Troublesome Topic: What Would Life Be Like Without Pain?

At first it sounds wonderful to have no pain. But in reality it would be horrible in a strange way.

Imagine this scenario: You are a parent of several children of different ages. One day, just before the holidays, you are in the kitchen baking cookies. While your back is turned, the child that tries your patience the most sneaks into the kitchen, quietly opens the oven door, reaches in with his bare hand and takes a partially baked cookie right off the cookie sheet. He shoves the whole thing in his mouth, and runs out of the kitchen laughing. While he runs he bumps his lip on the corner of the table and now he is bleeding all over his clothes and the floor. You holler at him to stop running because he will hurt himself again; but he just laughs and keeps running.

That may sound like a highly exaggerated situation. You may think I invented it to prove the point that we need pain. But, no. It is in fact the reality for some families.

We need pain. It tells us that something is wrong, and we hopefully learn from that pain so we don’t do the same thing again. Pain in our stomach or back tells us something is wrong inside our body. Pain in a shoulder tells you to use that shoulder more gingerly. In a more general sense, the pain and struggle that is so common throughout life serves to remind us of the problem of sin. Without hardship of any kind we would never see our need to seek God. Pain and hardship have positive roles to play. I am not saying that pain is enjoyable, but it is necessary.

 The Bible actually has much to say about the positive role of pain and hardship in our lives. Here are a few examples:

Proverbs 27:6 says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” That is because a true friend will only wound us if it is necessary to make us better, to wake us up to reality.

Paul said: Through personal experience, I want to know Him (Christ) and the power of His resurrection, and experience fellowship with His suffering, embodying the same thing He embodied in His death (Phil 3:10).

James 1:2-4  My brothers, think of it as pure joy when you fall into situations where you are surrounded by various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patient endurance, and let patient endurance complete its work so that you may be complete and whole, lacking nothing.

Can we trust that God does know what is best for us? Yes. So why do we doubt Him so easily when we are in physical or emotional pain? We doubt Him because we don’t like pain and we are focused on ourselves rather than on Him.

Always remember that Satan’s temptation to see pain as an indictment against God grows out of our sense of self-centeredness. Instead of allowing Satan to turn pain into an attack on God’s character, we should turn pain into an opportunity to thank God for such powerful reminders about sin and His remedy for sin.

The next lesson is Satan Uses Our Emotions against Us