Last night I came across this paragraph, under the heading "Does His Suffering for Us Mean We Escape Suffering?" (chapter 3, pg 76-77).
"The answer is that Christ died for us so that we would not have to die for sin, not so that we would not have to die for others. Christ bore the punishment of our sin so that our death and suffering are never punishment from God. The call to suffer with Christ is not a call to bear our sins the way he bore them but to love the way he loved. The death of Christ for the sin of my selfishness is not meant to help me escape the suffering of love but to enable it. Because he took my guilt and my punishment and reconciled me to God as my Father, I do not need to cling any longer to the comforts of earth in order to be content. I am free to let things go for the sake of making the supremacy of God's worth known."The context of this paragraph is specifically concerning persecution, something with which we in the United States are fairly unfamiliar. But I believe that what he says about our suffering never being punishment from God applies to any suffering. And it is something I have to remind myself of fairly regularly.
But as I wrote in an earlier post, suffering has more than one purpose. Not only does it bring forth patience and love in the one suffering, but it gives opportunity to the body of Christ to carry one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of God. And those who suffer for Christ's sake must concentrate on loving through and in and with it in the way that Christ did when he suffered for us.
That is a tall order, so praise God that He has given us His Spirit to enable a love like that!
