No One Knows My Pain
In suffering, we tend to draw inward and isolate to protect ourselves from further pain. Satan preys on that instinct, convincing us that we don’t need anyone else, and that others will only add to our grief, rather than easing it. He wants us to feel alone and self-righteous in our pain. Yet as we lean into God and his people, the Lord can transform us into humble servants, sanctified and shaped by our suffering.
One of my dearest friends lost both parents to suicide. Her father died when she was a teenager, and her mother passed away more recently. I was stunned and speechless when she told me about her mother’s death. How does anyone endure that kind of loss?
I was sure my words would be inadequate and unhelpful, yet my friend kept calling, asking my advice, letting me minister to her. She humbly shared both her pain and her struggles. She confessed her anger at her siblings’ callous response and asked me to pray for her. When she told me that our conversations had helped her, I was convicted by how rarely I let people into my pain. I had often assumed that if they hadn’t experienced what I had, they wouldn’t be able to understand it.
Rather than inviting others into my pain and grief, I’ve often pushed them away. I’ve felt a vague sense of self-righteousness, confident that no one could speak into my life except God himself. I’ve dismissed others’ experiences, even the comfort of friends, because they couldn’t fully relate to my suffering.
Temptation to Isolate
Right before my son’s death, my husband and I had worked through a significant marital struggle that intertwined with my grief. Messy and muddled, there were parts of my pain I felt I couldn’t share with others, so I was sure that no one could know how I felt. I withdrew from fellowship, hesitant to share deeply with others—it felt too vulnerable to be that exposed. Besides, I looked stronger and more spiritual when I didn’t let people in.
My attitude unknowingly intensified my pain, cutting off an important means of God’s grace and rescue: his people. My grief isolated me, ushering me into a silent silo in which I felt compelled (or perhaps entitled) to deal with my struggle alone. I said I was tired of hearing platitudes, but in truth, I was tired of hearing anything. I had closed everyone off, and no one dared to enter in.
This temptation to isolate, to pull away from community, assuming no one can help, is common in suffering. So how do we fight this temptation to pride—to believing that no one understands us and therefore no one can help us?
Pain and Loss and Sin
As someone who has dealt with layers of losses, I have seen this temptation to pride and isolation more than once. Pain, like sin, has a way of hardening my heart and blinding me to my real need.
When I was a single parent dealing with a significant physical disability, I was less concerned about being rescued from my sin than I was about being commended for my faith. In fact, I saw myself as a righteous victim in anything related to my suffering. Yet even those commended by God for their righteousness were not sinless, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). For instance, while Job was a righteous man, his suffering humbled him, and he repented in dust and ashes for pridefully speaking of what he did not know (Job 42:5–6).
I hadn’t fully considered my own sin as it related to my suffering until I heard Joni Eareckson Tada share about how pain and loss had sanctified her. She was paralyzed in a diving accident at age 17 and often spoke about how God changed her, transforming her once-sour and peevish disposition as she submitted daily to Jesus. Most of us would expect, or at least excuse, a quadriplegic with an irritable attitude, but Joni was determined to let God use her disability to refine her character. She writes in Lost and Found:
-
You Will be Breathtaking
Discovering all that we are and will be in Christ may be one key to escaping the cold cells of man-centeredness. Because anything glorious we discover about ourselves — and we will be glorious — is a mere reflection of him. We don’t receive any glory that does not whisper his glory and therefore glorify him all the more. We are “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9–11).
It might be hard to imagine that a phrase like soli Deo gloria could be misunderstood or misapplied. To God alone be the glory. What could be unclear or mistaken in those six simple words?
Fortunately, the main burden of the phrase is wonderfully and profoundly clear. Our generation (and, to be fair, every generation before us and after us) desperately needs to be confronted with such God-centered, God-entranced clarity. The clarion anthem of the Reformation has been the antidote to what ails sinners from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. We fall short of the glory of God by preferring anything besides the glory of God above the glory of God. That’s what sin is.
We want the credit, the appreciation, the praise for any good we’ve done (and pity and understanding for whatever we’ve done wrong). We were made to make much of him, but we demand instead that he make much of us. That is, if we think much of God at all. John Piper has been waving the red flag for decades.
It is a cosmic outrage billions of times over that God is ignored, treated as negligible, questioned, criticized, treated as virtually nothing, and given less thought than the carpet in people’s houses. (“I Am Who I Am”)
God’s glory gets less attention than the fibers under our feet — and we wonder why life feels so confusing and hard. Five hundred years ago, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and other reformers recovered the priceless medicine: soli Deo gloria. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory” (Psalm 115:1).
To Us be the Glory
The Reformers were living in a spiritual pandemic of compromise and confusion. As they walked through the darkness and corruption, they stumbled into the holy pharmacies of Scripture. And what did they find in those vials? They found, above all else, the glory of God. And that startling light became the North Star of all their resistance. They would not settle for any religion that robbed God of what was his and his alone.
Justification — what makes us right before God — had been distorted and vandalized in ways that uplifted our work, our self-determination, our glory. God’s justifying act was no longer found by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, but in significant measure, muddied by our efforts. And that emphasis on what we do in salvation siphoned off glory from the gospel. To us, O Lord, and to our name, be some of the glory.
The stubborn word of God would not surrender glory so easily, though. “I am the Lord,” the Reformers read; “that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols” (Isaiah 42:8). “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25). Then four more times in just three short verses:
For my name’s sake I defer my anger;for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you,that I may not cut you off. . . .For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it,for how should my name be profaned?My glory I will not give to another. (Isaiah 48:9–11)
The only God who saves is a God rightly, beautifully jealous for glory. He plans and works all things, especially salvation, “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:6, 12, 14). Our only hope in life and death is that God will do whatever most reveals the worth and character and beauty of God.
Read More
Related Posts: -
Authentic Ministry: Servanthood, Tears, and Temptations
Paul did not consider his life as precious or “of great value.”11 When he understood that it was necessary for him to go to Jerusalem to glorify God, he did not protest, saying: “But Lord, they want to kill me there. I have an important ministry among the gentiles. The churches in Asia and Greece need my theological wisdom and my practical guidance. Surely someone else could go.” Instead, Paul saw himself as a servant “for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor. 4:5). Nothing was more precious to him than to submit to the will of God. Nothing was more important than completing the work that the Lord Jesus gave to him. Thomas Manton (1620–77) said, “Life is only then worth the having when we may honor Christ by it. . . . Paul loved his work more than his life, and preferred obedience before safety.”12
In this way Paul denied himself, took up his cross and followed Christ, who, “being found in fashion as a man, . . . humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). Christ is God; yet Christ is also God’s servant par excellence. If He, whom we rightly call Lord and Master, washed the feet of His disciples, how much more should we be willing to undertake lowly and difficult tasks? Henry wrote of Paul, “He was willing to stoop to any service, and to make himself and his labors as cheap as they could desire.”13
Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676), a leading theologian of the Dutch Further Reformation, wrote voluminous theological disputations in Latin while seeking to reform the church and society of the Netherlands. Voetius has been compared to the English Puritan John Owen in stature and influence, yet Voetius took time every week to teach catechism to orphaned children.14 He did not regard that work as something too lowly for someone of his standing but gladly obeyed the Bible’s call to care for widows and orphans (James 1:27).
2. He delights in giving more than in receiving. Paul says in Acts 20:33–34, “I have coveted no man’s silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me.” As Apostle to the gentiles, Paul started many churches in centers of wealth, but not with the idea of making himself rich in the process. He gladly preached the gospel for free, earning his own way as a tentmaker if no one was able or willing to support him. He was willing to spend his own money on these churches, much as parents support their children (2 Cor. 12:14–15). So, Paul could say to the Ephesian elders, “I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35, KJV). How precious these words are from Christ’s earthly ministry, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Proud people are like black holes in outer space. They think they deserve glory, honor, and power for what they do, but whatever they manage to get simply disappears into their darkness, for they are never satisfied. They are like Haman, who was a great prince in the Persian Empire but was “full of wrath” when one man refused to bow to him (Est. 3:1–5). By contrast, people of humility are like the sun. They constantly shine forth light and warmth, blessing those around them. They do not covet glory and honor for themselves; they give freely, willing to “spend and be spent” for Christ’s sake. In doing so, they attract people as the sun attracts objects with its gravitational pull, and they create beautiful, ordered families, churches, and societies. -
Can Science Disprove the Christian Notion of the Soul?
The body can be weighted, measured, nipped, tucked, prodded, poked, whatever. The soul on the other hand, since it is immaterial, cannot. Does this make the Christian position somehow weaker, or beyond any real scrutiny? No.
Do you have a soul? Can science say anything about it? Can science disprove it?
Brian Cox, the musician turned professor, says science makes it plain the soul does not exist. If there was some other material source present in the body, it should be detectable in some way. Since the soul is not detectable in some measurable way, it must not exist.
This reminds me of a conversation with a skeptic friend some years back. He told me if I could prove what organ in the body is the soul, he would gladly believe. But that demonstrates the problem, doesn’t it? He believes only those things that can in some way be reduced to a material explanation are real. Furthermore, I never claimed the soul is an organ in the body. It is easy to begin talking past each other on points like this.
The Christian belief is that the soul is an immaterial part of the human condition. To be a human is to have a material body and an immaterial soul. Humans are a unit of soul and body. The body can be weighted, measured, nipped, tucked, prodded, poked, whatever. The soul on the other hand, since it is immaterial, cannot. Does this make the Christian position somehow weaker, or beyond any real scrutiny? No.
Read More
