How Pain Teaches Us to Love Like God

So in the last post we saw that God puts our spiritual welfare ahead of our physical welfare, but why does he need to use pain?  Pain has to be viewed through the lens of love, otherwise we will never be able to make any sense of it at all.  Pain’s main end is always love, meaning that all pain is ultimately intended to 1) make us more loving, and 2) help us better come to know God’s love.

But we’re fallen creatures with disordered wills.  Thanks to the Fall, we naturally put our own selfish desires above God and His love.  And so we have to train ourselves to put God first and trust Him.  We have to discipline ourselves to live by God’s law until it feels more natural.  We have to learn to want and love Him above everything else, which is perhaps the hardest thing of all to do.  Because one minute we’re promising to put Him first (fully intending to do, of course) and the next we’re acting as if we never made any such promise.

Pain can be purifying because it can teach us about love and sacrifice.  This isn’t a given, though, because pain makes us want to put ourselves first.  Pain makes us want to think of nothing but ourselves and finding a way to stop the pain.  And certainly it is our right to try and stop or reduce pain, but what do we do when we can’t?  How do we act when we’re stuck with pain?  We can either complain and snap at those around us or we can choose to be friendly and loving towards those around us even though we don’t feel like it.  We can feel sorry for ourselves or we can find a way to serve others in our pain.  We can get angry and isolate ourselves, closing our hearts to love or we can fight through the pain and make the effort to love, thereby expanding our hearts.

Ultimately, pain can teach us to put the love of others before our own desires if we’ll let it.  In other words, it can teach us to love like God.  Jesus put His love for us above all His humanly desires to flee from the Cross.  He put our needs above His well-being.  Our pain gives us the opportunity to imitate Him, to put our love for others above our sufferings.

And this is what our earthly life is for: to serve God and to become like Him.  It’s true that following Him can be painful, but it’s only in conforming our lives to His and ourselves to Him that we can ever truly come to know what love is.  Pain can make us saints…if we’ll let it.

My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son….God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it (Heb 12:5-6, 11)

Did you miss Part I of this post?  See: Why Does God Allow Suffering?

Part III: Letting the Pain Mold Us: Putting God’s Will Above Our Own

3 Comments

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  By Shane Kapler, March 6, 2011 @ 7:33 pm

  Your wrestling with this subject has borne awesome fruit – you are a gifted teacher!

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  By Ramon, March 7, 2011 @ 6:20 pm

  wow.. I googled “why does god put us through so much pain” and I went on this website and started to read the passage on why god puts you through pain first so you can have a stronger love, and I never felt this good in awhile. This passage might have just saved my life, seriously. – AMEN

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1. Learning to Put God's Will Above Our Own Through Prayer — March 15, 2011 @ 7:34 am

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