Name It to Tame It
Pain can break the rhythm of following Jesus just when we think we are making progress. Pastor Josh had been running nearly 10 kilometres before a sudden small bowel obstruction put him in hospital and broke that rhythm. In session five of Practicing the Way, the eight-week journey through Romans 12, the question becomes how to follow Jesus through suffering and pain.
Focus on One Thing
Enthusiasm can fade within a few weeks. We begin determined to change, enjoy the first sessions, then find the practice difficult or forget it altogether. Another season becomes another box ticked, while the same patterns continue.
Giving up whenever we do not feel like continuing keeps us at the centre. We keep asking God to fix our insecurity and bitterness while holding on to the pattern that prevents growth. The rebuke is blunt:
You are just too full of yourself.
Choose one practice and make room for it. It might be solitude, community, generosity or Sabbath. Trying to add all nine practices at once misses the invitation to remove less important things and focus on following Jesus.
Romans 12:1-2 puts our whole life before God as a living sacrifice. Verse 3 makes that practical: stop thinking of yourself more highly than you ought. Renewing the mind reaches into how we understand ourselves.
My Grace Is Sufficient
Grace comes first in Paul's instruction. To understand it, look at his thorn in the flesh in 2 Corinthians 12. We do not know what the thorn was. We know he wanted it gone and pleaded with God to remove it. The answer was:
My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
That answer challenges a transactional relationship with God. We can serve, give and take responsibility in church while expecting God to repay us with the life we want. When suffering remains, we wonder why he has failed to keep his side of the bargain.
God's grace is already sufficient. The thorn does not make Paul's life worth less. His weakness becomes a place where Christ's power can rest upon him. Paul can speak of contentment even in hardship.
Our own suffering raises the same question. Can we trust God's love when the thing we want removed is still there? Can we desire him and receive his grace in that weakness?
God Knows You
Suffering draws our attention to what is happening inside us. Pain, loneliness, emotional struggles and financial difficulties can expose questions that a busy life leaves untouched. Knowing facts about God leaves us with more to discover about who he is.
The psalmist speaks of a God who knows when we sit and rise, understands our thoughts and knows our words before we speak. That knowledge includes the things we hide: our weakness, sin, shame, regrets and fears. Nothing in our history has escaped him.
Suffering exposes what is in our heart so that we can join in what God is doing in us.
We have been shaped by years of relationships, repeated actions and encounters. God knows that whole story. We can come honestly before him without first explaining or defending why we are the way we are. The invitation is to trust that he knows us and, through our pain, come to know him.
Come Back to Me
Dependence belongs to the way God made us. Adam and Eve were created to live in willing obedience to him. Sin expresses the desire for independence: to do what we want, when we want, and be our own god.
Sabbath calls us back to that dependence. We stop, receive from God and acknowledge that the world we have is his gift. We need to draw strength from him regularly.
Hurry makes it easy to neglect the people closest to us. We become so occupied with what we are doing that we fail to find peace in God. Practising Sabbath means ruthlessly removing hurry so we can receive from him.
Suffering can interrupt our confidence that we control everything. A broken relationship or a weakness we cannot fix makes us stop. Romans 12:3 calls for sober judgement about ourselves. We can recognise our limits and return to the God who made us to depend on him.
You Need to Belong
We also depend on each other. A body has many members with different functions. Romans 12 describes people with different gifts belonging to one another in Christ. Each person has something to contribute, and the command is simple: use it.
The passage connects gifts with the way we exercise them:
- Contribute with generosity.
- Lead with zeal.
- Show mercy with cheerfulness.
Envying someone else's gift keeps us from using what God has given us. Discover how he made you and develop that gift. The person who teaches needs people whose strengths are entirely different. A loud person needs the sensitivity and perception of quieter people around them.
The body image is deliberately ridiculous. Beautiful eyes rolling across the floor by themselves would horrify us. Their beauty and function belong with the body they are attached to.
Following Jesus requires belonging. We cannot live entirely for ourselves and expect to become who God created us to be. Offering our bodies to God involves the community we are building together. Stay faithful through the highs and lows, with the people God has brought into your life.
Name Your Pain
This week, find a place of solitude and name the pain you are carrying. On his prayer walks, Pastor Josh finds old memories surfacing: people who hurt or disrespected him, people he hurt, and things he regrets. Each time something comes up, he offers it to God.
Give your suffering a name. Paul called his suffering a thorn in the flesh. Jesus named the cup he wanted removed in Gethsemane, the night before the cross. Bring the particular thing before God and attend to how he responds, even when there is no audible answer.
Offer each thing as it surfaces, then share it with your house church this week. Practicing the Way is about being with Jesus, becoming like Jesus and doing what Jesus did. Our unresolved pain can occupy so much of our attention that we never come honestly before him. Naming it gives us something specific to present to God.
Just name it. You don't have to try to fix it. You don't have to deny it. You don't have to dissociate it.
