Nobody puts suffering on the calendar. You don’t pencil it in alongside your vacations and doctor appointments. Suffering almost always comes out of nowhere and suddenly everything changes. The apostle Peter knew his readers were living in exactly that kind of disruption, enduring the normal aches of a broken world and on top of that suffering because they were Christians. First Peter 4 is his pastoral word to them, and to us. “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12).
Don’t Be Surprised
Our first reflex when something hard arrives is surprise. The Greek word Peter uses for “surprised” is the same word used when an unexpected guest shows up at the door. We’ve all experienced that jarring feeling of being startled from whatever we were doing and forced to come face to face with a stranger at our door. We wonder: What are you doing here? It is exactly how we react when a trial shows up. We wonder if there has been some mistake. Why didn’t this difficulty pass us by? Perhaps it was meant to go to my neighbor’s house.
We are surprised because we mistakenly think, as believers, that we have been transported to the Garden of Eden, or we imagine we have already arrived in heaven. We are not in either place. We live in the land in between, a broken world where sin entered through Adam and Eve and everything groans because of it (Romans 8). If you live in a broken world with eight billion other sinners, there is going to be suffering, and we ought not to be shocked when it knocks on our door.
What Comes Out of Our Pain
Peter tells us plainly that trials have come to test you. This pain is not random. God is sovereign over it, using fiery trials to reveal what is in our hearts. Think about how Jesus was tested in the wilderness, tempted to turn stones into bread, to bow to Satan, or to throw himself from the temple mount. In each of those testings, the real character of the Son of God came through.
Our trials do the same, though what surfaces in us looks a little different. Difficulties bring to the top the impurities we have been carrying, the anxiety and worry we didn’t even know were there. But we should not be surprised at what comes up. Our lives are like a ketchup bottle. When you squeeze it, you get ketchup, because that is what is inside. A trial works the same way, not producing those things in us but revealing what was already there.
An Invitation to Rejoice
Nobody opens the door to pain and says, “Finally, you’re here! Break out the band.” But after pointing us to the purpose behind our pain, Peter says something strange: “But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). Notice what Peter is actually saying. He doesn’t tell us to rejoice in the evil or in the pain itself. We are instead rejoicing that our pain reveals God’s glory.
When we endure trials by faith, submitting to the will of our heavenly Father and trusting Him through it, that experience mirrors what Jesus went through as He endured injustice and held fast to the Father in His own Gethsemane. The pain Jesus endured on the cross made it possible for Jesus to be glorified and makes it possible for us to rejoice in our own pain.
When life hurts, it causes us to look forward with fresh urgency to the time when this kind of pain will no longer be part of our experience. George Matheson, who went completely blind as a young man, wrote this about the trials of God’s people: “There is a time coming in which your glory shall consist in the very thing which now constitutes your pain.” Matheson asks Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, Job, Peter, Paul, and finally the Son of God Himself where their glory came from. Every one of them points back to the cold ground where they were laid, the Gethsemane ground, the desert that broke forth in singing, and the thorns that became roses.
Whatever trial is at your door right now, the question worth sitting with is not why this is happening but what God is doing through it. He is a God who produces beauty from ashes and turns mourning into dancing. The pain you are in today is offering you something in you that you could not have received any other way. Trust Him with it.
Way Points with Pastor Steve DeWitt is based on teaching from The Journey.
