There is nothing that will drive you to your knees faster than suffering.

Has your emotional suffering been going on too long?

Perhaps you’re suffering the damaging effects of a toxic relationship, or your heart has just been smashed in a thousand pieces.

Whether you are suffering from debilitating anger or incredible sadness, you’ve likely prayed and begged God to take away the pain but you’re still stuck in the negative, overwhelming, all-consuming pain of your emotions.

Before you take the unproductive approach of shutting the pain away behind a protective wall, let’s talk about the 4 possible points for your emotional pain.

Presence

Sometimes emotional suffering is the result of turning away from God. He does not want to see you suffer. He would much rather you stay in His presence all the time without painful promptings. God wants to be your source of comfort and healing.

The psalmist David said it well in Psalm 16:11: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”

Whether your emotional pain was self- or other-inflicted, there will always be pain on this side of eternity. But in His presence, God can turn that mourning into dancing, just like He did for David (Psalm 30:12).

Purpose

God has a purpose in everything. Even our pain has purpose. I am no longer surprised when God uses me to help others to work through the same struggles I went through. It’s never right away, which is why this “purpose in pain concept” is difficult to grasp when all you feel is pain.

Often times the things we go through have a greater purpose. When we go through pain, we are better equipped to help others in their time of need.

2 Corinthians 1:3-5 reminds us, “ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”

Pointing

Pain is often a sign that something is wrong. We don’t ignore physical pains, but we ignore emotional pains and call it mature, tough, or resilient. Often times, God will use our pain to point us to a problem.

Psalm 34:18 reminds us: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

God is not waiting for you to get your act together. He’s waiting for you to call upon Him, lean on Him, rely upon Him. And most importantly, He wants to help you address the root issue of your pain so that He can help you deal with it and ultimately heal it.

Just like brushing dirt under the rug doesn’t make it go away, asking God to take it away without working through it is avoidance.

I get it. It’s rough to face the pain, but He is with you.

Without pain, we would never know there is a problem. Without a problem, we may never turn to God to seek the solution.

Purification

God is more concerned with our holiness than our happiness.  As a follower of Christ, you can expect to grow in every way possible.

But you may ask, why do I have to go through suffering to grow? While God can use any situation to purify us, we are much like gold, in that we can only be refined by fire.

Peter says it best in 1 Peter 1:6-7: “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

God is not deriving pleasuring from seeing you suffer. His desire is your holiness. And this season too will end. In the meantime, let God show you what He needs to show you, so He can do what He needs to do to take you to where He wants you to be.

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