How to Suffer
Why do we suffer? Does God ever cause suffering for some greater purpose? How do we navigate pain and tragedy with our faith intact? In this series, we will explore the inevitability of suffering and the possibility of being changed for the better by it.
Community Practices
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Pray
Gather together as a community in a comfortable setting. Have one person read Psalm 119:50 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Recap
This past Sunday, we began a new teaching series called How to Suffer. Whether in small or big ways, each of us has suffered and experienced the brokenness of the world, and our experience gives rise to all sorts of questions. Why do we suffer? Is there a cause or purpose behind it? And where is God in the equation?
In our search for answers, it’s only natural for followers of Jesus to turn to the Scriptures. But far from offering us an easy answer, the Scriptures paint a complex portrait of what it means to live in a broken world, what it means to suffer, and how God is with us through it all.
The book of Job points us to the reality that the universe is an infinite web of details beyond our comprehension. But it also points us to the God who intimately knows each of those details, and who chooses to live in relationship with his creation and who hears and responds to the prayers of his people.
Discuss
What did you take away from the most recent teaching?
What do you find helpful or frustrating about the book of Job?
How would you describe your experience of God’s presence in the face of suffering?
How can your community support you when you face suffering?
Practice
This week, set aside time in your normal rhythm of connecting with God to experience his presence in your suffering. First, find a quiet and comfortable setting, then invite the Spirit to bring to mind any area of your life where you feel a sense of suffering. This could be anything big or small, nothing is insignificant in the eyes of God.
When the Spirit brings something to mind, express your feelings to God about your suffering, and don’t hold back. Like Job or the Psalmists, we can express our anger, frustration, lament, and confusion to God without worrying that he will be too fragile to handle it. If it helps, you can journal through this time, and may even consider writing your prayer as a Psalm or lament poem.
When you’ve expressed your feelings to God, sit quietly in the presence of his Spirit for a few minutes. After a few minutes, take note of anything you may be feeling, whether positive or negative. This could be anything from a sense of comfort from God, or a continued sense of confusion in your suffering.
Either way, end your time by reading Psalm 23 and offering a prayer of thankfulness to God.
Come next week ready to share about your experience with your community.
Pray
End by having someone read 2 Corinthians 1:3-5 as a prayer over the group.
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Pray
Gather together as a community in a comfortable setting. Have one person read Romans 8:28 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Recap
The question of why we suffer is one that haunts many of us. Is there divine purpose behind our pain, or is it simply the natural product of our chaotic world? Is suffering actually caused by God, or do we have to face the unthinkable possibility that he’s simply not capable of putting an end to the brokenness we face each day?
Often we forget that there’s another reality at play in our world, too; an enemy seeking to do us harm. In our hurting, we twist the experiences of our suffering and attribute them to God, rather than to the one through whom the evil of the world originates. In the Gospel of John, Jesus calls this enemy “the thief,” and says that he “comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” But it’s Jesus who has “come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).
When God made the world, both physical and spiritual, he thought it worth the risk to give his creation autonomy. It was the only way that our love for God could ever be genuine - if we were given the freedom to choose otherwise. Sadly, both humans and spiritual beings have chosen otherwise. Suffering takes place, whether directly or indirectly, because of the choices of created beings and how those choices have led to a corrupted and chaotic world. The beauty is that God is fully capable of working for our good, even within the brokenness.
Discuss
What did you take away from the most recent teaching?
We often wonder where God is in all of the suffering around us. What are some ways people try to make sense of this question?
How would you describe your own understanding/view of God’s involvement in suffering?
How has that understanding shifted or grown as you’ve walked with Jesus?
Practice
This week, the goal is to reflect on the moments of your life where you’ve felt a sense of suffering or pain, and to intentionally notice how God was working in those times. To do this, you’ll use a prayer meditation available from Van City’s Midweek Podcast, called A Garden of Suffering.
Set aside about 10 minutes in your normal rhythm of connecting with God to sit in a quiet and comfortable space. Listen to the podcast’s brief introduction, then follow along with the prayer prompts. As you do, take note of any emotions or thoughts that come up, writing them down if needed.
When the meditation is over, ask the Spirit if there is anything else he would like to say to you about your times of trial and suffering, and wait a few moments to hear anything he wants to communicate. Be ready to share your experience with your community the next time you meet.
Pray
End by having someone read Jeremiah 29:11 as a prayer over the group.
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Pray
Gather together as a community in a comfortable setting. Have one person read 1 Peter 5:10 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Recap
Try as we might, there’s no way to avoid suffering. The universe is a vast and complex web of details, populated by free beings, both physical and spiritual. In his infinite wisdom, God saw fit to give us autonomy so that our love for him could be a genuine choice. But because of all this, we experience suffering - it’s not if, but when.
The world wants to stave off suffering, doing all they can to limit their experience of pain. But in doing so, they miss the unique ability that suffering has to bring about growth and depth of character within us. Because while God does not cause or will our pain and suffering, he is good, smart, and creative enough to work within our suffering to bring out of it something for our benefit.
Like a refining fire that purifies gold, suffering can melt away our hard hearts and deepen our sense of humility and empathy. Suffering often reveals what we have taken for granted in our lives, and leads us to a renewed sense of gratitude and joy. But we must be mindful that we suffer well. To suffer in isolation or with a sense of self obsession, anger, and shame only leads to our destruction. Instead, we must embrace community, prayer, and healthy life rhythms, and always hold onto the hope that Jesus walks beside us in our suffering.
Discuss
What was your experience with doing last week’s prayer meditation?
What did you take away from the most recent teaching?
How has a time of suffering in your life grown your maturity or deepened your character?
What do you think of the idea that God does not cause our suffering, but that he can repurpose it for our good?
Practice
The practice this week is to process with God how it is that you respond to suffering. Do you do it well, or decidedly less so? To do this, you will spend time in listening prayer and journaling. Set aside about 10 minutes in your normal rhythm of spending time with God for this exercise.
First, find a quiet and comfortable setting, and have a way to take notes. Spend a moment in prayer, recognizing that the Spirit of Jesus is with you, and thanking him for his presence. Next, invite Jesus to speak to you about the ways that you have historically responded to suffering. If you have specific instances that come to mind, ask Jesus to walk through those moments with you in your memory, pointing out the ways that you handled that suffering, whether positive or negative. As you do this, write down what Jesus says.
After you’ve spent a few minutes doing this, ask the Spirit for wisdom and to show you ways you could better respond to suffering. What things should change or stay the same? What are some ways you could work with the Spirit of God within your suffering so that you experience growth and a deepening of your character? Once again, write down what the Spirit says. When you are finished, close your time by reading 1 Peter 1:3-9 as a prayer.
Come to your next community night ready to share about your experience.
Pray
End by having someone read 1 Peter 1:6-7 as a prayer over the group.
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Pray
Gather together as a community in a comfortable setting. Have one person read John 11:20-35 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Recap
Contrary to what we might hope, the life of a Christian is not free from suffering. Nonetheless, we are promised that we do not suffer alone or without purpose. Holding tightly to the knowledge that God does not cause our suffering, we also embrace the knowledge that God, in his kindness, makes use of our suffering for our refinement and to draw us to himself. Furthermore, moments and seasons of suffering can become guideposts, pointing us in the way of Jesus, who suffered on our behalf and ministers to us in our own suffering.
That said, we are not automatically carefree beings who embrace suffering joyfully at every turn. Most people fall somewhere along a spectrum between getting lost and isolated in our own or others’ suffering, or ignoring the suffering within and around us with heartless platitudes, poor theology, or misguided comparisons. As Christians, we are called to turn towards Christ and his body in full honesty of our experience of suffering. In so doing, we find hope and encouragement in the midst of our stories of pain, both as an act of resistance to the enemy and of redemption for this broken world.
Discuss
If you are willing, share something from your journal or your experience more generally from the practice last week.
What particular point or section from this past Sunday’s message did you find most impactful for you?
Which side of the spectrum of experiencing suffering (as mentioned above) do you tend to find yourself on the most?
If you are in a season of suffering, what might resistance or redemption look like for you?
Practice
This week, the practice is to do an imaginative reading of the John 11 passage that was read at the beginning of this practice. To do this, simply read the story slowly, while imagining yourself as one of the characters presented there. Allow your thoughts and emotions to come up during the reading and see if you can imagine Jesus attending to you specifically as you read.
The goal is to do this practice at least twice, so that you can imagine yourself as each of the sisters. Notice how Jesus attends to the head/theology of the one, but the heart/emotions of the other. See if you can imagine Jesus meeting you in each of these same spaces.
If time allows, do a third reading imagining yourself as a member of the fellow mourners, in which you may be interceding on behalf of someone you know who is suffering, perhaps someone in your own community. Ask the Spirit of Jesus if he might offer you something to share with that person.
Write down anything Jesus says to you during these imaginative Scripture readings, and come to your next community night ready to share about your experience.
Pray
End by allowing members of your community to briefly share their present experiences of suffering. Then have someone read Isaiah 53:2-5 over the group and then lift the names of those who shared to the Lord in prayer.
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Pray
Gather together as a community in a comfortable setting. Have one person read James 5:10-11 over the group and then pray to ask the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.
Recap
Exploring the nature, cause, and purpose of suffering is no small task, and as we close out our most recent teaching series, you may be left with a myriad of questions. The invitation from God and the Scriptures, though, is not to shrug those questions off, pretending as if they're not important. We’re also not asked to blindly accept suffering as the meticulous, albeit mysteries, providence of God. Instead, we are called to wrestle with our questions and our experiences in the presence of God and his people.
The Scriptures offer us books of wisdom like Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, that at first glance seem to be in conflict with each other. Does righteousness always lead to blessing, while wrongdoing always leads to suffering, as Proverbs seems to suggest? Or is life meaningless and suffering inevitable, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes claims? Why was Job, a man called blameless and upright in the sight of God, subjected to such devastation and pain?
For centuries, the people of God have come together as a community to ask these questions, often arriving at differing conclusions. The beauty is that in the family of God, there’s room for discussion, and even disagreement, because there’s also accountability. No one person alone can claim to have the definitive answer from God. Rather, men and women from all different times, places, and cultures around the world, have joined together to wrestle through these important questions. So the invitation stands - bring your questions to God, but do so in the community of the Church that he has created. Because together, our faith and hope in Jesus is made stronger, even in suffering.
Discuss
What stood out to you from this past Sunday’s Question and Answer time?
What question(s) do you wrestle with the most when it comes to making sense of suffering (whether your own or the world’s suffering)?
In what ways do you think community/church can help shape how we understand things like suffering, the problem of evil, and the providence of God?
What feelings come up for you when you think about Jesus entering into the brokenness of the world, becoming a “man of suffering, and familiar with pain” (Isaiah 53:3)? (Comfort, hope, confusion, frustration, etc.).
Practice
This week’s practice is simple, although perhaps not easy. It’s to set aside time to allow God to speak to you about your biggest questions and concerns when it comes to understanding the suffering you experience and see in the world around you.
Make space to spend at least 15 minutes in quiet listening this week. Find a comfortable place and, if needed, have a way to take notes. Take a moment to recognize that Jesus is with you by the power of his Spirit, and thank him for the space he allows you to wrestle with tough questions. Then, spend time asking questions and listening.
What you ask during this time will vary person to person. Maybe you already have specific questions about your personal suffering, or suffering in the world, that you want Jesus to speak into. Or maybe you are coming into this time with no preconceived questions, and you need to ask Jesus to reveal areas where you have confusion, doubt, or concern. Whatever the case, Jesus invites you to be authentic and genuine, not holding back. Bring your fear, frustration, joy, and thankfulness before him, and allow him to speak, taking note of what he says.
The final piece of this practice is important. Bring what you hear from Jesus to your community. Share it with them, and invite them into the questions you may be wrestling with, remembering that it’s essential to work out our faith in the context of the family of God. Take time as a community to process with each other any thoughts and questions that are shared.
Pray
End by having someone read Romans 5:1-5 over the group.
