Overcoming Pain and Suffering

We are all at times faced with seemingly unbearable pain and suffering. Some call out to God and ask “Why? Why me?”. In times like these we need to be careful of deceiving spirits coming along and saying “If your God is so good then why is he allowing or bringing you so much pain?”. We all know who this great deceiver is...

This is what the Holy Bible says:  James 1 : 2 – 4 (Good News Bible version)
My friends, consider yourselves fortunate when all kinds of trials come your way, for you know that when your faith succeeds in facing such trials, the result is the ability to endure. Make sure that your endurance carries you all the way without failing, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.

God brings these hard times upon us so that we may be drawn closer to Him and that we may grow in our faith. How does pain and suffering draw us closer to God some may ask?...

You see, in our daily lives when things are going great, everyone is smiling and we think we have it all sorted, we tend to be more concerned about trivial or worldly things such as money, jewellery, cellular phones and cars. We are always concerned about losing those things we have.

Now keep in mind that God is a jealous God. He wants us to make Him a part of everything we do (when we sleep, eat, drink, wake up and work). He wants us to never forget Him, even for one second. But then comes along this concern we have about losing our possessions and we become distracted from God. So what does God do?... He brings along pain, suffering and trauma.

Now in hard times we are very quick to call out to God, but in good times we are distracted from Him, so now God, seeing that hard times are about the only times we turn to Him, throws pain into our lives. This pain can come in different forms and manners.

In cases of severe illness and death our concern shifts away from trivial things such as money and other worldly possessions and we look for a way out, turning to God. So we ask God to help us through and he does.

Now what we need to do is instead of forgetting about God after these tough times, we need to include Him in our good times as well. Putting God first during good and bad times now shifts our concern away from worldly possessions.

So when hard times come along again we should not see them as hard times, instead we should see it as a test of faith and upon passing this test, our faith in God becomes stronger. This is how we grow in the Holy Spirit. We should therefore embrace these trials and tribulations, because God is working with us so we can become stronger in faith and in spirit. We should be honoured that God is taking time out of His unexplainably huge schedule just to spend time with us and help us grow.

So thank God for all good times he gives and thank Him even more for the hard times he gives us. Put your trust in God completely and you will be delivered a stronger and bigger person.

For a perfect example of this test of faith read through the entire book of Job in The Old Testament.