“To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example,
that you should follow in his steps.”
(1 Peter 2:21)
There are a lot of sayings about suffering; most of them, I’ve never heard of before. Sure, we have the ones everyone knows: “suffer a setback,” “suffer an attack (of something),” “suffer under someone,” “suffer the consequences,” and of course, Sylvester’s “Sufferin’ succotash.” But then, we have a whole host of expressions I’ve never heard of before: “Stir suffering into your soup,” “suffering by candle and quill,” “suffering in the shadows,” “suffering at the doorstep,” and “suffering counting the ceiling cracks.” That’s a lot of “new” suffering, but maybe we all need to learn something new about suffering.
In Luke 9, Jesus prepares his disciples for what is ahead because what is ahead, is suffering. He says (Luke 9:23): “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.” The whole verse speaks of hardship. In one sense, to deny oneself is the opposite of another well-known word, “to confess.” Let me explain: when we confess Jesus, we acknowledge him as Lord and align ourselves with him—heart, soul, mind and strength. His will becomes our chief desire. To deny ourselves, then, means that when we are faced with a choice between what we want to do and what he calls us to do, we will abandon our wants and follow Jesus. It does not mean that we should, from time-to-time, deny ourselves certain pleasures or embody a personality that is devoid of personality. Instead, it means we will now live for Jesus. And make no mistake here, to deny ourselves is to suffer. But Jesus goes on. He calls us to take up our cross daily. I’m not sure if the disciples could have even wrapped their head around this because it seemed so out of place and unexpected. The cross was a form of Roman torture. A condemned criminal would be forced to carry the beam of his cross to the place of his execution. John Morris describes this trip. He wrote: “This was a one-way journey. He’s not going to be back.” To follow Jesus is to walk in the path of suffering, to surrender ourselves to his will, to learn the discipline of discipleship, and never to turn back. And then, Jesus calls us to follow him, but not only into his love and concern for others, but also in his suffering—in his being misunderstood, in his being rejected, in his being accused, and in his giving of himself for others. Isaiah 53 describes Jesus in a way that we don’t often consider. Verses 2-3 say, “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” And then, Jesus carried his cross as far as he could and then was led to Golgotha and crucified. And now, he calls us to follow in his footsteps.
Here’s the full thing. We are a people who value success and pleasure and prosperity and affluence, not suffering. We like to confess ourselves and our way of doing things and deny the hard way of Jesus. We like to sing songs and be happy. We don’t like to lament over our sin or our struggles. We don’t want to follow. We would much rather lead and have Jesus bless our efforts. We are a hot mess. Worse, perhaps, we don’t see much value in suffering. But suffering leads to growth and strength and peace. This is not my idea, of course. This is the wisdom of many others.
Evelyn Waugh: “No one is ever holy without suffering.”
Vance Havner: “God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.”
C.S. Lewis: “I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect.”
Father Seraphim Rose: “Suffering is an indication of another Kingdom which we look to. If being Christian meant being ‘happy’ in this life, we wouldn’t need the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Charles Dickens: “Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what my heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape.”
Simone Weil: “Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”
C.S. Lewis (again): “They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say, ‘Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why . . . the Blessed will say, ‘We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven’; and the Lost, ‘We were always in Hell.’ And both will speak truly.”
And this leads us back to our seventh verse from 1 Peter 2:21: “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.” Jesus suffered for us, and now, it is our honor and privilege to follow in his footsteps and suffer that his kingdom may come to us and through us to others.
Tim Keller writes: “The Biblical view of things is resurrection—not a future that is just a consolation for the life we never had but a restoration of the life you always wanted. This means that every horrible thing that ever happened will not only be undone and repaired but will in some way make the eventual glory and joy even greater.”
And there is the good news. When we follow Jesus into suffering, we also get to follow him into resurrection and glory. And that, my friends, is the promise of discipleship.
