Push Into the Pain
What God May Be Doing in Our Suffering
Pain is one of the most difficult realities of human life.
Most of us instinctively assume that suffering means something has gone wrong—that something has failed or broken. We try to avoid it, minimize it, or escape it as quickly as possible. Pain, in our natural way of thinking, is something to be eliminated.
But what if that is not always the case?
What if some of the pain we experience is not meant to destroy us… but to shape us?
There is a passage in the Psalms that has always struck me as one of the most remarkable statements in Scripture:
“Before I was afflicted I went astray,
But now I keep Your word.”
— Psalm 119:67 (NKJV)
That is a surprising thing to say.
The psalmist does not simply endure affliction—he looks back on it and recognizes that it corrected him. It brought him into alignment. It did something in him that comfort never could.
And just a few verses later, he makes the statement even more plainly:
“It is good for me that I have been afflicted,
That I may learn Your statutes.”
— Psalm 119:71
“It is good for me…”
That is not how we naturally speak about suffering.
And yet, the psalmist is not denying the pain. He is recognizing its purpose.
We are told, throughout Scripture, that God is good.
And yet, we also encounter affliction.
Those two realities must be held together.
If God is good, then the suffering that enters our lives cannot simply be meaningless destruction. It must have purpose. It must be doing something.
Scripture consistently presents suffering not merely as something to endure, but as something formational.
Something that shapes us.
Something that teaches us.
Something that brings us to places we could not reach any other way.
Someone once said something that has stayed with me for many years:
God whispers to us in our blessings.
He speaks to us through our conscience.
But He shouts to us through our pain.
There is something about suffering that clears the air.
When life is comfortable, the voice of God can easily be drowned out by the noise of everyday life. Blessings are good, but they can also lull us into a kind of spiritual sleep.
Our conscience speaks more clearly. It nudges us. It pricks us. It warns us when something is not right.
But pain does something deeper still.
Pain silences distractions.
Pain strips away illusions.
Pain forces us to confront what actually matters.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once observed that affliction works by “silencing all irrelevant voices.”
And that is often exactly what suffering does.
The voices of pride, ambition, distraction, and comfort suddenly grow quiet.
And in that quiet, we begin to hear something else.
We begin to hear the voice of God with a clarity we rarely experience when life is easy.
We often say things like, “I feel like God is trying to birth something in my life.”
We say it about calling, about purpose, about growth.
But if we are going to use that language, we should understand what it means.
Because birth is not gentle.
Birth is painful.
I remember when my first son was born. My wife was just twenty years old, and we had been in labor for something like forty-two hours. By the time it came time to push, she was exhausted.
And she didn’t yet know how to push properly.
My mother was there helping coach her through it, and I remember something very specific she said.
She said:
“Push as hard as you possibly can—until you feel like you cannot push any harder.”
And then she said:
“Now push a little harder than that.”
And hold it there.
What she was teaching her was something very important.
You cannot push the pain away.
You have to push into the pain.
Because if you push away from the pain, the baby actually moves the wrong direction.
But when you push into the place of greatest pressure, something begins to happen.
A head begins to crown.
And new life begins to appear.
Life comes forth through struggle.
We often speak about wanting victory in our lives.
Victory over sin.
Victory in faith.
Victory in calling.
But victory implies battle.
There is no victory without conflict.
The apostle Paul understood this when he wrote:
“Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in needs, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:10
That is not a natural way of thinking.
But Paul had discovered something.
It was precisely when his own strength was exhausted that the strength of God became visible.
One of the great misunderstandings about suffering is that people assume hardship means God is punishing them.
But Scripture describes something very different.
“Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons.”
— Hebrews 12:7
Discipline is not punishment.
Discipline is training.
My father once explained this using the example of exercise.
When someone lifts weights, the weights themselves do not give strength. What they do is tear the muscle. They damage it.
And then the body rebuilds that muscle stronger than before.
The hardship is not the strength.
The hardship forces strength to develop.
And something very similar happens spiritually.
Trials stretch our faith.
They deepen our dependence on God.
They prepare us for things we may not yet even see coming.
One of the most important realizations a believer can come to is this:
God has not authorized pain to destroy us.
He has authorized it to build us.
There is a moment in the book of Job where Satan is allowed to test Job—but there is a boundary.
Everything may be touched.
But Job himself cannot be destroyed.
Pain was allowed.
Destruction was not authorized.
And that distinction matters.
Because sometimes what feels like everything collapsing is actually something being stripped away.
Something unnecessary.
Something that cannot remain if something deeper is to be formed.
I remember a moment in my own life when I felt deeply overwhelmed.
Someone had trusted me in a way that involved a great deal of risk, and I knew that I had let them down.
I remember sitting in a meeting, feeling like I had dug a hole I did not know how to climb out of.
And someone began singing:
“From the end of the earth I will cry to You…
When my heart is overwhelmed,
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”
And I remember realizing something.
There is a rock higher than I am.
Even when we fail.
Even when we fall short.
Even when we feel crushed under the weight of our mistakes.
God is still calling us upward.
Pain is not the end of the story.
Sometimes pain becomes the doorway back to Him.
There is a moment in the book of Daniel where three men are thrown into a furnace.
And when the king looks into the fire, he sees not three—but four.
And the fourth looks like the Son of God.
There is something deeply comforting in that image.
God does not merely observe our suffering.
He enters it.
And He is already present in the fire.
And that raises an important question.
If God is present in the fire…
what is the fire doing?
My father once wrote something that has stayed with me for many years.
He described the work of craftsmanship this way:
Clay is pounded.
Flax is beaten.
Wool is teased, carded, and twisted.
Metal is softened and struck.The substance—whether material or human—must change its character.
It must be torn apart in order to be re-formed into something new.It must die in order to be reborn.
And he went on to say that the call of Christ is, in one sense, the call to the discipline of life as art.
Not an art of our own creation, but a life shaped into the image of the Master Craftsman—the Creator.
And when we begin to see life this way, something changes.
The adversities of life…
the misunderstandings…
the losses…
the struggles…
the blows that fall upon us…
are no longer simply the meaningless workings of blind chance.
They may be the pounding of the clay.
The beating of the flax.
The striking of the metal.
The shaping of a life into form.
And so the question becomes this:
Are the difficulties of life merely random events?
Or are they the blows of the blacksmith’s hammer…
the shaping of a life in the hands of a Master Craftsman?
Because if a hand can be discerned behind the hammer…
then the fire that touches us and the blows that fall upon us mean something entirely different.
And that brings us back to where we began.
God has not authorized pain to destroy us.
He has authorized it to shape us.
To form us.
To strengthen us.
And sometimes…
to bring something new into the world.
So when the pressure comes…
when the fire burns…
when the hammer falls…
the call of faith is not to run from the pain.
It is to push into it.
Because the Master Craftsman is still at work.
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