Last week we looked at ten tips for walking through suffering with God. This week we present ten more.
- God uses suffering to reveal our hidden corruption. Notice the new insights about yourself that the pressure of suffering brings to the surface. Seek God for help with what suffering reveals.
- Develop a better understanding about the ways in which fear influences your life. Suffering often generates fears.
- Don’t dwell on the pain. Focus on other things. Continue doing your tasks.
- Do not indulge in sin! Do not go back to your former destructive habits! Fight them every way you know how. Find someone to hold you accountable. Many people ruin their Spiritual lives with these former sins and it takes them years to recover.
- Do not start believing lies. Do not let your thinking get scrambled or drift from Scripture. Do not believe that God does not love you or has abandoned you. You need the shield of faith to protect you from serious spiritual harm.
- Remember that it can be very difficult, if not impossible to understand why you are suffering. This adds to the distress. There are many possible reasons for suffering. Seek answers, but there may come a point when you need to give up trying to know why.
- Look for ways to stop suffering, unless that would be resisting God. Even Jesus, when he was facing the Cross, prayed “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42, ESV). We need to be wise about finding solutions but accepting the suffering in the meantime. Learn to accept the tension between embracing your suffering and looking for ways to stop it; do both wisely. Don’t spend large amounts of mental and emotional energy vascillating back and forth trying to decide which approach to pursue.
- Seek physical healing. If your suffering is primarily a health issue, then seek and follow good medical advice. Also, seek healing prayer and expect healing, but continue to be wise about your health and live as normally as you can.
- If your suffering is like Job’s suffering or like Paul’s thorn in the flesh then you will not be able to stop it. You cannot stop God from doing his will. The problem is that we normally don’t know if our suffering is like Job or Paul’s. This is just a truth to keep in mind.
- When we are angry in suffering it might be partly because we don’t have the proper expectations about God. (We also get angry just because of the pain.) He promises to protect our inner self but not to protect us from sufferings. If we think of him as our perfect protector our expectations will be dashed and we will struggle with Him.
Next week is part three of this series.
