Suffering Is Not for Nothing (by Elisabeth Elliot & Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss an outreach of Life Action Ministries )

"... I learned in that experience who God is—who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise."

~Elisabeth Elliot

You can LISTEN to it at the link below, but I have copied the transcript below if you would rather just read it.

https://www.reviveourhearts.com/radio/revive-our-hearts/classic-message-elisabeth-elliot/

Suffering Is Not for Nothing (Elisabeth Elliot)
When C.S. Lewis was asked to write a book on the problem of pain, he asked permission to write it anonymously. Permission was denied as not being in keeping with that particular series. This is what he wrote in his introduction. "If I were to say what I really thought about pain, I should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew who made them." And I would echo those sentiments.
When I hear other people's stories about their own sufferings, I feel as though I know practically nothing about the subject myself. I'm in kindergarten as it were compared to, for example, my friend Jan who is quadriplegic and lies on one side or the other twenty-four hours a day in a nursing home in Connecticut; or my friend Judy Squires in California who was born with no legs; or my late friend, Jo Bailey who lost three children. But if all I knew about suffering was by observation alone, it would still be sufficient to tell me that we're up against a tremendous mystery.
Suffering is a mystery that none of us is really capable of plumbing, and it's a mystery about which I'm sure everyone at some time or other here has asked "Why?" If we try to put together the mystery of suffering with the Christian idea of a God who loves us, we know if we think about it for as much as five minutes that the notion of a loving God cannot possibly be deduced from the evidence that we see around us let alone from human experience. And what I want to share with you is what I see to be the straight truth with no evasions and no clear platitudes.
It's very fresh in my mind just this week a picture that I saw in Time Magazine of an inconsolable newborn baby whose mother was on crack cocaine. Just to look at that picture brought down on my own head, as it were, everything that I was planning to say to you in this series.
I happened to be sitting on a plane yesterday next to a woman who was reading a book that was called Master of Life Manual which according to the cover was about metaphysics, brain/mind awareness, human potential principles, and this stunning statement, "Create your own reality now." I thought I would hate to be down to such an extreme that I was having to create my own reality in the face of the data of human experience.
So I would ask questions. Is there a reason to believe that suffering is not for nothing? Is there an eternal and perfectly loving purpose behind it all? If there is, it's not obvious. It doesn't exactly meet the eye. And yet if for thousands of years in the face of these stunning realities there is this terrible truth. If for thousands of years people have believed that there is a loving God and that that God is looking down on the realities around us and still loves us, and these people have still continued to insist that God knows what He's doing and that He's got the whole world in His hands, then I repeat, the reason cannot possibly be obvious. It can't be because those thousands of people were all deaf, dumb, blind, or stupid and incapable of looking clearly and steadily at the data that you and I are constantly having to look at. What is the answer?
F.W.H. Myers in his poem "St. Paul" wrote these words:

Is there not wrong too bitter for atoning?
What are these desperate and hidden years?
Hast Thou not heard Thy whole creation groaning,
Sighs of the bondsmen and a woman's tears? 

The answer is not obvious. There must be an explanation somewhere. It's my purpose in this series to try to get at the explanation and then to see if there's something that you and I can do about this question of suffering. I'm convinced that there are a good many things in this life that we can't really do anything about, but that God wants us to do something with. I hope that by the time I'm finished, I will have made myself clear.
Now, the word suffering may seem very high flowing and perhaps much too dignified for your particular set of troubles today. If I knew you and if I knew your stories, then I would know that I can't possibly speak personally to every need that's here, to every kind of suffering. I'm fairly sure that there would be some people here tonight who would be saying, "Well, I really don't know any such thing as suffering. I've never been through anything like Joni Eareckson or Jo Bailey or even Elisabeth Elliot. And of course, that's true. And I could say the very same thing if I knew your story. I could say, "Well, I've never been through anything like that."
So I want to give you a definition of suffering which will cover the whole gamut from when the washing machine overflows or when the roast burns and you're having the boss to dinner that night, all those things about which our immediate human reaction is, "Oh, no!" From that kind of triviality, relatively speaking, to your husband has cancer, your child has spina bifida or yourself have just lost everything. I think that you'll find the definition that I'm going to give you will cover that gamut. A
I think that the things that I'm going to try to say to you will apply to the small things—those sometimes ridiculously small things that if you're like me you get all upset about and all bent out of shape about—that matter not at all by comparison with the big things.
And here it is, my definition. Suffering is having what you don't want or wanting what you don't have. Now, if you can think of something that does not come under one of those two headings, please see me later because I do want to hear about it. I think that covers everything.
Now, can you imagine a world, for example, where nobody had anything that he didn't want—no toothaches, no taxes, no touchy relatives, no traffic jams? Or by contrast, can you imagine a world in which everybody had everything they wanted—perfect weather, perfect wife, perfect husband, perfect health, perfect score, perfect happiness?
Malcome Muggeridge said, "Supposing you eliminated suffering. What a dreadful place the world would be because everything that corrects dependency of man to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He's bad enough now. But he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered." Muggeridge gets at the heart of what I want to say. It's not for nothing. Now how do I know that?
The deepest things that I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. Out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things that I know about God. I imagine that most of you would say exactly the same. I would add this that the greatest gifts of my life have also entailed the greatest suffering. The greatest gifts of my life for example have been marriage and motherhood. And let's never forget that if we don't ever want to suffer, we must be very careful never to love anything or anybody. The gifts of love have been the gifts of suffering. Those two things are inseparable.
Now, I come to you tonight not like R.C. Sproul who is a theologian and a scholar. I come to you not merely as one who has stood on the sidelines and pondered these things, but as one in whose life God has seen to it that there has been a certain measure of suffering, a certain measure of pain. It has been out of that very measure of pain that has come the unshakeable conviction that God is love.
Now when my little girl, Valerie, was two years old, her father had been dead for more than a year, and I was beginning to teach her things like Psalm 23:
The Lord is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul.
And I can still hear that tiny, little, baby voice saying, "He leadeth me beside the still waters." I realized that when I heard her say that again, and I still have a tape of her saying that, I thought, "Where did she get that weird intonation?" And I realized that she had gotten it from her mother who was coaching her word by word. She'd say, "He leadeth me," and I would say, "beside" and she would say, "beside." Anyway, she learned it.
Things like Psalm 91, one of my favorite psalms. "You who live in the shelter of the Most High and lodge under the shadow of the Almighty who say the Lord is my safe retreat, my God, the fortress the refuge in which I trust. He will cover you with his pinions and you shall find safety beneath his wings. You shall not fear the hunter's trap by night or the arrow that flies by day. A thousand may fall at your side, ten thousand close at hand but you it shall not touch" (vv. 1–7 paraphrased).
Now, I want you to think of how a mother who is a widow tried to teach her little daughter whose father was killed by a group of savage Indians, who thought that he was a cannibal, what this psalm means—what the words of Scripture means. She learned "Jesus loves me this I know" not because her daddy was killed. She didn't know it that way. But "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so." She learned to sing, "God will take care of me." How was I to explain that "a thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand but it shall not come nigh thee."
I tell you this because maybe it will help you see that I have been forced from the circumstances in my own life to try to get down to the very bedrock of faith—the things which are infrangible and unshakeable. God is my refuge. Was He Jim's refuge? Was He a fortress?
On the night before those five men who were killed by the Auca's went into Auca territory, they sang, "We rest on Thee our shield and our defender." What does your faith do with the irony of those words? There will be no intellectual satisfaction on this side of heaven to that age old question, "Why?"
But although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. And the answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God. And so we come back again to the terrible truths that there is suffering. The question, "Is God paying attention?" And thirdly, "Why doesn't He do something?"
And in answer to that third question, "Why doesn't He do something?" I would say, "He has. He did. He is doing something, and He will do something." The subject can only be approached via the cross—that old rugged cross so despised by the world. The very worst thing that ever happened in human history turns out to be the very best thing because it saved me. It saves the world.
So God's love, which was demonstrated to us in His giving His son Jesus to die on the cross, is brought together into harmony with suffering. You see, this is the crux of the question. And those of you who've studied Latin remember that the word crux, the Latin word crux for cross. It's only in the cross that we can begin to harmonize this seeming contradiction between suffering and love. We will never understand suffering unless we understand the love of God.
We're talking about two different levels on which things are to be understood. Again and again in the Scripture we have what seem to be complete paradoxes, because we're talking about two different kingdoms. We're talking about this visible world and an invisible kingdom on which the facts of this world are interpreted.
Take for example the beatitudes—those wonderful statements of paradox that Jesus gave to the multitudes when He was preaching to them on the mountain. He said things like this—very strange things: "How happy are those who know what sorrow means. Happy are those who claim nothing. Happy are those who have suffered persecution. What happiness will be yours when people blame you and ill treat you and say all kind of slanderous things against you. Be glad then. Yes, be tremendously glad." Does it make any sense at all? Not unless you see that there are two kingdoms—the kingdom of this world, the kingdom of an invisible world.
When I stood by my short-wave radio in the jungle of Ecuador in 1956 and heard that my husband was missing, God brought to my mind the words of the prophet Isaiah, "When thou passeth through the waters, I will be with thee" (43:2). You can imagine that my response was not terribly spiritual. I was saying, "But Lord, You're with me all the time. What I want is Jim. I want my husband."
We had been married twenty-seven months after waiting five-and-a-half years. Five days later I knew that Jim was dead, and God's presence with me was not Jim's presence. That was a terrible fact. God's presence did not change the terrible fact that I was a widow. I expected to be a widow until I died because I thought it was a miracle I got married the first time. I couldn't imagine that I would ever get married a second let alone a third. God's presence did not change the fact of my widowhood. Jim's absence thrust me, forced me, hurried me to God—my hope and my only refuge. And I learned in that experience who God is—who He is in a way that I could never have known otherwise.
And so I can say to you that suffering is an irreplaceable medium through which I learned an indispensable truth.  "I Am." "I am the Lord." In other words, God is God. Well, I still want to go back and say, "But, Lord, what about those babies? What about that little spina bifida child? What about those babies born terribly handicapped with terrible suffering because their mothers were on cocaine or heroin or alcohol?" And I can't answer your questions or even my own except in the words of Scripture.
These words from the apostle Paul who knew the power of the cross of Jesus. And this is what he wrote:

For I reckon that the sufferings we now endure bear no comparison with the splendor as yet unrevealed which is in store for us. For the created universe waits with eager expectation for God's sons to be revealed. It was made the victim of frustration [all those animals—all those babies who have no guilt whatsoever] the victim of frustration not by its own choice but because of him who made it so yet always there was hope [and this is the part that brings me immeasurable comfort] because the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and enter upon the liberty and splendor of the children of God. (Rom. 8:18–21 paraphrased)

Where does this idea of a loving God come from? It is not man so desperately wanting a god that he manufactures him in his mind. It's He who was the word before the foundation of the world suffering as a lamb slain and He has a lot up His sleeve that you and I haven't the slightest idea about now. He's told us enough so that we know that suffering is not for nothing.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.