A Different Kind of Suffering by Holly D. Sands
But I've come to believe there's another suffering required of us - one with a different aim entirely. Not suffering for the sake of the gospel going out, but suffering for the sake of us being made into something. Conformed. And I now believe that kind may be the most painful, and the most meaningful, tool the Lord uses on His own children.
Even the SON Learned Obedience
This is the verse that undid my old framework: "Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered" (Hebrews 5:8).
Sit with that. The eternal Son - sinless, perfect, needing no correction - learned obedience. Not learned as in He was ignorant of it, but learned it experientially, the way you only learn a thing by walking through it. If the sinless Son of God was perfected through suffering (Hebrews 2:10 says as much — "it was fitting for Him...in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings"), then no child of God gets to assume suffering is only ever punitive, or only ever persecution from outside. Some of it is the very shape obedience takes on the way to maturity.
Conformed to the Image of His SON
This is where Romans 8 stopped being a comfort verse to me and became something heavier and better. We quote verse 28 - "all things work together for good" and stop right there. But Paul doesn't stop there. Verse 29 tells you what the "good" actually is: "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son" (Romans 8:29).
The good God working in "all things" isn't comfort, ease, or even a resolved circumstance. It's conformity to Christ. And you don't get conformed to a suffering Savior by a pain-free life. Philippians 3:10 says it as a desire, not a threat. Paul wanted to know Him and "the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death." Fellowship with Christ includes fellowship in what He walked through, and that fellowship is how the conforming happens.
Children Get Disciplined — That's the Whole Point
Hebrews 12 says this directly, and it's not gentle about it. God disciplines every son/daughter He receives (Hebrews 12:6-8), and if we're without that discipline, we're not sons/daughters at all, but illegitimate. Verse 10 says earthly fathers disciplined us as seemed best to them, "but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness." Then verse 11, "no discipline seems joyful at the time, but painful - yet it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those trained by it."
That word "trained" matters. This isn't suffering as punishment for sin in the legal sense - Christ already bore that. This is suffering as a Father's hand, training a son/daughter toward holiness they don't have yet. It's love that afflicts, on purpose, toward an end goal He already sees and we don't.
I'll be honest about why that took me so long to accept. My earthly father was abusive, and "discipline" in his hands was never aimed at my good - it was about his anger, not my holiness. So when I read that God disciplines those He loves, my gut reaction for years wasn't comfort. I wouldn't even allow my mind to go there because I could not reconcile that with a God of love.
But Hebrews 12:9-10 anticipates exactly that wound. It draws the contrast on purpose: "Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live? For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness". The writer isn't assuming every earthly father got it right. He's saying even the best human fathers were imperfect and short-sighted in how they corrected their children, so how much more should we trust a Father whose discipline has no selfishness, no anger issue, no bad day in it at all. God's discipline isn't my father's discipline. It's the real thing my father's version only distorted. He disciplines for my profit, full stop - never for His own relief, never out of control lost.
That distinction had to be rebuilt in me slowly. I had to actually give myself the space to begin believing that what He allows is for my good, even when it hurts.
A Woman Who Lived This
I've always referred to Elisabeth Elliot as my spiritual mother because she has had the most influence over my Christian walk. She buried her first husband, Jim, at the hands of the very tribe she went on to live among and love. Years later she buried a second husband to cancer. Nothing about her life reads like persecution in the narrow sense; it reads like exactly the kind of suffering Hebrews and Romans are describing, the kind aimed at conforming a person to Christ rather than punishing her for the faith she held.
What always strikes me about Mom Elliot is that she never pretended to have solved the "why." In one of her later interviews she said plainly that she hadn't found intellectual satisfaction for her suffering - only peace, and that the peace was a Person, not an explanation. That's obedience learned through what she suffered, not around it.
She's also the one who taught me the discipline of "do the next thing"- that when grief or fear makes the whole of life feel unbearable, faithfulness usually looks like the next small act of obedience, not a resolved mystery. That's what James 1 and Hebrews 12 are describing when they talk about training and endurance producing something real. It isn't dramatic. It's continuing to do the normal activities of your day, trusting that the Father's hand is at work in the doing.
She earned the right to say suffering is never wasted, because she tested that claim against the worst things that ever happened to her and it held. That's the kind of spiritual mother worth having — not one who explains away the pain, but one who walked through hers long enough to come out the other side looking more like Jesus.
Refined, Not Wasted
Peter says the same thing from a different angle. Various trials come so that "the genuineness of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to praise, honor, and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ" (1 Peter 1:6-7). And James says count it all joy when you fall into various trials, because the testing of your faith produces patience, and patience has to have its perfect work "that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing" (James 1:2-4).
None of those texts are about persecution specifically. They're about the ordinary, grinding trials of a life lived in dead, sinful flesh in a fallen world and God's stated that the purpose in them is to finish something in us. Not to waste our pain. To refine it into something that comes out looking like His Son.
Why This Matters
If the only suffering I expect is persecution, I'll misread half of what God is doing in my life. I'll assume the hard providences of the loss, the waiting, the thorn that doesn't get removed is either meaningless or evidence something's gone wrong. But Scripture won't let me land there. Paul had a thorn he asked three times to have removed, and the answer wasn't removal - it was "My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).
That's the suffering I'm talking about. Not suffering for the gospel's advance in the world, but suffering for the gospel's advance in me, until Christ is formed in me the way Paul travailed for the Galatians (Galatians 4:19). It's the harder truth, and honestly the more sobering one. But it's also the one that means nothing the Lord allows into my life is ever wasted. It's aimed. It's fatherly. And it's headed somewhere... toward the image of His Son.
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