Why Does God Allow Us to Suffer?

Jesus Never Promised a Life Without Suffering

Jesus spoke John 16:33 shortly before He was handed over to brutal suffering and death. He did not stand at a safe distance and tell His followers to endure something He would never face. Our Lord suffered in a human body, bore the weight of our sin, and faced separation from His Father. He got what we deserved, and He gave us what He deserved.

Through a terrible degree of suffering, the Lord displayed the greatest act of love this world has ever seen. Christ died so that we might live through Him now and forever. The cross does not teach us that suffering is good in itself. It shows us that suffering cannot prevent the Lord from accomplishing His good purpose.

That matters when we are tempted to look at the pain around us and conclude that God must have failed us. The Lord never promised that mankind would stop producing trouble, that sin would stop hurting people, or that believers would never face sickness, loss, persecution, disappointment, or death. Jesus promised tribulation in the world and peace in Him.

That also means we should be careful about assuming that every hardship is the Father punishing us. The question of whether God punishes Christians deserves its own treatment. Suffering can come through our own choices, the actions of other people, the brokenness of life, or persecution for Christ. Pain by itself does not tell us that the Father has turned against us.

The larger question of how God remains sovereign without becoming the author of evil is developed in Did God Create Evil?. Here the point is simpler. If what Jesus said is true, suffering does not prove that God lied to us. He told us trouble would come. He also told us where peace would be found.

For the Christian, suffering is never the final word. The Lord will provide a way through it. If deliverance does not come in the form we want in this life, suffering still cannot follow us forever. Nothing about Christian suffering is permanent. Christ has already overcome the world.

Paul Learned to Depend on the God Who Raises the Dead

Paul gives us one of the clearest pictures of this kind of dependence in 2 Corinthians 1. He does not describe mild inconvenience. He says the affliction in Asia pressed him and his companions beyond their own strength.

“For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.”
2 Corinthians 1:8–11 ESV

Notice what Paul says the pressure did. It brought him to the end of his own strength. The answer was not to discover a little more self-confidence. It was to rely on the God who raises the dead.

Paul had been sent by the Lord with an apostolic mission, yet there were moments when it looked as if his work could end before it was finished. His confidence was not in his ability to control the situation. His hope rested in the Lord who had delivered him before and could deliver him again. Even death itself could not place Paul outside the power of the God who raises the dead.

Have you ever looked at something happening in your life and thought, This should not be happening this way? Maybe you have given yourself to a good purpose, worked hard, prayed, tried to be faithful, and still found yourself buried under circumstances you cannot fix. Paul knew that place. Scripture gives us people who understood real suffering, not just theories about it.

That helps us hear Philippians 4:11–13 correctly. “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” is not Paul announcing that Christians can accomplish anything they decide to attempt. He has just said that he learned how to be brought low and how to abound, how to face plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

“I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound… I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:11–13 ESV

The strength of Christ did not always remove Paul’s circumstances. It gave him strength within them. That is why contentment in Scripture is much deeper than getting the life we wanted. Does God Want Us to Be Happy? continues that question by looking at happiness, contentment, and trust when circumstances do not cooperate.

Suffering Exposes What We Depend On

Suffering has a way of exposing our dependencies. There are all kinds of things in life that we can enjoy without making them our source of life. Entertainment is not evil. Vacations are not evil. A good job is a blessing. Sports can teach our children discipline and purpose. A good movie can be a great way to spend a Friday evening. When I am doing physical work, I still think some good old rock and roll can make the workday better.

The problem begins when good things become the things we depend on to keep ourselves balanced, secure, satisfied, or in control. We can depend on the job, the money, the credit card, the schedule, the hobbies, or the next escape. Then trouble comes and the supports we trusted begin to shake.

This is where prayer can expose something important in us. When you find yourself in trouble, are you asking the Lord to help you find your way out, or are you asking Him to guide you in His way? There is a difference between asking for help and accepting guidance. Help is good when we have accepted the Lord’s guidance. But if we refuse His direction, what exactly are we asking Him to help us accomplish?

That is one reason Jesus’ teaching about asking cannot be separated from abiding and dependence. Ask and It Will Be Done: What Did Jesus Mean? follows John 15:7 in that setting. Prayer is not a way to recruit God into our plans. It is part of a life that is learning to remain in Christ.

Stop Grabbing the Wheel

The best way to avoid sin is not simply to try harder. The way to love more and live a holy life is not to keep squeezing more effort out of ourselves. It is about letting go of self-dependence, resting in Christ, and surrendering the belief that we always know what is best.

Jesus uses the language of counting the cost in Luke 14:28–32:

“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.”
Luke 14:28–32 ESV

The point is not simply that wise people plan ahead. The builder discovers whether he has enough to finish. The king looks at ten thousand against twenty thousand and has to recognize what he cannot accomplish in his own strength. If he cannot win, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

When we look at the context of this passage, Jesus is teaching that He is the peace. You cannot accomplish anything without Him. John 15:5 says it directly: “Apart from me you can do nothing.” You are not capable of living a holy life in your own strength. You will never finish the job that way. So what does a Christian do to be more holy? Depend on Christ alone.

Don’t play tug of war with God. Let go of the rope and cling to Christ. We need to stop fighting against the will of the Lord and simply step aside. The picture is not really Jesus waiting for us to hand Him the wheel. He already has the wheel, and we keep trying to steer Him in another direction because we think we know what is best. Surrender means we stop grabbing the wheel and let Him drive.

Fear and anxiety often reveal the same struggle. Cast Your Cares on the Lord develops that movement from anxious control toward dependence. We are not taught to abide in our emotions or our best effort. Jesus says, “Abide in me.”

Have you drifted away from that early desire simply to receive everything the Lord had for you? Jesus once asked the lame man by the pool, “Do you want to be healed?” There are times when the question beneath our request for relief is whether we are willing to let the Lord change our direction, our desires, or the way we are thinking.

There will always be distractions. We have to train our minds to return to grace. One piece of advice I have had to remind myself of again and again is this: do not set grace aside for any amount of time or for any reason, even when self-effort seems necessary in the moment. We can spend tremendous energy trying to fix ourselves and still move farther from the peace we were trying to find.

No achievement, health, success, or praise from the world will ever be enough to sustain us. We can keep filling the tank with temporary gratification and wonder why we are still running on empty. The answer is not another temporary refill. Fill your life with the love of God.

Strength Is Made Perfect in Weakness

Paul returns to this same truth in 2 Corinthians 12. He asked the Lord to remove his thorn in the flesh, and the answer was not removal. The answer was grace.

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul responds, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me… For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:9–10 ESV

Sometimes feeling helpless is exactly where our own strength finally gets out of the way. Paul does not look weak when we read his life because Christ trained him to depend on the love and strength of the Father. His weakness became the place where another power was seen.

If you want to follow Paul’s thorn and the reason grace was sufficient when the suffering remained, continue with What Was Paul’s Thorn in the Flesh?. That passage makes it very hard to build a Christian life around the idea that answered prayer always means immediate removal of pain.

Paul also keeps bringing us back to love. First Corinthians 13 tells us that great gifts and great activity are empty without love. Ephesians 5:18 tells believers not to be drunk with wine but to be filled with the Spirit. Jesus speaks in John 7:37–38 of living water flowing from those who believe in Him.

There is a real contrast here. We can become intoxicated with self-effort, our own reasoning, our own plans, and our own ability to keep everything under control. Or we can be filled with the Spirit and learn to receive life from Christ. One leaves us empty. The other fills us with living water.

This is also why legalism is so spiritually exhausting. It keeps pulling our eyes back onto our own performance. We start measuring whether we are doing enough, believing enough, behaving well enough, or staying in the right spiritual condition. Before long we are bouncing in and out of fellowship with God in our minds, even though Christ is the one who established that fellowship. What Is Fellowship with God? develops the security of that relationship in grace.

When we sprinkle additives into the gospel, it can become like poison. Teachers add words like “positional” before forgiveness, make grace positional, and make our relationship with the Father conditional. Then people are sent back and forth between self-effort and grace, wondering whether they are close to God one minute and far from Him the next. That kind of teaching becomes a blind guide when it comes to grace. Don’t learn grace from the blind.

Abide in Truth, Not Emotion

When worry takes over, it is easy to let the strongest emotion in the room become our guide. But we are not taught to abide in our emotions. Second John 1:2 speaks of “the truth that abides in us and will be with us forever.” Truth has to have a deeper place in us than the feeling of the moment.

As our minds are renewed, we can look more clearly at what kind of suffering we are facing. If our own sin is producing consequences, the answer is not to excuse it. We can bring it into the light and ask for the love of Christ to overcome what our self-effort could not. If we are suffering while doing what is right, we can keep depending on the Lord without interpreting the hardship as proof that we have failed.

Be patient and diligent in prayer. Do not stop believing that the power of Christ is within you. The strength you are looking for is not a more impressive version of your own physical or mental strength. It is His strength.

Romans 8:37–39 gives us the foundation beneath all of this. Neither death nor life, things present nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Circumstances can hurt us. They cannot separate us from Him.

Suffering Can Produce Hope

There is a difference between suffering because of destructive choices and suffering while doing what is right. Sin can bring real consequences. We can hurt ourselves and other people. Grace does not make foolish choices harmless. But when we suffer while depending on the Lord, suffering does not have to produce emptiness.

Romans 5 begins with the settled truth that we have been justified by faith and have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul does not then pretend that suffering disappears. He says something much stronger.

“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Romans 5:3–5 ESV

Paul’s answer is not that suffering is pleasant. His answer is that suffering cannot stop the life of Christ from producing fruit in us. Endurance, character, and hope can grow in the very place where our own strength fails.

That brings us back to the question we started with. Why does God allow us to suffer? Scripture does not give one mechanical explanation for every painful event. What it does give us is a place to stand. Jesus told us trouble would come. Paul showed us what happens when our strength runs out. The Lord can deliver, sustain, teach, strengthen, and produce hope without surrendering us to the circumstances around us.

Paul says in Romans 8 that we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Then he reaches across every category he can name and says that neither death nor life, angels nor rulers, things present nor things to come, nor anything else in creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That is the kind of security suffering cannot touch.

Depending on ourselves eventually leads to emptiness. It does not matter how hard we try to maintain the appearance of control. Self-effort eventually runs out of fuel. Christ does not.

Ephesians 3:16–20 prays that believers would be strengthened with power through the Spirit in the inner person, rooted and grounded in love, and filled with all the fullness of God. That is not an empty religious slogan. It is the supernatural life of Christ at work within us.

No level of achievement, health, money, comfort, or success can replace that life. Worldly gratification can keep us busy while leaving us spiritually empty. Praise from the world is temporary. The love of God is not.

If God raises the dead, He can raise us above our circumstances. That does not mean we pretend the pain is gone. It means the pain does not get to become our lord. We can bring our fear, weakness, confusion, and suffering to Christ and learn again to depend on His strength.

And when life reaches a place where we feel as if we have hit the bottom, grace is still there. God Is Always Below the Bottom carries that truth into the moments when feelings fail and suffering becomes difficult even to put into words.

Christianity is more than cleaning up a list of habits. It is salvation from a faithless mindset and a life of dependence on Christ. We know suffering will come. The question is whether we will try to endure it from our own emptiness or receive the strength, love, and hope of the One who raises the dead.