The Difference between Our Suffering … and His
The Difference between
Our Suffering … and His
It’s no use trying to fake it with the staff at Joni and Friends. They’ve seen me at my worst.
On different occasions I’ve come into the office downcast, completely disheartened for one reason or another. My friends in our ministry have had the sensitivity to be a real comfort to me. After sharing a few mutual problems and prayer needs, I begin to feel like I honestly am a part of the fellowship of suffering.
All Christians participate in that marvelous fellowship. Through the smiles, sharing of struggles, prayerful lifting of burdens, tears, and even the consolation and occasional advice, we are initiated into the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings.
For all believers, there is a wonderful, inexplicable participation in the life and power of Jesus when we suffer. Ours is a fellowship in which the power of Jesus is made perfect, not just alongside of or beyond our weaknesses, but actually in our weakness. Two of the words most associated with Christians in their suffering are “comfort” and “joy.”
But it’s right at this point that we need to understand a big difference between our suffering and the suffering our Lord went through.
For the Lord Jesus, there was no fellowship in suffering.
For the Lord, there was only the wooden insensitivity of His disciples—from the first day right up to the end of His ministry.
For Him, there was only that awful climax of isolation on the cross, even to the point of being forsaken by the Father and abandoned to God’s blazing wrath.
There was no real joy in His cross as there can be in ours. Hebrews 12:2 tells us that “for the joy set before Him He endured the cross.” In other words, Jesus focused on that which was beyond those ghastly hours: on His future back with the Father, and on the salvation of millions who would trust Him through history. But thankfully for us, we can have joy in our affliction. Right in the heart of it. Ours is a comfort we can experience now as we suffer.
For Jesus, it was a different story. Far different.
You don’t have to be alone in your hurt! Comfort is yours. Joy is an option. And it’s all been made possible by your Savior. He went without comfort so that you might have it. He postponed joy so that you might share in it. He willingly chose isolation so that you might never be alone in your hurt and sorrow. He had no real fellowship so that fellowship might be yours, this moment.
So let’s you and I drop our martyr complex, okay? You will never experience isolation or abandonment or the dread of being forsaken as did your Lord. You’ve got fellowship! The fellowship of suffering!
And you have it because He didn’t.