Think back to a time when you were suffering significantly. Maybe it was a loved one dying, or a relationship gone wrong, or drama within your church or fellowship. For me, it was when people I trusted were becoming my greatest enemies. I prayed, but it seemed like God didn’t answer. To survive, I built a wall of steel around my heart. It was the loneliest time of my life.
What was it for you? When your suffering blocked out the sun, when you didn’t even know what to pray, when your world was one of confusion, fear, chaos, what was it like?
I may not know your deepest sufferings, but I do know your prayer:
Where are you, God? Don’t You see? Don’t You care?
In those moments, when your fiancé dies, when your cousin commits suicide, when you’re diagnosed with cancer, when no one understands you, when your entire country has been ravaged and bodies are strewn in the streets and the temple of God is no more, what do we need the most? For someone to throw a truth grenade at us? To “just let go and let God?” To believe that “everything happens for a reason?”
That’s not enough for me. A truth Band-Aid just won’t do. So we arrive at our question: “What do suffering people need most?”
What Suffering People Need Most
Joni Eareckson Tada has been a quadriplegic (paralyzed from the shoulders down) for over 50 years. Through those years, she has struggled with bitterness against God, depression, suicidal thoughts, chronic pain, and breast cancer. She’s most well-known for her foundation “Joni and Friends,” a ministry for disabled persons.
I want to quote her answer to “What do suffering people need most?” from her book, When God Weeps:
When [we] are sorely suffering…[we] are like hurting children looking up into the faces of their parents, crying and asking, “Daddy, why?” Those children don’t want explanations, answers, or “reasons why”; they want their daddy to pick them up, pat them on the backs, and reassure them that everything is going to be okay.
Our heartfelt plea is for assurance—Fatherly assurance—that there is an order to reality that far transcends our problems, that somehow everything will be okay. We amble on along our philosophical path, then—Bam!—get hit with suffering. …Suffering has not only rocked the boat, it’s capsized it.
We need assurance that the world is not splitting apart at the seams. We need to know we aren’t going to fizzle into a zillion atomic particles and go spinning off in space. We need to be reassured that the world, the universe, is not in nightmarish chaos, but orderly and stable.
God must be at the center of things. He must be in the center of our suffering.
What’s more, he must be Daddy. Personal and compassionate. …
God, like a father, doesn’t just give advice. He gives himself. 1
What do we need? Not pithy promises, but fatherly assurance. Not just advice, but God Himself—personal, compassionate, Father, Daddy. And this is exactly what we find Jeremiah saying in Lamentations 3:19–24.
Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
What does a suffering saint need most? God! When our world is falling apart, when we have forgotten what happiness is, when our hope has perished, when our life is bitter, we need God!
We need to know that He is with us, that He loves us with a steadfast, unfailing love, that His mercy is absolutely guaranteed in the morning, that His grace overwhelms even our most desperate of circumstances, that He is faithful to us, faithful to His promises, faithful to the end.
Even if we have nothing and no one else, we have Him! He is my portion, is my inheritance, is my only possession, says my soul. Therefore, I will hope, not in better circumstances, not in deliverance from pain, not in the end of suffering, but in Him. No one else, nothing less, will do.
This truth is the foundation of the psalmist’s cries to the Lord. Yes, they plead for deliverance. Yes, they appeal to theological truth. But above all, they appeal to the God of the Word.
“God is my Father, my refuge, my strength. He is the fount of every blessing, apart from whom I have no good. He is my portion, my cup, my lot, my inheritance. God is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my shield, my stronghold, my horn of salvation, my light, my hope, and my salvation.”
This is the language that the psalmists use to describe God; is it any wonder, then, that they cry out for Him? That they pant, faint, thirst, yearn for God to come near, to deliver them out of their affliction? This is the testimony of the Old Testament saints; He is their greatest need.
But in the new covenant, suffering saints have a more particular language: We need to know God as our heavenly Father, Abba, Daddy. We need to know that He is our inheritance forever. We need Him with us.
The good news is that He has not held Himself aloof. He has given us Himself, in the person and work of Jesus Christ—our Suffering Savior.
Christ, Our Suffering Substitute
Isaiah 52:12 to the end of Isaiah 53 is rightly called the passage on the Suffering Servant. In Isaiah 53:5-6, we see our Suffering Substitute:
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
Jesus is Immanuel, the Incarnate God. Immanuel: God with us. Incarnate: God in flesh. That matters because in Jesus Christ, God gave Himself. In a moment in time, Christ humbled Himself and became the Suffering Servant of God. Why?
Jesus did this so that He would be pierced through for our transgressions of God’s Law, so that He would be crushed under the wrath of God for our blatant disobedience. In Jesus, we are saved from our greatest peril. He drank the cup of wrath for our sin, so there is no more wrath for us. In Christ, our heavenly Father looks upon us with steadfast, unceasingly, endless, relentless love.
That means every believer is His beloved child, forever part of the family of God, never to be pushed away by sin, sickness, suffering, devastation, disease, or death. He cannot love us more; He will not love us less. His love is conditional upon one thing and one thing alone: Himself. He will not violate His own promise to never leave nor forsake His people. Rest in that, beloved child of God!
This gospel truth comes home to sufferers because Jesus’ death for our sins does not just give hope for eternity, but also today in the midst of our everyday suffering—our anxiety, loneliness, fear.
Christ, Our Sympathetic Sufferer
In Isaiah 53:3-4, we see Christ, our sympathetic sufferer:
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Whereas verse 5 focused on Jesus suffering on the cross as our substitute, verses 3 focuses on the social, emotional, and relational suffering Jesus bore through His entire life. Oh, the irony! He is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Maker of heaven and Earth and all that they contain, yet He, King Jesus, entered into our world of suffering.
- Have you been hated and rejected because of your faith? So was Jesus. His enemies called him Satan’s accomplice, an illegitimate child of his mother, a law-breaker, a friend of sinners, even a blasphemer.
- Have you lost friends and family to death? So did Jesus. We don’t see much of Jesus’ earthly father Joseph in the gospels, which probably means Joseph died while Jesus was quite young. When Jesus’ friend Lazarus died, Jesus wept. Even now, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints” (Ps 116:15). No one cares more about death than Jesus.
- Have you been violated and abused, unjustly condemned? So was Jesus. He was arrested and assaulted by the religious elite, beaten and scourged by soldiers, scorned and jeered by the crowds—yet blameless, to the very end.
- Have you been betrayed by a friend? So was Jesus. Judas Iscariot was one of the twelve; Jesus even washed his feet! But Judas sold Him for a mere thirty pieces of silver.
- Have you been utterly abandoned by friends and family? So was Jesus. His own brothers thought He was crazy. Hundreds of disciples abandoned Him when He taught that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood. Even the Eleven abandoned Him when He was arrested, to be condemned and crucified alone.
- Do you feel forsaken by God? Yours is a feeling, but Jesus was truly forsaken by the Father. Why else do you think He cried out on that cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Mt 27:46)
There is no suffering that you, I, or anyone else could go through that Jesus does not intimately understand. He is the sympathetic sufferer. And it is to you, dear suffering Christian, that He says, “I am with you always” (Mt 28:20). I will never leave you nor forsake you (Heb 13:5). Even though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need not fear any evil, for I am with you” (Ps 23:4). Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, surely I will help you, surely I will uphold you with My righteous right hand” (Is 41:10).
In Christ, we have a Friend who knows. We are never alone. But in Christ, God isn’t just with us in our suffering. He is even more intimate. Christ Himself bore our sufferings to the cross.
Christ, Our Suffering Bearer
In Isaiah 53:4, we see Christ, our suffering bearer.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
Matthew quotes this verse in Matthew 8:17. After showing that Jesus cleansed the unclean leper, healed the centurion’s paralyzed servant, took away the fever from Peter’s mother-in-law, and cast out the demons from the oppressed, Matthew writes: “he took our illnesses and bore our diseases.”
What could be more everyday suffering than griefs, sorrows, illnesses, and diseases? This means that Jesus carried not only our sin, but also our suffering to the cross. Yes, He absolutely suffered under the wrath of God for our sin; that is the dominant note of Isaiah 53. But He also suffered even the temporal effects of sin—earthly suffering. Our cancer, depression, loneliness, disability, abuse, sickness, sadness, betrayal, abandonment, conflict—our suffering—is not foreign to Him
In Jesus, God gives Himself. In Jesus, God comes close as personal, compassionate, and Father. In Jesus, God suffers with sufferers. In Jesus, God suffers for sufferers. In Jesus, God crucifies the curse of sin on this world. In Jesus, we have not only eternal salvation but also the hope of deliverance from suffering, sadness, pain, death—forever. In Jesus, we are free to live for God in everlasting joy.
Don’t misunderstand me. On this side of eternity, we are still under the weight of sin and suffering. This text does not teach that if we believe in Jesus we will stop suffering on this earth, no more than it teaches that if we believe in Jesus we will stop sinning. Instead, this verse teaches us at least these two things:
- Jesus conquered sin and the effects of sin (i.e. suffering)
On that day, the day of His return, the consummation of all the promises of God will finally be complete. This gives us confident hope. We look back at the cross of Christ, the central event not only of Christianity but of the entire history of the world, and rejoice that Christ has conquered sin, death, and the grave—and all of the effects of Adam’s sin. We look forward to the consummation of the ages, the full realization and establishment of God’s kingdom, when God will be King and He Himself will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away (Rev 21:4).
- We never “move on” from Jesus Christ.
Christians ought to be a Jesus-obsessed people. We ought to talk about Him, think about Him, enjoy Him, pray to Him—as if we worshiped Him. His death and resurrection isn’t just a ticket to get to heaven; He is ours for eternity and for right now—and that transforms every-day life.
Christ is everything to the saints. Scripture says that Christ is our hope (1 Tim 1:1). He is our life (Col 3:4). He is our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption (1 Cor 1:30). He has brought us to the Father of mercies, the God of all comfort (2 Cor 1:4). Or as Jeremiah says, the LORD is my portion, my inheritance, my only possession.
Thus, in Isaiah 53:3–6, we find that the end of our sin and suffering is not a solution, or an abstract truth, or a truth Band-Aid, but rather a Person: God Himself in the flesh, namely Jesus Christ, come to redeem us not only from the guilt of sin but also from the curse of sin. Save us to the uttermost, our God! Praise be to the gracious, lavishly generous, Almighty and good God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
I started this series by asking the question, “How do we counsel suffering brothers and sisters in Christ?” Now I can give you an answer: Show suffering saints Christ, our suffering savior—our suffering substitute, our sympathetic sufferer, and our suffering bearer. There is much more to do to be effective counsel, but whatever we do, it is not less than showing people Jesus.
In Part 3 of this series, I’ll give some practical advice for counseling suffering saints.
Editor’s Note: This post was adapted from a sermon preached to UCLA’s AACF on April 22, 2020, as part of the ministry of Lighthouse Community Church. It was also originally published on Keith Fong’s blog, The Art of Godliness. It has been adapted and republished here with permission from the author.