Suffering is the textbook that’ll teach you who you really are.
Hi, I’m Joni Eareckson Tada and you will often hear me say that God uses one form of evil; that is, suffering, in order to defeat another form of evil; and that is, our sin. We already know it happened at the cross, but it occurs in the lives of Christians every day. For instance, I deal daily with chronic pain, and, at times, my pain feels like a lemon that God squeezes, revealing my cranky, crabby spirit, and tendency to complain or grumble. If God did not use my pain to expose my sin, I might – like many of us – not be aware of the sin of which I’m capable. But we are not the paragons of virtue that we’d all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God uses suffering to expose the stuff of which we are made. It’s why Romans 5, says, “Rejoice in suffering.” It’s because suffering is the textbook that’ll teach you who you really are, and best of all, who you can be in Christ.
© Joni and Friends