entering into the heart of him who “loved [us] and gave Himself for [us]” (Galatians 2:20)?
So, let us “rejoice to the extent that [we] partake of Christ’s sufferings” 1 Peter 4:12) and remember Christian “prisoners as if chained with them” (1 Peter 13:3), including our fellow believers in China.
Yours in his sacrificial love,
Wright