How to Suffer Well: Advancing the Gospel

Greetings friends in the faith,
This past Sunday we were able to dive into the biblical reality of suffering in this life and how James wrote about it in his letter to persecuted Christians. Admittedly, this is obviously a topic no one really likes, or even prepares for. But it is in fact something we need to come to terms with, as well as intentionally take steps to prepare for.

As a summary of what we saw together on Sunday morning, here are three things that will carry you through your particular situation or season of suffering:

Nobody practices for suffering. We prepare for careers, hobbies, relationships, and retirement. We take lessons, watch tutorials, and put in the hours to get better at the things we care about. But when it comes to one of the most guaranteed experiences of human life, most of us show up completely unprepared. Suffering arrives, and we are caught off guard every single time.

Don Carson, in his book "How Long O Lord? Reflections on Suffering and Evil," put it plainly: "One of the major causes of devastating grief and confusion among Christians is that our expectations are false. We do not give the subject of evil and suffering the thought it deserves until we ourselves are confronted with tragedy." That observation cuts deep because it is true of nearly all of us. We know suffering is coming. We have already lived through some of it. And yet we rarely stop to think carefully about how to endure it with faith intact.

James 5:7-11 is one of the Bible's direct and practical addresses to believers who are in the middle of real hardship. James was not writing to people with theoretical problems. He was writing to men and women who were being oppressed, marginalized, and pushed to their limits. And into that reality, he offers three characteristics that mark the person who suffers well.

Patience: The Long Game of Faith
The first thing James calls his readers to is patience. He uses the image of a farmer who plants his seed and then waits. The farmer cannot control the rain. He cannot rush the soil. He puts the seed in the ground and trusts the process, day after day, with no guarantee of what any given season will bring. James tells suffering believers to adopt that same posture.

This is not passive resignation. It is active, grounded trust. Paul echoed this same call to the church at Thessalonica, urging believers to be patient with one another through every kind of difficulty (1 Thessalonians 5:14). Patience as a theme runs through the whole of Scripture, from the Psalms to Proverbs to Isaiah's promise that those who wait on the Lord will be renewed in their strength. The sheer frequency of this theme in the Bible tells us something honest about ourselves: we are deeply impatient people, and God knows it.

James grounds his call to patience in something specific. In verse 8, he points to the return of Christ as the reason to hold on. He tells believers to establish their hearts, to prepare themselves, because the Lord is coming. Think about what it means to wait for something you know is worth waiting for. A mother enduring the final weeks of pregnancy does not give up because the discomfort is real. She endures because she knows what is coming.

The promise on the other side of the waiting changes everything about how she endures the waiting itself. That is the picture James is painting for the suffering believer.

Positivity: Refusing to Let Grumbling Win
The second characteristic James calls out is the refusal to grumble. Verse 9 is blunt: do not grumble against one another. It is easy to get along when life is comfortable. It is something else entirely to remain kind, generous, and encouraging toward the people around you when the pressure is rising and the hardship is real. Stress has a way of making grumbling feel justified, even righteous. But James draws a line.

Here is the spiritual logic behind it: suffering is not a detour. It is not a sign that something has gone wrong with God's plan for your life. We live in a broken world, and a culture saturated with prosperity thinking has conditioned many of us to believe that difficulty means something has gone off the rails. It has not. The hard seasons, the painful chapters, the moments that bring us to our knees, these are not interruptions to God's purposes.

They are often the very means by which God is working out those purposes in us.

Paul is the clearest example of this. Writing from a prison cell in Philippians 1:12-14, he describes how his imprisonment has actually advanced the gospel. He is not performing optimism. He is operating from a supernatural understanding of what God is doing in and through his suffering. Later in the same letter, in Philippians 2, he commands believers to do everything without grumbling or complaining so that they might shine as lights in a dark world. The connection is not accidental. Grumbling dims the light. Joyful endurance amplifies it.

Peter reinforces this in 1 Peter 1:3-4, pointing believers toward a living hope and an inheritance that cannot be taken away. That eternal perspective is what makes positivity possible in the middle of suffering. It is not manufactured cheerfulness. It is the fruit of knowing where the story ends.

Perseverance: The Long Walk of the Faithful
The third characteristic is perseverance, and James illustrates it by pointing to the prophets of the Old Testament. He does not need to list every name. The reader's imagination fills in the gaps: Jeremiah thrown into a cistern, Daniel in the lions' den, Elijah standing alone on Mount Carmel. These were men who suffered not because of what they did wrong, but because of what they did right. They spoke in the name of the Lord, and it cost them.

James highlights Job specifically, whose story in Job 42 stands as one of the Bible's most powerful portraits of a man who endured unimaginable loss and remained in faith. James points to Job's story to make two things clear. First, perseverance allows us to see the purposes of the Lord. Second, it allows us to see the benevolence of the Lord, his compassion, his mercy, his genuine kindness toward those who hold on.

God does not permit suffering in the lives of his children simply so they can get through it as fast as possible. He uses it to produce something in them that cannot be produced any other way. Holiness, depth of faith, and genuine trust are forged in difficulty.

There is a saying worth sitting with: nothing advances the gospel more than suffering. But to suffer well, you first need the gospel. The good news of Jesus Christ is not just the comfort at the end of suffering. It is the foundation that makes faithful endurance possible from the very first moment the storm arrives.

May God Grant Us Power & Wisdom to Suffer Well,
Bro. Tony