Suffering and Sufficiency

In her excellent book, A Lamp Unto My Feet: The Bible’s Light for Your Daily Walk, author Elisabeth Elliot writes about a question someone asked her shortly after her husband Jim had been murdered by a native tribe in the jungles of Ecuador. The person asked a two-part question: (1) Was Elisabeth’s walk with the Lord close enough so that His love and presence were sufficient at all times—or (2) had she been overwhelmed by grief and sorrow as she dealt with the tragic loss of her beloved Jim.

Elisabeth gave a very wise—and truthful—reply. “My answer is yes to both questions. It is not an either-or matter” (Kindle location 498).

Elisabeth then recalls that the Apostle Paul had asked the Lord three times to remove his “thorn in the flesh.” God declined to do so, saying, “My grace is sufficient for you…” (2 Corinthians 12:9) or, as the J. B. Phillips Translation renders it, “My grace is enough for you: for where there is weakness, my power is shown the more completely.”

Likewise, when the time for Jesus’s crucifixion was imminent, He prayed, “Abba, Father, everything is possible for You. Please take this cup of suffering away from Me. Yet, I want Your will, not mine, to be done” (Mark 14:36). God did not spare His Own Beloved Son from an agonizing death on the cross, since Christ’s sufferings would result in a greater good.

In neither case, Elisabeth says, did God say no because those who cried out to Him were not close enough to Him. She concludes her answer to the question in the first paragraph above with these words: “There was human suffering and divine sufficiency. This is the story of our lives.”

Dear Reader, you and I can rest assured that God’s grace will always be sufficient for whatever we must go through. That has been His message, His promise, to believers throughout the centuries. We find this promise even in the Old Testament, which was written thousands of years ago. For example, God says through the prophet Isaiah, “When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2).

Does God promise to spare us from suffering? No! But…He does promise to be with us when we go through whatever suffering He allows. And we can draw strength and comfort from that promise and from the knowledge that He is our God and that He loves us and will always sustain us and provide for us.