God is not shaken by our honesty at how circumstances feel. We sometimes seem to think the only acceptable Christian response to anything terrible is to say, ‘God is good’ or ‘God is working this for good’ or some other Christian cliché. Those things are true, of course. God is good. God is working whatever it is for our good. But knowing that in our head doesn’t necessarily change how it feels.
I doubt Paul, when he was having his head bashed in with rocks for preaching the gospel, was going ‘God is working all things for my good’. Paul, I suspect, theologized about it later. Sometimes things just suck. We know our theology, we believe it, but what is happening is just awful. God isn’t offended nor undermined when we admit it.
It bears asking what we think we’re doing anyway by pretending to God – who knows everything – that we don’t feel the way we do. Like he’ll be fooled if we just go, ‘praise God because he’s good’, as if he doesn’t know how terrible we’re feeling. I think many of us are tempted to pray in such a way that you basically throw theological facts at God that he already knows, almost cliched phrases, to cover up the fact that you just feel awful, wish things would stop and frankly you think what you’re suffering is God’s fault! If I believe in a sovereign God, to some degree, I clearly do (theologically) think it is God’s fault. And if not quite so theologically driven, I am well aware – just like the rubbish Jeremiah had to put with simply because he was faithful – that much of the time it is doing what God wants i.e. being faithful that is the cause of my trouble.
The truth is, God knows what we think. He knows we believe what’s true. He knows, despite that, we feel awful because the situation is terrible. He isn’t undermined or upset when we admit we feel like we’re in the pit and we wish he’d do something about it. He isn’t even undermined when we tell him – because he knows we think it already – that we think it’s his fault. He’s sovereign, he’s in control, so why doesn’t he do anything. God is perfectly happy for us to tell him what we feel because he knows already. You’re not going to surprise him. We’re foolish if we think we can hide our true feelings from him.
This is quite clear in Jeremiah’s case (cf. Jeremiah 20) is that he suffers specifically because he’s doing God’s will. Putting it bluntly, God is Jeremiah’s problem. The brute fact is, if he didn’t do what God asked of him he wouldn’t suffer the things that he did. That tells us, doing God’s will may lead to more suffering not less. It was true for the prophets, it was true for Jesus so there’s every reason to think it’ll be true for us.
We have to seriously count the cost of following Jesus. Following Jesus and being faithful will almost certainly lead to greater suffering and a harder life than if you reject Christ. It is a huge lie in many churches that says, ‘follow Jesus and he’ll make your life better’. That is NOT what the Bible says nor what happened to any of Jesus’ people in the Bible. Following Jesus will probably make your life harder. If it hasn’t made your life harder, it’s probably because you’re not actually following Jesus. Jesus does not promise you an easy life. He does not say, come to me and all your problems will disappear. Jeremiah found faithfulness actively made life hard. Faithfulness is not for the faint-hearted!
You might be sat there thinking, why would I follow Jesus then? If he’s going to make my life harder, why would I bother? What’s the point?
Like Jeremiah found, if God has called us it’s harder to reject his call than to accept the hardships of faithfulness. If God always wins, and he has called us, there’s nothing we can do but obey his call. We’ll feel worse rejecting him than following him.
More than that, only genuine belief in the goodness of God and his commitment to his promises will get anyone to say ‘yes’ to a deal that will make our lives harder. Why suffer for the sake of Christ? Because he calls us to do it and we believe he is good and he will work for our good in it. That doesn’t stop hardships from sucking big time. But it does help us trust God is doing something greater for us in them.
But even more than that, we might not find out the good that God is doing through our suffering. Job never found out why he suffered. He has a lifetime of suffering, friends who had all sorts of wonky theories about why it was happening and, in the end, he never found out why. Like him, we might not be able to look at the suffering and see what God is doing specifically for us in it. If that is the case, all we can do is trust in his unfailing promises to us. His promise that if we endure for his sake, though we may suffer now, there is eternal glory to be won. We hold onto the promises of God. Seeing that his promises are always true, and he always wins, we can weigh some temporary suffering now against the hope of eternal life, joy, peace, happiness, contentment and glory one day.
If you’re follow Jesus to make your life better, you are on a hiding to nothing. Jeremiah shows us that pretty clearly. But if you follow Jesus because you believe his promises are true, and you love him because of what he has done for you to make those promises yours and to apply them to you, then you might endure suffering for his sake.
That won’t make your suffering fun. It won’t make you love it. It won’t stop you seeing reality and recognising sometimes it is specifically what God asks of you that has made you suffer. But it will cause you to press on for Jesus’ sake regardless. And when you’re in the midst of it, tell him how you feel. He knows already and he isn’t surprised. We don’t have to pretend with him and we may just be surprised by what he does for us to help us endure for him and do the work he calls us to do.
You wrote “If it hasn’t made your life harder, it’s probably because you’re not actually following Jesus.”
I have heard this sort of thing before. I find this troubling because I would say, on the whole, that have not encountered a great deal of suffering or hardship in life (so far). Does this mean I’m not a Christian?
That’s not to say that there is no difficulty or inconvenience. Certainly there’s the flight against sinful inclinations. Also I probably am not as well off financially as others in my position due to the amount I give away.
However, I wouldn’t call my life difficult.
It might not mean you aren’t a Christian, but it *could* mean you aren’t being as faithful as you ought to be (and I am emphasising that word *could* as opposed to *necessarily proves*). It also bears saying I was quite clear that following Jesus will make your life *harder*. Note, I did not say it would make your life impossibly unbearable. Faithfulness will make our life harder than it was before, not necessarily objectively hard by world standards. So, we need to hear those nuances carefully.
So, take your fight against sin. If you weren’t bothered about fighting sin before and, as a believer, you now are. That is an example of life getting harder, isn’t it? And it is a good sign of being a genuine believer.
Take not being as financially well off as others in your position. That is harder than if you didn’t give money away. That is harder. You might want to reflect (I’m not saying this is the case – I don’t know you or your situation) on Jesus’ words to the rich in scripture. He rarely says ‘give away a bit’ and I suspect more of us need to think about whether our ‘bit’ is quite what Jesus had in mind. But, nevertheless, even giving a bit is harder than not giving anything. That is a harder life (in some measure).
Consider the call to share the gospel. Easy-going relationships with family and friendships more broadly are easy when there is no specific call on us to say hard things. But if we are seriously sharing the gospel, we will have a harder time navigating a) when to speak, b) what to say, c) accepting that some relationships may be strained because we share the gospel. If we never find these things, it might be because we aren’t actually taking our responsibilities on this front seriously at all. But if we are, even if by and large such relationships are not strained really, there is still the emotional concern about it. That would be *harder* than if you didn’t think about it at all and felt no compulsion to do so.
I could go on, but I hope you get the point. These are examples of what is harder than if you weren’t doing them at all. I’m sure you can think of many other examples of the commands of Christ that, if we do them, operate the same way. Faithfulness will make our life harder, even if some of the time that doesn’t mean impossible or unbearable (though we must countenance for some of us that may be as true as it was for Jeremiah and others in scripture).
Thanks for the encouragement.
I would add that thinking these things through is often compounded by a long hard wrestle with the issue of assurance of salvation that I have had.