Greg and Amy encourage Christians not to judge how strong their faith is based on how they feel about past suffering, but to trust God’s proven love and character revealed through the cross.
Transcript
Amy: Let’s go on to a question from Anonymous: “I often hear that people wouldn’t trade their suffering because of the closer relationship with God it produced, etc. My relationship with God didn’t improve after having cancer, and although some good came out of it, I wish it had never happened. Should I be worried about my faith?”
Greg: Look, everybody’s an individual. They respond differently to these things, and even in the midst of them, I wouldn’t be concerned about that.
I think of difficulties that I’ve gone through and how they’ve helped me, and some of them, it’s very, very obvious, and I would not want that to change. It isn’t so much that I felt closer to God. I would say that’s the case in every case. The key here is what God did in my life through that hardship, and they were substantial things that needed to happen for my good and for my own personal flourishing and for other things—places that God placed me, like in my role at Stand to Reason, for example. And I look back historically at things that happened that I did not want to experience at the time, but I realized that was preparation for me. I can’t say that those are the things that brought me closer to God—now I feel really close to God as a result of it or something like that. But I can definitely see the value of those things, and I wouldn’t trade them.
There’s some other things where I think, “I don’t know what I gained out of that,” and “I would rather not have gone through that”—sometimes physical pain when you have, you know, physical ailments. “Boy, I could have done without that one.”
So, we don’t know. That’s in God’s hands, and we just have to give that to him. My encouragement here for anonymous is, don’t beat yourself up about that.
Amy: Yeah, I wouldn’t beat yourself up either. I think it’s different in different cases. Sometimes it takes a long time to see what has happened. I can think of two instances in my own life where it took several years before I looked back and said, “Oh, now I get how that has brought me here and why I needed for that to happen.” But that took a long time and distance. So, you just won’t see every time. And that’s when you have to trust God in the times where you can’t see. You have to trust that he is doing something.
So, we’ll see certain examples where we can see it clearly, and we’ll see other examples where we don’t see anything, and that’s where the trust comes in because he’s already proved himself. He’s already proved that he cares about us and he loves us on the cross. That’s objective reality, and that’s what I hang on to when I can’t see why something is happening. But maybe in ten years, you’ll feel differently about it.
I always bring up Joni Eareckson Tada. She’s just such a great example of this. Had a diving accident. Has been paralyzed for fifty years. Now, says she wouldn’t trade her wheelchair for anything. But I doubt she said that in the first ten or fifteen years. It takes a long time to see what God is doing and why. And some of it, we won’t see until the next life. So, again, if I were you, Anonymous, what I would do is focus on trusting him that he did have something good, even if you can’t see it. And the way you do that is you look at who he is and what he’s done for us and what he’s done in history, and you hang on to that, and you trust him.