WOW. What a verse and what a topic. Does your pain have purpose? Maybe you’re in a season right now that’s painful. Maybe it’s a hurtful breakup, a broken trust in marriage, a death of a loved one, a lost job, friendship problems, a diagnosis you never dreamed of, a long life of discouraging health issues or maybe it’s something that’s less of a situation and more of state of being – maybe you feel stuck in loneliness, depression, bitterness.

Does your pain have purpose?

The passage I just read is one of my all time favorite passages in scripture. It’s a passage I read over 5 years ago now in the midst of my own very real heartache that I felt angry and sad about. Reading this passage was the first time I REALLY felt like the Words of scripture ever lifted off the page. I had felt and known that God was speaking to me before through what so many would call coincidences or experiences or even through strictly scripture but this was the first time in my life that I felt like I could tangibly hear God whisper to me and call me to see these verses like never before. 

I was in a season where I was desperately trying to understand WHY. WHY would God allow such a tragedy to take place? WHY would God not protect someone I love, someone He loves? WHY would God allow pain like this? WHY would God not intervene? It was also a big season of the question HOW. HOW could God be loving and all powerful and still allow this? HOW could God make all things work together for God for me in this situation?

Friend if you can relate at all, keep listening. I’m going to DIVE into this passage and tell you front and center – your pain, your very tangible, very hard pain that I am SO sorry you are going through. That pain has PURPOSE. 

1. God is a Father of mercies and God of all comfort. Know today that God is THE ONE to go to with your pain. He is mercy and He is the God of ALL comfort – every type of comfort, the best comfort, the fullest of comfort that’s what HE knows and can do in YOU. He can comfort even the people and situations that seem most comfortLESS.
2. God comforts us so that – this is the section that has stuck with me the rest of my life. God comforts SO THAT. God comforts for a reason. God’s comfort has purpose. But if God’s comfort has purpose, there has to be a reason He had to comfort us in the first place. This life is full – overflowing – with pain that often we don’t realize the gravity of until it hits OUR lives. But God comforts. And He has a purpose for comforting you even MORE than just comforting you
3. SO THAT we can comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted God. God comforts us so we can spread that comfort. It’s so like a God of comfort to want to SPREAD comfort, right? He gives purpose to our being comforted. Which means when we receive that comfort it’s not just for us to feel and forget. It’s for us to receive and pour out. God, in His incredible goodness, allows us to be used mightily even in the hard places. He wants to use YOU to be able to comfort others. To be a light to others. To bring hope to others. To reach others. He could do it all Himself – just like He did for me. BUT He could also use us to comfort others with that same comfort. Maybe you even have been comforted by someone else. I know in my own life I have – I have been SO Grateful for those who have walked hard paths before me and were able to comfort me and give wisdom and speak truth because they had themselves been comforted by God through their pain and God now used their pain and comfort for the good of another person He loves. THEY allowed themselves and the comfort they received to be used for a greater good and didn’t just keep that in. 
4. For there to be purpose in comfort there has to pain and purpose in pain. The writer says “If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we suffer.” Even our affliction has purpose. Affliction will exist. God never shies away from that truth in scripture. Not ONCE. In fact He tells us to expect it time and time again. But God brings beauty from ashes and good from evil and hope from the valley. 
5. Pain is real. The writer says, “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.” If you feel like you are feeling that extreme pain. Where you are so burdened beyond your strength that you even despair of life, that you have received a sentence of death – friend know you are NOT alone. God acknowledges your pain. He sees you. And NO pain is too much for Him to comfort. 
6. There’s 2 purposes in pain: to comfort others which we talked about and this: “That was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again.” Because sin exists, there is pain. Right now, Satan does have his reign of this earth. It’s not unlimited and it’s not forever but it is real. Pain EXISTS. But God gives even pain a purpose. Here the writer says that the pain – the burden beyond strength, despairing of life itself, feeling like a sentence of death pain – was to make him rely on God and not themselves. God who raises the dead – who can heal the ULTIMATE pain. Who delivers us and will deliver us again. It’s to cause us to set our hope on HIM and HIS deliverance and nothing else. It reminds us that everything else is fleeting. Everything. Except. Him. That’s just reality and He wants us to remember and trust and REST in that reality despite everything else that falls away. 

So does your pain have purpose? YES. It has a purpose for yourself – to depend on Jesus. It has a purpose that’s to be poured out – to encourage and comfort others. 

Something I realized years ago was that just like my life is not my own. My pain is not my own. It is not just for me. It is for others. 

And while in some seasons it seems hard to fathom anything useful coming from pain, it can also be an incredibly HEALING reality. There is purpose in my pain. My pain can be used for good. My pain’s purpose and my life’s purpose are greater than to just benefit or affect me. 

Praise God that He does bring beauty from ashes and make all things good for those who love Him and bring purpose in EVERYTHING.