Grace for Our Groaning

As long as there has been suffering in the world, men have groaned. A groan is a deep, wordless cry, a miserable sound wrung forth from within by grief, pain, and despair. It is the soul’s complaint to God, a petition for deliverance from torment and anguish. We groan because this world is cursed; we groan because this life is a series of ceaseless battles filled with sorrow and adversity; we groan because we are broken — mind, body, and soul. 

Perhaps the idea of groaning or “complaining” to God feels less-than-Christian to you. You feel as though you’re supposed to put on a brave face and keep it all together, and the thought of actually acknowledging your suffering, of telling God how you feel somehow seems unspiritual. But Christianity is not a religion of superheroes who have no flaws; on the contrary, it is a faith of the weary, the wretched, and the weak. We follow a Savior who suffered and died a death of shame, and who promised us not success and power and ease in this life, but trials and tribulations (Jn. 16:33). And yet, when we do suffer, when troubles do come, it’s hard not to feel a sort of spiritual dissonance between who God says He is and what is happening to us.

God says He loves me, so why won’t He heal me? God says He’ll never leave me or forsake me, so why does it feel like He’s nowhere to be found? God says He wants me to have abundant life, so why am I experiencing such devastating loss? Maybe one or all of these resonate with you, but you’re afraid to admit it. Maybe you’ve heard shallow spiritual platitudes one too many times and you’ve stopped expressing the more difficult dilemmas of your Christian life because all anybody seems to want to do is sweep them under the rug. You would never say out loud “I’m having a hard time trusting God is good,” but inwardly you feel it, the tension of these seemingly irreconcilable truths: God is good, and He ordains every trial that comes your way. Every. Single. One. 

Even the one you’ve prayed about over and over, day after day, again and again with apparently no answer. Maybe you need to pause and let the full weight of that settle on you for a moment. I know, it’s heavy… 

So, now that we’re all nice and uncomfortable, how do we handle this? You may not be there yet, but eventually we will all come face to face with what I’m going to call “divine disappointment.” Our expectations for what we think our lives should look like because we are God’s children have been dashed. We’re left hurting. Frustrated. Disillusioned. Doubting. We wonder if God even cares, and if He does, why He doesn’t do anything about it. We wonder if there’s something wrong with us, if our faith is failing, if we haven’t done enough. But herein lies the problem, and it is twofold: 1) We’re approaching God transactionally, and (or rather, because) 2) we’ve forgotten the nature of the gospel and the nature of the world.

Let’s start with the gospel. 

The gospel holds implications not only for our past and present (the means by which we are saved and sanctified), but for our future as well. We fight the same battles day in and day out; the gospel is there to encourage us in the fight so that we do not lose hope. In regards to suffering, it reminds us that even though troubles come like breakers against the shore, Jesus died so that one day we will suffer no more. One day, we will enter into glory — we will live in a glorified new earth with glorified new bodies and every tear shall be wiped away from our eyes. There will be no more pain, no more sorrow, no more death, no more suffering. All of this is promised to us, but where we tend to get hung up is in the waiting. 

We live in the “now,” and our glorification resides in the “not yet.” The gospel is a means of God’s grace to see us through the now, but we should not think that it will erase all our troubles. God will be faithful to sustain us, but that does not necessarily mean deliverance from trials. We must see the grace promised us for what it is: a supernatural means of protecting our heart and soul so that we do not lose hope in the midst of suffering. This grace is not something we manufacture ourselves or earn; it can only be given by God. In our times of need, we flee where? To the throne of grace (Heb. 4:16). We come. We ask. We receive. And God will be with us and give us grace to endure. Which brings us to approaching God transactionally.

Somewhere along the way, whether through distorted doctrine or simply the bent of our fallen flesh, we’ve fallen into the fallacy that if we do the right things or pray the right way, God will answer in the way we want Him to. This stems from our desire to have our glorification now, and when it does not happen, when our prayers are not answered in the way we’d like them to be, we end up living in a state of divine disappointment. We’ve become earthbound in our thinking. We feel, mistakenly, that we ought to have “arrived” by now. Things should be getting easier, shouldn’t they? But suffering is not a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” situation: If I just muster enough faith, God will reward me and I can avoid it! The reality is you will suffer, and this is where we need God’s help reframing our perceptions of what life for a follower of Jesus looks like in this world.

When we forget the nature of the world, we are prone to thoughts like If I had this or that, then my life would be better. Whether it’s health, money, love, or any number of things, the fact is it’s not going to solve the problem. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting good things, and we ought to celebrate the beauty and blessings of God in our lives, but this world is cursed. And if this life is what we’ve set our hopes on, then we are, as Paul says, “of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:19). Praise God that the follower of Jesus is promised a full, final, once-and-for-all deliverance, but he or she is not promised deliverance from suffering in this life. We may plead with God over and over, and, like Paul with his thorn in the flesh, still receive a “no” because — and hear me here — this is not about us! It’s not about becoming so strong, so spiritually superior that we hover above the trials of life unaffected and unafflicted. Do you want to know what it’s really about? Let’s listen to Paul:

“So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness’” (2 Cor. 12:7–9).

Did you catch that? Paul pleaded with God. Multiple times! He didn’t say “I politely asked” or “I casually requested.” He pleaded — on his knees, groaning-and-tears begged for this affliction to be taken away. And what did God say to him? My. Grace. Is. Sufficient. That’s what this is about. Not our strength, but His sufficiency. If we were delivered from every trial, if suffering was never allowed to touch our lives, our dependence on God would wither like grass in the desert. We would no longer see our need for His grace, mercy, or sustaining power. We would no longer look to the world to come. For the believer, a life without suffering is the equivalent of spiritual suicide. And God will not let that happen.

Now, I can’t claim to know what God is doing in your particular trials, and I would be leery of anyone who thinks they do. But I can say this for certain because God’s Word says it: Your trials are producing steadfastness in you (James 1:3). This is not to say that suffering is somehow good; it’s not. Cancer is not a blessing, it’s a result of the curse. Suffering is bad, but what God does through it in His people is miraculous and overflowing with grace. Rather than turning us away from God, our suffering actually serves to draw us nearer to Him. This is really quite paradoxical if you think about it. I may step on some toes here, but let’s get real for a moment. God could end your suffering instantly. He is sovereign over everything. He could take away your trial with a word. He could heal the illness, repair the relationship, remove the pain, restore what was lost … and sometimes He does. But more often He doesn’t. And yet we keep on coming back to Him with the apostle Peter’s words on our lips: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God” (Jn. 6:68).

This, brothers and sisters, is a miracle. There simply is no other word for it. Does it mean that we come to Him flawlessly, with a smile on our face and perfect trust in what He’s doing? No. Sometimes we come angry. Doubtful. Fearful. Sometimes we don’t even come with words, but the Spirit Himself groans on our behalf (Rom. 8:26). The point is to just come to Him, no matter what you’re feeling. It is not a sin to speak honestly to God. Scripture records the groanings of the saints from times past for our benefit, as a model of what it looks like to express our anguish to the Lord. Just take a look at these words from Job: 

“Why is light given to him who is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it comes not, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures, who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For my sighing comes instead of my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, but trouble comes” (Job 3:20–26).

The apostle Paul did his fair share of groaning, too:

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death” (2 Cor. 1:8–9)

Or how about King David?

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (Ps. 22:1–2).

And just so we’re clear, the very words you just read were on Jesus’ lips while He was being crucified. We have the example of the Messiah Himself to guide us! We can pray to our heavenly Father, You have done this, God. And I don’t like it. Do You see me? Do You hear me? Do You even care? I would rather be dead than go through what I’m going through right now… Beloved, if it is your instinct to pour out your heart in raw, humble honesty to God, to say what you think and feel — even how you feel about Him — that is the response of a believer. There isn’t something wrong with you; you’re acknowledging the reality that your experience does not always align with what you know to be true about God. God is good, but it doesn’t feel like He is good right now. God is for me, but it feels like He is against me in this. God loves me, but what I’m going through doesn’t feel loving. This is what it is to groan before the Lord. And this is what it is to live by faith.

Whoever says faith is too easy is not acquainted with real, biblical Christian faith. Faith is hard. It’s always been hard. And it will continue to be hard until our faith is made sight. We are not the first Christians to experience suffering, to go through trials that break us, that take the wind out of us, that make us doubt and leave us angry with God. We come from a long line of saints who, despite their frequent and oftentimes grievous tribulations, were carried through this life on the shoulders of Christ. How? By God’s grace. By remembering who He is and who He is for us. By reflecting on God’s unconditional, sacrificial love displayed for us on the cross when we were yet His enemies. He has always loved us; He has always been there for us, and the evidence lies in the cross of Jesus our Savior.

And so we come, with groanings, with tears, with pain beyond words, and we exchange our groaning for grace. Maybe you doubted Him today. That’s okay. Come. Maybe you were angry with Him. Maybe you pushed Him away in fear. Still come. God can handle it. He can handle your emotions and your pain. His love has never ever been contingent upon anything in us (1 Jn. 4:10). Come to Him honestly; let Him know how you feel and ask Him to give you grace to keep trusting and seeking Him in the midst of your trials. Because, beloved, we will suffer. It’s just as hard for me to write that as it probably is for you to read it. I don’t like the trials God has placed in my life, and they have tested my faith sorely. I’ve prayed, perhaps just like you, and rather than getting better, things only seem to get worse. I’ve doubted God’s goodness; I’ve questioned His ways; I’ve even asked myself why I would want to be close to a God who sees my suffering and does nothing about it. But you know what? Somehow I always end up back at His feet, back at the throne of grace, groanings and all. Suffering may take everything in this life, but it cannot take Jesus from us. It cannot rob us of our glorious future, of God’s unending, steadfast love and grace, or of the hope we have in Christ. So let’s end with the apostle’s words:

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us… For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:18, 22–25).