Suffering can change the direction of a life in a single moment.
One phone call. One diagnosis. One betrayal. One accident. We can wake up believing life is one thing and go to sleep in a world that feels completely different.
In the previous episode of the Faith That Stands Podcast, we talked about trusting God when suffering does not make sense. In Episode 7, we continue that conversation with another difficult question: How can God use our suffering?
This is not an attempt to call pain good or explain away someone’s grief. It is a conversation about whether God can still be working when life feels broken.
More Than a Theological Question
For Angel, suffering has never been a distant subject.
When he was nine years old, he watched his father die in a jet ski accident. That moment changed the direction of his family. His mother was never the same, and more losses followed. By his mid-twenties, Angel had lost seventeen family members, including his mother.
Following Jesus did not bring an end to the funerals, pain, or difficult seasons. What Jesus gave him was truth to stand on when his feelings were falling apart, a larger story in which to understand suffering, and a hope deeper than the pain.
That is what this episode is meant to offer. Not an explanation for every painful event, but a biblical framework for recognizing how God may still be at work within it.
This Is Not the World We Were Made For
The Bible does not begin by telling us suffering is normal and that we should simply accept it.
Genesis begins with a world God repeatedly called good. Humanity knew life, peace, joy, and closeness with God. There was no death, shame, grief, betrayal, or suffering.
Then sin entered the world, bringing consequences that fractured human relationships, creation, and our relationship with God.
This is why suffering feels like an intruder. Something within us knows that death, disease, injustice, and loss are not how life was meant to be.
Yet even in the first moments of human rebellion, God did not abandon His creation. He promised that a Deliverer would come and defeat the serpent. He covered Adam and Eve in their shame. Judgment was real, but so were mercy, grace, and the promise of restoration.
We Pray to a Savior Who Has Scars
Christianity does not give us a God who watches suffering from a cold distance.
Jesus entered it.
He experienced poverty, rejection, temptation, betrayal, abandonment, false accusation, physical pain, and death. After His resurrection, the scars remained visible. They became proof that suffering and death did not receive the final word.
Revelation 21 promises that Jesus will one day make all things new. Death, mourning, crying, and pain will end. God will personally wipe away every tear.
That future hope does not make present pain unreal. It gives us a reason to believe the pain is not permanent.
God Can Bring Good From What Is Broken
The Bible never asks us to call evil good.
Abuse is not good. Betrayal is not good. Disease and death are not good. But God is so wise, powerful, and sovereign that evil cannot stop His purposes.
Joseph’s story captures this truth. His brothers betrayed him, sold him into slavery, and set in motion years of suffering. Looking back, Joseph could say, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).
He named the evil honestly while still recognizing that God had been working.
We may not always see what God is doing in our own stories. From Scripture and years of walking with people through pain, Angel identifies four ways God may use suffering: trimming, teaching, testing, and training.
- Trimming: Hardship can expose pride, sin, and unhealthy dependence that comfort allowed to remain hidden.
- Teaching: Some consequences become a classroom in which a loving Father leads us toward wisdom and obedience.
- Testing: Suffering can reveal what we truly trust and whether our faith rests on God or only on comfortable circumstances.
- Training: Painful seasons may develop the character, humility, and dependence needed for something God will ask of us later.
The full episode unpacks each category through the stories of Israel, Job, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and David.
Hold These Categories With Care
These four ideas can help us reflect on our own suffering. They should never become labels we place carelessly on someone else’s pain.
Job’s friends had plenty of theology, but they did not understand what God was doing. Their attempts to diagnose Job only added to his burden.
When someone is suffering, our first responsibility is not to tell them whether God is trimming, teaching, testing, or training them. Our first responsibility is to love them, listen to them, and point them toward God.
We are not God. Compassion must come before explanation.
You Do Not Have to Suffer Alone
Looking back on his hardest seasons, Angel can say that God often felt nearest when his heart was most broken.
God did not always remove the pain as quickly as he wanted. But He was present. He carried, comforted, formed, and sustained him.
Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and close to those crushed in spirit. Sometimes the place where we feel most broken becomes the place where we experience God most deeply.
A faith that stands is not a faith that has every answer, never cries, or never asks why. It is a faith that knows where to run when the storm comes.
If you are suffering, you may not yet understand what God is doing. But you can know that He is near, that He loves you, and that your suffering does not have to be wasted.
Listen to Episode 7 of the Faith That Stands Podcast: How Can God Use Our Suffering?
