Timothy Keller writes eloquently of suffering. His gentle perspective helps me to make sense of the things my mind refuses to understand. Here is an excerpt from his sermon "Christian Hope and Suffering."
Suffering: The Servant of Our Joy
Timothy Keller
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
2 Corinthians 4:16-17
We live in a unique culture. Every other society before ours has been more reconciled to the reality that life is full of sorrow. If you read the journals of people who lived before us, it is obvious they understood this, and that they were not surprised by suffering. We are the first culture to be surprised by suffering. When Paul writes to the people of his day, “We do not lose heart, though outwardly we are wasting away,” he speaks of suffering as a given.
Greek scholars will tell you Paul was not just talking about the body as wasting away, but about life in this visible world. He was saying that everything in this world is wearing away. Everything is steadily, irreversibly falling apart.
Our bodies are wearing away. Our hearts are like wind-up clocks with a finite number of clicks that are clicking away. Our physical appearance and attractiveness are wearing away, and we can’t stop it. Our relationships are wearing away. Get a group of friends around you, and time and circumstance will eventually pull you apart. Our families are wearing away, dying off one at a time. Our skills are wearing away. You can’t stay on top of your game forever. Everything is like a wave on the sand. You can’t pin it down; it starts to recede from you.
Paul writes about “wasting away” to a group of people who have suggested that he can’t be trusted, that God is obviously not with him. One reason Paul can’t be trusted they suggest, is that he has experienced an inordinate number of tragedies and difficulties. And, in fact, Paul makes a list of them in 2 Corinthians 11:24-28.
The people in Corinth were saying, How can God be with a man when all that stuff happens to him? Surely when God’s with you he protects you. When God is with you, you prosper. I’ve been traveling the Mediterranean all my life and I’ve never been shipwrecked, and this guy has been shipwrecked three times?
It’s similar to the thinking of Job’s friends had about Job’s suffering. Job’s friends said If God is with you, this wouldn’t happen. God can’t be with you. If he was, he’d protect you.
And we ask ourselves the same thing, don’t we, when one thing after another goes wrong, when we’ve reached the bottom and find out there’s lower to go?
This can’t be right, we think. Either there is no God or God is mad at me. He can’t be with me or this wouldn’t be happening.
How does Paul respond to this premise? Paul doesn’t just say God is with him. He goes further. He says that the suffering and hardship he has experienced is not a denial of the gospel, but a confirmation of the gospel.
He writes, “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed; we always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you” (2 Cor. 4:8-12).
Paul is saying that the way of the gospel is death leading to resurrection, weakness resulting in triumphant exaltation. Paul is saying that the way the gospel works in Jesus’ life is the way it is working in his life. He’s saying that just as Jesus’ suffering and death led to greater life, he is finding that the same thing is happening in his life. “My deaths seem to lead to greater life,” he’s saying.
The suffering he experiences because he is trying to minister lead to greater life in other people’s lives, as they hear the gospel and experience spiritual life.
And this doesn’t just happen in the lives of people in professional ministry. I know a number of people—doctors and lawyers and the like, who, rather than stepping onto the ladder of professional and financial upward mobility, have decided to serve under-served people. They’ve given their lives to working with the poor in places off the beaten path. And when a person does that, they fall out of the structure of their profession. They kind of go off the radar, and find they can’t advance. But they also find that their career death produces greater life.
When we suffer for doing the right thing, when we choose to live unselfishly, we find that our “death” leads to greater life for those around us.
But is it not only people around us who experience greater life when we suffer. In Romans 5:3-5 Paul says, “We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perservance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”
Now what is he saying there? He’s saying, “My suffering not only leads to greater life in those around me, but in me.”
It’s like what happens to an acorn. Do you know how much power there is in an acorn? An entire huge tree can come out of a small little acorn. And out of that tree can come innumerable other trees. One acorn has the power to fill a continent with wood.
But only if it dies. Only if it “falls to the ground and dies” (John 12:24) is that enormous power released.
Every human soul in the image of God has infinitely more life potential than an acorn. Every soul as the capacity for compassion, beauty, greatness, composure, and character—but it will not be released until there is a death, the death that comes through suffering and trials.
Unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it cannot bear life. Suffering leads to life, but that seed has to fall to the ground.
What God said to Jesus and to Paul, and what he says to us is, “My power always comes to perfection through weakness. My power can only explode into your life through your weakness.”
Death in us will work life in us and in others around us. That’s our hope.
