Myth 5 – Pain is Not God’s Will for Me

We live in a culture that believes that the pursuit of pleasure is one of the highest priorities, if not THE very highest priority for the individual. The motto of Western civilization is “Do whatever makes you feel good.”

A direct consequence is that we have also become greatly preoccupied with eliminating whatever doesn’t make you feel good – whatever makes you feel uncomfortable, uneasy, unhappy. And so our attitude toward pain, in Western culture, is that pain is something to be avoided at all costs. We have become obsessed with removing pain.

Have you ever walked into a drug store and looked at all the commercially available pain remedies there are? It is absolutely staggering! Billions of dollars are being spent on the elimination of pain.

Our attitude toward pain spills over into more than just getting rid of a headache. Many people have developed what I would call an “anesthetic approach” to life – they develop a lifestyle that is designed to enhance pleasure and eliminate pain.

Whether it is by living from party to party, weekend to weekend, or going on shopping sprees, or becoming addicted to any number of things - pornography, gambling, food, alcohol – jumping from relationship to relationship, throwing themselves into recreational pursuits, people live so as to avoid pain and obtain pleasure at all costs – even if the pleasure proves to be only fleeting or transitory. Anything to take away the pain of reality!

This mindset colors our understanding of spiritual matters as well. Our culture has taught us to believe that pain is bad and pleasure is good. The Bible teaches us that God is good. Therefore, we believe, as we look through our culturally-tinted glasses, God is to be associated with pleasure, since pleasure is the greatest good we can imagine. Our relationship with God, then, ought to be pleasant, particularly since the Bible says that God loves us. People who love us don’t generally make our lives miserable!

Our spiritual assumption is that since pain is bad and God is good, God’s will is that we should not have to experience pain. A good God would never want people to suffer. A good God would never make us uncomfortable. God’s will for us is that we have a pleasant life, a good time, a happy, pain-free existence. And to the extent that there IS pain in our lives, whether physical or mental or emotional or social, it is because we must have somehow missed out on the will of God.

This is the fifth myth in our series: Pain is not God’s will for me.

And there are plenty of high-profile Christian teachers and evangelists who will tell you precisely that. Listen to a couple of direct quotes from their teachings:

The basic principle of the Christian life is to know that God put our sin, sickness, disease, sorrow, grief, and poverty on Jesus at Calvary. For Him to put any of this on us now would be a miscarriage of justice. – Kenneth Copeland

Sickness does not belong to you. It has no part in the Body of Christ. There will be no sickness for the saint of God. He promises to heal all our diseases. That means not even a headache, sinus problem, not even a toothache – nothing! No sickness should come your way. – Benny Hinn

When the devil tries to put a symptom of sickness or disease on my body, I absolutely refuse to accept it. A short time agoa he tried to put symptoms of the flu on me. My nose and eyes started to run. I began to sneeze and ache all over. I haven’t had the flu since 1969, an I’m not going to have it now. I’m redeemed from the flu! I rebuked Satan and refused his lying symptoms. – Jerry Savelle

It is the plan of God our Father that no believer should ever be sick. It is not the will of God our Father that we should suffer with cancer and other dread diseases which bring pain and anguish. No! It is God’s will that we be healed. – Kenneth Hagin

Well teaching like that is pretty appealing! Who wouldn’t want to be free from sickness and pain and suffering! Who wouldn’t want to be a Christian when it offers a lifestyle like that! But is that the truth? Is that the Gospel? Is that what God’s will is all about?

When you take off your cultural eyeglasses and read the Bible for what it is, pain is quite obviously there. God’s people were not free from pain, whether it be the

• Physical pain of Paul, who was flogged five times, beaten with rods three times, stoned once and left for dead, shipwrecked three times, and had a painful physical ailment that he pled with God to relieve him of.

• Emotional pain of Jeremiah, who was called the weeping prophet – a man to whom nobody listened, nobody respected, and nobody responded to his ministry.

• Relational pain of David, whose family life was a disaster; with a wife who scorned his spirituality, a son who raped his sister and was murdered for it by another son - the same son who rebelled against his father and tried to overthrow him.

• Spiritual pain of Jesus, who Isaiah calls “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”, who (as Hebrews 5:8 tells us) learned obedience from what he suffered, and who wept on many occasions over the spiritual hardness of the people he had come to save.

Pain is writ large on almost every page of Scripture. So what are we to make of it? Where does pain fit into the picture? What is the purpose of pain? Why does God allow it? What does He intend for it to do in our lives?

Well, one of the first things we need to get hold of is that God has a place for pain. The very first mention of the word “pain” in the Bible comes from the very mouth of God in Genesis 3, when he tells Adam and Eve that pain would be one of the two greatest consequences of sin; the other being death.

He says “From henceforth, your existence will be painful. Eve, in pain you will give birth to children. Adam, in painful toil you will try to work the ground. Pain is a consequence of your having turned your back on me.”

And the irony is that just a few chapters later, in Genesis 6, we learn that the pain of man’s sin was not confined to earth – it was felt in heaven as well:

Gen. 6:6 The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.

Not even God himself was exempt from the pain that was caused by man’s sin.

Far from pain being foreign to the Christian Gospel, we can see that pain is at the very center of the Gospel. It was God’s pain over man’s sin that caused him to do something about it. He sent His Son Jesus – and that act itself was a painful thing – because Jesus came to die for our sins.

And if you are going to respond to the Gospel, it is going to be painful, because in order to respond you have to acknowledge that you are a sinner, that you are repulsive to God, that you are broken, and that is something terribly painful to have to acknowledge.

And then, in order to follow Christ, you have to renounce your allegiance to Self, and that is a terribly painful thing to do. It is a painful struggle that we have to fight every day of our existence as a Christian.

So this idea that Christianity is a life free from pain is absurd! It is all about pain.

But one day, pain will be eliminated. And God will be the one who will eliminate it. The Bible is such a wonderful book – there are so many things going on at so many levels. Remember, in Genesis – the first book in the Bible, God was the one who introduced us to the concept and the consequence of pain? Well, in Revelation – the last book of the Bible, we read that God Himself “will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

The God who allowed pain is the God who will ultimately remove all pain. But in the meantime, what is the precise purpose of pain? What is the place of pain in God’s sovereign will?

There are three ideas that I would like to consider with you. (I am indebted to C.S. Lewis and his landmark book “The Problem of Pain” for these ideas.)

1. Pain unmasks the reality of evil in the world and in us

2. Pain shatters the illusion of our own self-sufficiency

3. Pain tests the depth of our obedience to God

1. Pain unmasks the reality of evil in the world and in us

The book of Genesis tells us that, as human beings, we belong to a fallen race and we’re living in a fallen place. We are evil beings – we are bent in our inner selves and we are disconnected from God. (Myth 1) And because of our “bent-ness” our homeland, planet Earth, is broken, too. Creation is now under a curse; it doesn’t work right. It is full of fear, death, and disaster.

And pain is the newsboy who cries out these truths.

One of the most insidious characteristics of evil is that it has a deluding effect on us. The deeper the inroads that evil makes within us, the less we suspect its existence, and the more inclined to trivialize it we become.

Take a truly evil character for example. The world is full of great villains. One of the most notorious today is Saddam Hussein, an absolute autocrat; a man who rules the Iraqi people by terror and death. Yet if you were to speak with him, you would find that he is utterly oblivious to what a monster he has become. A lifetime of wicked thoughts and wicked deeds has inured him to the destructive impact of evil in his life.

The Nuremburg Trials following World War Two illustrated this to a tee. The Nazi defendants, confronted with their awesome crimes, protested that they were decent, law-abiding officials who were merely following orders. The Jewish author Hannah Arendt, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 called this tendency “the banality of evil”.

But pain unmasks the evil. When we are in pain, we begin to suspect that all is not well with this comfortable little life we have constructed for ourselves. Pain has a way of insisting that we attend to it. It arouses us to the fact that there is something terribly wrong.

Paul Brand was a Christian missionary doctor who worked for many years with leprosy patients in India. He found that one of the most devastating effects of the disease was that it rendered the patient incapable of feeling pain. At first glance, this might seem to be a great blessing; in fact, it was a terrible curse.

The leprosy patients would put their hands accidentally in fire, or wear shoes that didn’t fit properly, and without pain as a faithful messenger that something was wrong, they would maim and cripple themselves.

Without pain, we would have no way of knowing that we are fallen creatures living in a fallen world. Pain shatters the illusion that all is well. C.S. Lewis says “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Pain is God’s wakeup call - it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of fallen souls living in a fallen world.

2. Pain shatters the illusion of our own self-sufficiency

In Matthew 19, a rich young man came to Jesus seeking the secret to spiritual fulfilment. He was very religious, and by his own account, he had kept the Jewish Law. But still there was something lacking.

Jesus told him to go and sell everything he owned, give the proceeds to the poor, and then come and follow him. The young man couldn’t do it. He went away sad, because he couldn’t part with what he had.

St. Augustine said “God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full – there’s nowhere for him to put it.”

Have you ever noticed that it is hard to turn your thoughts toward God when everything is going well with you? It is a known statistical phenomenon that church attendance goes down when the national economy goes up. It was true in the OT and it is just as true today.

What can God do to shake us out of our complacency? What can He do to bring us back to Himself? He can take away the false props that we have built our lives upon, but doing so will involve pain.

We sometimes think that God is cruel for allowing pain to come into our lives. Yet, if we are ever going to become all that God wants us to be, he has to wean us away from the illusion that we are okay just as we are. And pain is the faithful messenger – and often the only messenger – which can accomplish that.

Think of Michelangelo’s sculpture David. It is absolutely one of the greatest sculptures ever created – the very pinnacle of the sculptor’s art. Yet imagine yourself to be the block of marble that Michelangelo used. How would you feel as the artist patiently and persistently chipped away at you? It would be painful, wouldn’t it? But look at the result!

C.S. Lewis reflected on our tendency to call God cruel for allowing pain. He made this observation: “We want, in fact, no so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven – a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves,” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”

In other words, we wish that God would indulge us, would spoil us, would give us anything we wanted, just so long as he kept pain away from us. But we do not even treat our own children this way. How can we expect God, our heavenly father to do it with us?

No, C.S. Lewis continues…

“God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

3. Pain tests the depth of our obedience to God

If our love for God and our obedience are conditional on producing pleasure in us, then how deep is our commitment to Him?

This question is what is behind the biblical story of Job. Satan came into the presence of God with the proposition that a man like Job only served God because of what he could get out of it for himself. And, to be sure, Job had done quite well—he was very wealthy and successful by any standard.

Satan said “Take all that away from Job – in other words, let him experience some real pain – and then we’ll see what tune he sings.” So God allowed it. God allowed Satan to take away his possessions, his family, and his health. All he had left was a wife who wanted him to commit suicide, and three friends who steadily began to chip away at his reputation.

Yet under that onslaught, Job stood firm. Although he had agonizing questions about God’s ways, he continued to trust God’s goodness. He said “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” And through the painful trial, Job won a great victory.

Some of our modern TV preachers say that pain is incompatible with the victorious Christian life. But the Bible says that pain is an integral and unavoidable part of the victorious Christian life.

Jesus said “Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those who mourn…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness… Those are painful things! None of those things sound terribly pleasant to us. They are not experiences we wish for.

Yet ask yourself: When have I felt most “connected” with God; most dependent upon God? Was it in times of success, or in times of suffering? Suffering and pain produce grace, meekness, beauty of spirit, and strength of character that can be gained in no other way.

Ask yourself: Which person has made the most profound impact on my life – the one who has gone from success to success, from strength to strength? Or the one who has suffered affliction, yet has persevered and remained faithful through the pain?

This is why God allows pain into our lives. So that we can say with the Psalmist “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees…in faithfulness you have afflicted me.” (Psalm 119:71, 75)

Are we then to become masochists? Are we to become pain-lovers like the Hindu yogi on his bed of nails? Of course not. Remember – pain is a temporary affliction – it was not in the original blueprints. God is going to remove it some day. It is not something to be sought, but it is something to be accepted.

In the meantime, are we to be callous and hardened toward pain? When we see a person in pain, are we to say, like a fatalist “It is the will of God for that person. There is nothing I can do.” No – the spirit of Christ tells us to intervene, even as Jesus intervened in so many situations – to relieve pain and suffering wherever possible – to give people hope that the God who loves them is the God who will one day dry all our tears.

A young woman named Debbie Jackson Searles wrote a song after going through a crisis of emotional pain and depression. Christine Wyrtzen later recorded it. It goes like this…

I’ve been through a fire

That has deepened my desire

To know the living God more and more.

It hasn’t been much fun,

But the work that it has done

In my life has made it worth the hurt.

You see, sometimes we need the hard times

To bring us to our knees

Otherwise we do as we please and never heed Him.

But He always knows what’s best,

And it’s when we are distressed

That we really come to know God as He is.

The myth:

Pain is not God’s will for me.

The truth:

God allows pain in order to accomplish his will in me