How Suffering Can Bring Healing

On TBN’s Better Together, Priscilla Shirer discusses how Jesus faced suffering. Join the conversation as Laurie Crouch, Chrystal Evans Hurst, Victoria Osteen, and Elaine Fisher join Priscilla Shirer to discuss how Jesus endured suffering, and the beauty found on the other side of obedience.

God is saying to you today:
“Be so confident in My plans for you that you don’t even get upset when things don’t go your way.”

We can tend to think or pretend that a good life is mutually exclusive of pain, a painful life that those two things can’t exist that we’re, we’re striving for ease and happiness and we’re looking for that.
And then as even as I talk to my sons about what it means to, to walk with the Lord and be a believer and be a Christian.
It doesn’t mean ease. It means that when there is pain and suffering, God can still be glorified through your life and that he is fully able to turn the situation around.
We cannot live and not have any suffering any painful times, any seasons that we wouldn’t prefer.
You’re going to. Um it’s guaranteed just by virtue that we’re alive.
And man, I can remember there were three women um that were each going through separate hard times.
This is maybe three years ago.
And during that year, there were three women in my life that were all going through, I mean hard stuff, illness, uh trauma.
And each of them were at such a low point, a hard point with their physicality that they either didn’t have the strength to literally pick up their Bible and read or they couldn’t attend church anymore because of their health issues.
They literally could not function in the way they usually would because of what was happening in their life.
And each of them independently of each other, they don’t even know each other.
But as I was talking to them individually, um and spending time with them, they each said something similar.
They said, I’m so glad that me and the Lord already had a thing going on because now that I’m in the midst of this where maybe I can’t even get out of the bed.
There are scripture verses that will come to my mind or there’s hymns, right? Mom was one of them.
There are hymns that mom would just start singing when she couldn’t even move anymore.
She would just start singing these little hymns that, that were buried on the inside of her.
She would be encouraged by these women were encouraged by things that the Holy Spirit would bring to their mind um about their friendship with the Lord.
They were so glad that they had stabilized themselves in good times, in preparation for bad times.
And so I think that’s so critical for all of us knowing that we’re going to walk through suffering.
There are going to be things that come in our lives that we do not prefer.
Well, then when things are pretty steady, we better be using that time to cultivate a friendship and a stability with the Lord.
You know, I do, I do think that we handle it, we process things and we handle things differently.
You know. And I, and I, and I have a, a way to, and I think it was the way I was raised.
Like, you know, when my kids would fall down and scrape their knee, I’m like, you’re ok, you’re ok.
Come on, come on, come on, come on, you’re ok. You’re ok.
You know, and, and I think it may be the generation that my mother was raised in and I was raised in that.
It’s like, ok, just don’t worry about that. We can’t look at that, we can’t think of that.
We can’t, we can’t take time to process that.
You know, we’ve got to move forward, we’ve just got to move forward and sometimes I think it results in stepping things down, you know, and, and maybe that has, you know, uh, uh, detrimental effects and, uh, I think the way I process things is, is I try to ignore certain things, you know, and I, of course I process it through prayer and talking to God.
But, you know, it’s how we, it’s how we find ourselves doing different things, different situations, you know, like if you’re talking about your mother’s death, you know, you probably, I don’t know if you even processed it the same way if you found yourself doing it differently.
But I mean, you can’t you can’t get any more suffering than death and loss like that.
You know, that’s just a, that your soul, you know, that’s a tearing away literally.
And so, um, I think, I think that we shouldn’t be ashamed that we process it differently or feel like this one did it better than I did or, you know, so I think sometimes I just think about people listening and, and they’re thinking, well, how should I process suffering?
You know, I mean, I think the first thing we need to do is run to the father because he’s the only one that can help us and to be true with him and honest and open.
And uh you know, David, you could hear in his, in, in, in, in his writings, you know, he was open, he was honest with God, but it was, as he began to talk, he began to shift, that’s his perspective.
And it was, it was only by the power of the Holy Spirit.
It was only by God, you know, shifting that for him and helping him see things in a different way and, and enlighten him in a, in a different way.
But I, I think that I can just hear some people say, well, how am I supposed to?
And I think you have to do it by going to God and in your own personal way. That’s right.
And, and also the ministry of community, people who have suffered as you are suffering.
I think that’s at least one of the benefits that come out of tough times in our individual lives is that we come out of that tunnel to the other side that we never thought we’d make it through.
And then the Lord gives us opportunity to comfort those with the comfort that we have been given and to give them that same hope that listen, I just went through this tunnel and made it out.
Let me tell you and let me show you how the Holy Spirit helped me, how um prayer works, how you know, community during my time of suffering was so important.
People encouraging me. Now let me offer that same encouragement to you.
Um Victoria, you know, your your husband did that for me. He called me while mom was sick.
And I mean, that man encouraged me and just said, you know, we, we walked through real difficult times as well.
So let me remind you of some of the things that it’s so easy either to forget or to just have so doled and pushed down underneath all of the, the um urgent sort of things that are that you’re facing in the middle of a crisis.
It can be so dull that you just need someone to come alongside of you and say, let me remind you of who Jesus is that he still is who he says he is that he is still able and fully capable of covering you and your family to have people’s voices in your ear who can remind you of that and can also give you perspective from their own seasons of suffering.
It buoys you up and keeps you going to the next 24 hours. Like nothing else, like nothing else.
Yeah. You know, I, I always think going through suffering and hardships and people dying that you’ve believed God for.
Yeah, I mean, we’ve, we’ve all put our faith on the line for so many things and just God, please, you know, please let this happen and, and to think that Jesus got the father’s no as well.
You know, he, he got, he got God’s. No. And so I think praying the Get’s prayer, it’s, it’s God.
I know you can, I know you can deliver me. I know you can do this.
I know you’re the great physician.
I know you, you know, you are the, the father to the fatherless and the husband to the husband list and all the things that you are.
You’re the great physician and I know you can do it.
But if you don’t, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. And Jesus had to do that.
Please let this cup pass from me.
We can, we can say who God is and then we can pray God. Please don’t make me do this.
Don’t let, don’t let me and my Children have to walk this road.
But then it’s, but not my will but dying be done.
You know, and, and knowing the faithfulness and the love of God and the comfort of the Holy Spirit to take us and the grace and the mercy of God to bring us out of those times, to, to, to strengthen us.
I mean, think about some of the hardest things you’ve gone through. It makes you who you are today.
You, you absolutely the tenacity.
I mean, if it’s given me nothing but tenacity to believe God even harder the next time, whether it happened or not, it, it does something on the inside of us to strengthen our faith.
I believe if you don’t let go, if you don’t stop, if you don’t give up and you know, and don’t you think that we have to re retrain our own thinking and make sure we do this with the Children or the other people that we’re discipline and pouring into as Christians, we can tend to think or pretend that a good life is mutually exclusive of pain, a painful life that those two things can’t exist that we’re, we’re striving for ease and happiness and we’re looking for that.
And I know people that’s, that’s kind of a, a western kind of perspective on, on being a believer that ease is what we’re after.
That happiness is what we’re after. There are some people, Christians in other parts of the world.
Um I remember someone saying to me that, that lives in another part of the world that when there is suffering happening amongst them, that their first prayer is not deliverance from that suffering.
They pray that too. But that’s not the first prayer.
The first prayer is Lord help me to glorify you in this suffering. While I’m here.
Since I’m here, can your name be made great somehow through the suffering now, Lord, yes, heal and deliver and free and we know you can do all that.
But while, while you’re gonna leave us here in this moment for whatever time frame it is a week or a month or whatever Lord, would your name be made great while we’re here.
And I just thought it, it’s important for me.
And then as even as I talk to my sons about what it means to, to walk with the Lord and be a believer and be a Christian.
It doesn’t mean ease. It means that when there is pain and suffering, God can still be glorified through your life and that he is fully able to turn the situation around.
But since life is going to come with difficulty and it is you, you don’t have to go looking for the storms of life, you just keep living and the storms somehow find you.
So since that’s going to happen, then we at least need to be mindful of praying.
Ok, Lord, why have you allowed me to be in this pocket?
And would you be glorified through the way I respond, the decisions I make, the way I treat others while I’m in it.
Let me glorify you while I’m here.