When you melt into God like that, it’s more than knowing about him, it’s knowing him. The inside stuff. How the Father loves the Son. How the son pleases the Father, not himself. How the Spirit reveals the Son, never himself. How the Son reveals the Father, never pointing to himself. The Father begets the Son, the Son honors the Father, the Spirit reveres them both. It’s a kind of divine “dying to self.”
Paul knew if his heart were to be knit to God’s, it would mean suffering. Never pointing to himself but honoring and revering the Other. To get in the trenches with God where they could fight a common enemy. Where their hearts could be pressed together.
This is real esprit de corps. To know God in the trenches is to know why we trust him. Why shouldn’t you trust the one covering your back in the crossfire? To know God is to be free of the incessant need to understand exactly what he is doing before you place confidence in him. Members with such esprit de corps are the happiest people in the world.
Such people know the real enemy. They know God will never run out of bullets—there will always be enough grace. They know God will never fail them. They know his mercy when they falter. His protection. His peace in the midst of the battle. His compassion for the hurting.
They are convinced God is with them in the trenches.
I WANT TO KNOW…THE FELLOWSHIP OF SHARING IN HIS SUFFERINGS
This is the best part: He delights in identifying with us in our suffering.
When the apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus, the risen Lord didn’t say, “Saul, why are you persecuting my people?” God said, “Why are you persecuting me?” (see Acts 9:4). He considers our sufferings his sufferings. He feels the sting in his chest when you hurt. He takes it personally. “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first,” he said in John 15:18.This is intimacy described from Jesus’ perspective.
Jesus is a Savior who can “sympathize with our weaknesses…one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). My blind friend Peter shares how humiliated he was when, as a teenager, he fell after striking his head on a low branch. Sprawled on the ground in front of his friends, he felt hurt and embarrassed. His confidence in God was shaken: You don’t understand what it’s like to be blind, God. To not know where the next blow might come from! But Jesus does. “The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him. They blindfolded him and demanded,’Prophesy! Who hit you?’” (Luke 22:63-64).
Another friend, Gloria, fell into deep anguish over the dismal prognosis of her daughter’s illness. Little Laura had already suffered enough from the degenerative nerve disorder she had been born with, and now the doctors’ forecast included more suffering and impending death. One night after leaving her daughter’s bedside, she spat, “God, it’s not right. You’ve never had to watch one of your children die!” As soon as the words escaped, she clasped her hand over her mouth. He did watch his child die. His one and only Son.
Early on when I realized Jesus is a Savior who could sympathize with our weakness, I was passionately telling everybody how “Christ was paralyzed on the cross.” How he understood how I felt. A stressed-out firefighter happened to cross the wake of my enthusiasm. In the diner where we met, I offered, “He’s been there. He understands.” Outside, taxis honked and trucks rumbled by, but we were oblivious. The fireman’s gaze held mine—me, cheerful and sincere; he, disbelieving and with scorn lining his tired mouth. “So he understands. Big deal. What good does that do me?” he bristled as he raised his arms from under the table. His rolled-up sleeves revealed the smooth ends of two stumps where hands should be. “Burned off in a blaze. Lost my job.”
I was taken aback. I was fresh out of the hospital and certainly no theology student or expert on the Bible. Cheer drained from my face. I answered as honestly as I knew how. “I don’t know all the answers. And I’m not sure if I did that it would help. But I do know the One who has the answers.” A long pause. His gaze lowered. “—and knowing him makes all the difference.” I had never spoken with such confidence, but I sensed the esprit de corps with this man with no hands. I then shocked myself by saying for the first time since my accident, “I’d rather be in this chair knowing him than on my feet without him.”
The fireman didn’t need a briefcase full of words. He needed the Word. The Word made flesh—gouged, with nail-pierced wrists, hands nearly ripped off. Spat upon, beaten bloody, with flies buzzing and hatred hammering. These aren’t merely facts about Jesus. This isn’t love as an abstract idea. This is love poured out like wine as strong as fire. In that diner, the fireman stopped thinking of God as a meditating mystic on a faraway mountain. No longer was he an abstract deity. Nothing neat and tidy about him. God got messy when he smeared his blood on a cross to save people from hellfire. This held a strange appeal for this man who had injured himself rescuing others from the flames.
Programs, systems, and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God—really know him—is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with him. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses life for me and for the gospel will save it” (Mark 8:34-35).
The fireman was gripped. God didn’t merely expose the fireman’s sin, he entered it. He came into it. Like entering a burning building to hand a baby out the window just in the nick of time. But Jesus lost more than his hands; he lost his life. Thankfully, he was not scorched by death. He burst back to life. What power! If I’m to be held steady in the midst of my suffering, I want to be held not by a doctrine or a cause but by the most powerful Person in the universe.
Amazing love, how can it be? That God should plunge the knife in his heart for me—all the while, me, dry and indifferent, cool and detached. That he, the God of life, should conquer death by embracing it. That he should destroy the power of sin by letting it destroy him. This is “the foolishness of God…wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God…stronger than man’s strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).
Little wonder the apostle Paul was aching to experience him “and the power of his resurrection.”
I WANT TO KNOW…THE POWER OF HIS RESURRECTION
Julia Beach stood behind the crumpled form of her husband, Bob. She, graying, slight-built and short, he, massive, muscular and with a patch over his eye from a hunting accident. She sighed, confessing, “Before I open my eyes in the morning, I am sometimes hit with the thought, Dear Jesus, I can’t face another day. I’m overwhelmed by discouragement before I even throw the covers back.” I wondered how they manage from day to day. Mrs. Beach needs power from out of this world.
You can’t rise above your circumstances without power. Can’t push through your pain without a force on your side. Can’t even grasp a brighter perspective, a happier hope without strength from somewhere.
But why does Paul say “the power of his resurrection”?
And how does it help Julia?
First, she’s helped just by knowing Jesus empathizes. For Jesus to be resurrected, he first had to die. To die, he first had to become human (without ever surrendering his deity). So the resurrected Jesus once walked in Julia’s shoes and felt the pain of this earthly life. Even though he’s now in heaven, he has a “divinely” good memory that recalls his days upon earth. He knows what Mrs. Beach goes through. Is Julia Beach broken? He is broken with her. Do neighbors no longer come by to help? Jesus couldn’t get his three best friends to spend an hour in prayer with him. If she feels like the world has passed her by, he too was ignored. Is she sinking into sorrow? He sunk low as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3 KJV). Does he descend into her hell? Yes, for Julia may cry, “The darkness is all around me,” but “even the darkness is not dark to him” (Psalm 139:12).You can endure most anything, even hours sitting
vigil by a sickbed, if you know God is sitting next to you.
Secondly, the “power of his resurrection” helps Mrs. Beach because she’s earmarked as a recipient of the Spirit whom the resurrected Jesus won the right to pour out on her. This means she has immediate access to incredible power.
But wait. There’s no gain without pain; remember, Jesus had to conquer sin and death in order to pour out that power. Access to this power will cost us something, like “an eye gouged” or “if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell” (Matthew 5:29-30). Jesus becomes one with us in our suffering; we, in turn, become one with him in his. He takes on our flesh; we take on his holiness.
Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but 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.
Hebrews 12:10-11
If Jesus died for sin, we die to sin. This doesn’t mean we must die as Christ did, paying sin’s penalty, but if we are to experience life-changing, suffering-shaking power in our lives, we “always [bear] in the body the dying of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:10).
At first, this might not sit well with Mrs. Beach. It sounds cold and hard. “Gouge an eye? My husband’s already lost one. What more could you possibly want from us, God?” What God wants is for this frail, tired woman to die to her doubts, fears, anxieties, and abilities. God knows they are a burden too heavy for her to bear.
Dying to self. It’s just a small taste of the pangs and affliction Christ experienced, but taste it, we must. If we’re going to cash in on his joy, peace, and heavenly home, if we are going to partake of all of Christ’s benefits, then it means, “sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” Death is the gateway to life.
And the gateway to power.
But how do we walk through the gate?
THE CROSS
By itself, suffering does no good. But when we see it as the thing between God and us, it has meaning. Wedged in the crux—the cross—suffering becomes a transaction. The cross is the place of transaction. “The cross is…the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). It is the place where power happens between God and us.
It’s where relationship is given birth and depth. The cross was, first, a transaction between the Father and the Son. Because of what transpired there—the work of salvation—the cross has meaning. Not only between the Father and the Son, but between the Son and us. For our salvation, yes, but also for our suffering. The cross is the center of our relationship with Jesus. Something literal happened there 2,000 years ago. It is where we were given spiritual birth.
Something symbolic is happening still: the cross is where we die. We go there daily. But it isn’t easy. Normally, we will follow Christ anywhere—to a party, as it were, where he changes water to wine, to a sunlit beach where he preaches from a boat, to a breezy hillside where he feeds thousands, and even to the temple where he topples the tables of the moneychangers. But to the cross? We dig in our heels. The invitation is so frighteningly individual. It’s an invitation to go alone. The Lord does not give a general appeal but a specific one, personal to you. The transaction exists between the Almighty of the universe and you.
We know it as a place of death. “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature…” (Colossians 3:5). Who wants to do that? Crucify his own pride? Kill his own daydreams and fantasies? Dig a grave for his pet worries?
We simply cannot bring ourselves to go to the cross. Nothing attracts us to it.
Thus we live independently of the cross. Or try to. As time passes, the memory of our desperate state when we first believed fades. The cross was something that happened to us “back then.” We forget how hungry for God we once were. We grow self-sufficient. We go through the motions—turning the other cheek and going the extra mile—but the effort is just that, an effort. We would hardly admit it, but we know full well how autonomous of God we operate.
This is where God steps in.
He permits suffering. He allows Peter’s blindness, Laura’s degenerative disease, Mr. Beach’s hunting accident, my paralysis. Suffering reduces us to nothing and as Soren Kierkegaard noted, “God creates everything out of nothing. And everything which God is to use, he first reduces to nothing.” To be reduced to nothing is to be dragged to the foot of the cross. It’s a severe mercy. Our dark side abhors it; our enlightened side recognizes it as home base.
A miraculous exchange happens at the cross. When suffering forces us to our knees at the foot of Calvary, we die to self. We cannot kneel there for long without releasing our pride and anger, unclasping our dreams and desires—this is what “coming to the cross” is all about. In exchange, God imparts power and implants new and lasting hope. We rise, renewed. His yoke becomes easy; his burden light. But just when we begin to get a tad self-sufficient, suffering presses harder. And so, we seek the cross again, mortifying the martyr in us, destroying the self-display. The transaction then is able to continue. God reveals more of his love, more of his power and peace as we hold fast the cross of suffering.
Stray away from it and…no power.
When I was a child on our family’s farm, one of my favorite places was the pond down in the pasture by the barn. Tadpoles and crayfish occupied me for hours. I’d rest on my haunches and wonder where the pond water came from. I’d walk around its edge but could never see any stream splashing into it. No trickling rivulet over a rock. No pipes feeding it from the spring house.
My dad patiently tried to explain that the pond was fed by a spring, from water deep in the earth. That spring, he told me, bubbled up and filled the pond. If Dad would have dug the pond area larger, the spring would have continued to fill it. To me it was a mystery, but I was sufficiently satisfied to go on playing with frogs and crayfish.
It’s no longer a mystery now that I’ve felt the crunch of decades of paralysis. The encroachments of my limitations often feel like the cutting edge of a spade, digging up twisted vines of self-centeredness and the dirt of sin and rebellion. Uprooting rights. Clearing out the debris of habitual sins. Shoveling away pride. To believe in God in the midst of suffering is to empty myself; and to empty myself is to increase the capacity—the pond area—for God. The greatest good suffering can do for me is to increase my capacity for God. Then he, like a spring, is free to flow through me. “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From His innermost being shall flow rivers of living water’” (see John 7:38).
Not a rivulet, but a powerful river of peace.
THE LOVE OF GOD CONSTRAINS US
Suffering makes for this marvelous transaction, this between God and us. And when something marvelous happens between God and us, his cross no longer seems just a symbol of death. Another miraculous exchange occurs: the cross becomes a symbol of life. Victorious life. We no longer go to the cross kicking and screaming, we race to it for dear life. “The love of Christ compels us” to yield further to love’s demands; thus we “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles” (2 Corinthians 5:14; Hebrews 12:1).
We no longer go to the cross to get something, even something so sweet as “peace like a river.” We don’t “go” to the cross at all. We are drawn to it. Compelled.
The love of Christ places inexorable and insistent demands on my heart, wooing, enticing, luring, and drawing me like a magnet into the inside stuff about God. My heart is aroused by Psalm 25:14; if “the Lord confides in those who fear him,” then any amount of suffering is worth gaining the confidentiality of the Almighty. Backaches. Lung infections. Long stints in bed feeling claustrophobic. Sitting down in a world that stands up. “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors…for I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the prese
nt nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).
God wants no separations. He permits suffering between Jesus and me so that nothing will be between Jesus and me.
Deeper and more delightful, onward and upward we journey toward the cross, confessing and trusting, yielding and obeying. Poets and sages, Christian mystics and martyrs have ached to find words that would convey the sweetness, the pleasure, the rapture of such intimate communion with God. I wish there were a word for this joy-peace-pleasure-rest-freedom all rolled into one. I only know earth offers no such satisfaction. It’s the answer to Jesus’ prayer to our Father: “I in them and you in me” (John 17:22-23).
Never further than Thy cross,
Never higher than Thy feet;
Here earth’s precious things seem dross;
Here earth’s bitter things grow sweet.
Here, O Christ, our sins we see,
Learn Thy love while gazing thus;
Sin, which laid the cross on Thee,
Love, which bore the cross for us.
Here we learn to serve and give,
And, rejoicing, self deny;
Here we gather love to live;
Here we gather faith to die.
Pressing onward as we can,
Still to this our hearts must tend;
Where our earliest hopes began,
There our last aspirings end.
Till amid the hosts of light,
We in Thee redeemed, complete,
Through Thy cross made pure and white,
Cast our crowns before Thy feet.
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