Lessons Through Pain

Sometimes in our lives, we are faced with incredibly painful experiences. Ones that can really shake us to our core. It is easy to ask ourselves why we have to go through things like this and what God is trying to teach us by allowing us to go through that experience. This past weekend, God showed me three very crucial reasons why.

The first came on Sabbath through a sermon I heard by Dwight Nelson that spoke directly to my heart. His passage was John 11 and the story of Lazarus. He spoke about Jesus’ delay in coming to Lazarus’ home. He specifically waited until Lazarus died, and had been dead for four days before making the journey to Bethany. Elizabeth Talbot makes an interesting statement: “How strange! It doesn’t make sense to say, ‘He loved—so He delayed.’ Or does it? Obviously it isn’t the lack of affection that delayed the Son of God. So what was it? I have come to trust God’s timing even though I usually don’t understand it. I have a motto that has helped countless times: Delays are designed to show the magnitude of the miracle.”

Then it struck me. Sometimes God allows us to go through incredible pain to reveal the magnitude of the miracle God is going to perform for us THROUGH this tragedy. If Lazarus’ sister had not experienced the death of their brother Lazarus, then Christ healing Lazarus from his illness would not have been nearly as magnificent as Christ raising him from the dead. Sometimes, God allows us to go through severe trials because His love for us is shown in an even more powerful way in the end.

As Mrs. White says in Desire of Ages, pg. 528, “To all who are reaching out to feel the guiding hand of God, the moment of greatest discouragement is the time when divine help is the nearest. They will look back with thankfulness upon the darkest part of their way.”

Pastor Nelson made another interesting observation: What if what we have been hoping would be resurrected isn’t what needs to be? What if Jesus has stayed away long enough for that very thing to die completely so that in that dying, I might turn to Him as I never would have if that thing had not died in me? Maybe God wants that very thing to die since this is the only way to resurrect in me the greatest sense of my need to trust God and to build a deeper relationship with Him. Maybe only through that death can He raise me to live a new life with Him. And the promise in the story of Lazarus is that if Jesus is in my story, there will be a miracle in store for me.

The second reason came through something my sister shared with me. She took me to Isaiah 6. Mrs. White talks about the dreadful condition of the people of Judah during this time as they strayed away from God. It was into this mess that Isaiah found himself. And then with the death of King Uzziah, the outlook was bleak. But this crisis for Isaiah sent him to the temple, and it was there that God revealed to Isaiah His will. It was in this state of confusion, perplexity, and crisis for Isaiah that he heard God’s call for his life. When God asked, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”, Isaiah immediately answered the call and said, “Here I am! Send me.” It was through this crisis and his time with God in the temple, that he felt God’s call on his life and responded to be used by God.

In the book My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers make an interesting statement. He says, “The call of God is not the echo of my nature; my affinities and personal temperament are not considered. As long as I consider my personal temperament and think about what I am fitted for, I shall never hear the call of God. But when I am brought into relationship with God, I am in the condition Isaiah was in. Isaiah’s soul was so attuned to God by the tremendous crisis he had gone through that he recorded the call of God to his amazed soul. The majority of us have no ear of anything but ourselves, we cannot hear a thing God says. To be brought into the zone of the call of God is to be profoundly altered.”

Chambers also writes, “God did not lay a strong compulsion on Isaiah; Isaiah was in the presence of God and he overheard the call, and realized there was nothing else for him but to say, in conscious freedom, ‘Here am I, send me.’…If we let the Spirit of God bring us face to face with God, we too shall hear something akin to what Isaiah heard, the still small voice of God; and in perfect freedom will say, ‘Here am I; send me.’”

Sometimes in life, we are so in tune with our desires and wishes, what we think is best for ourselves, or what we think we are best fitted for. But going through a crisis, we instead sense God's call in our lives, often in a greater way then we have ever experienced it before. By coming face to face with God in the temple as a result of a crisis, God reveals HIS will, HIS call, and HIS leading. And being in the center of God’s will, not our own, is exactly where we should want to be!

The third reason is that sometimes God needs to get us alone with Him so he can speak to our hearts. It is only then that He can explain to us His will, His reasoning, His leading. In another section of Oswald Chamber’s book, he writes: “When God gets us alone by affliction, heartbreak, or temptation, by disappointment, sickness, or by thwarted affection, by a broken friendship, or by a new friendship—when He gets us absolutely alone, and we are dumbfounded, and cannot ask one question, then He begins to expound… Are we alone with Him now?... Jesus can expound nothing until we get through all the noisy questions of the head and are alone with Him.”

Maybe our trials and pain are designed to get us alone with God. And in the stillness, the quietness, we can hear God speaking to our hearts, saying, ‘My child, just trust me. My hand will uphold you, My spirit will guide you, and lead you into paths you do not know.”

Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way they did not know; I will lead them in paths they have not known. I will make darkness light before them, and crooked places straight. These things I will do for them, and not forsake them.”