Suffering Is Never For Nothing: 7-Day DevotionalSample

Day 2

“I will be with you when you pass through the waters, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you. You will not be scorched when you walk through the fire, and the flame will not burn you.” Isaiah 43:2 CSB

We come back again to the terrible truth that there is suffering. The question remains, is God paying attention? If so, why doesn’t He do something? I say He has, He did, He is doing something, and He will do something. The subject can only be approached by the cross. That old, rugged cross so despised by the world. The very worst thing that ever happened in human history turns out to be the very best thing because it saved me. It saves the world.

And so God’s love, which was represented, demonstrated to us in His giving His Son Jesus to die on the cross, has been brought together in harmony with suffering. It’s only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love. And we will never understand suffering unless we understand the love of God.

And when I stood by my shortwave radio in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing, and God brought to my mind the words of the Prophet Isaiah, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee.” You can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual. I was saying, but Lord, You’re with me all the time. What I want is Jim. I want my husband. We had been married twenty-seven months after waiting five and a half years.

Five days later I knew that Jim was dead. And God’s presence with me was not Jim’s presence. That was a terrible fact. God’s presence did not change the terrible fact that I was a widow and I expected to be a widow until I died because I thought it was a miracle I got married the first time. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever get married a second time, let alone a third time. God’s presence did not change the fact of my widowhood. Jim’s absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God, my hope and my only refuge. And I learned in that experience who God is. Who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise. And

so I can say to you that suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth. I Am. I am the Lord. In other words, that God is God.

This is the part that brings me immeasurable comfort: The universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of God.

Where does this idea of a loving God come from? It is not a deduction. It is not man so desperately wanting a god that he manufactures Him in his mind. It’s He who was the Word before the foundation of the world, suffering as a lamb slain. And He has a lot up His sleeve that you and I haven’t the slightest idea about now. He’s told us enough so that we

know that suffering is never for nothing.