Where Do We Find Ourselves in Suffering?

Have you noticed how suffering can lead us to the cross of Christ in ways that nothing else can? Our suffering reminds us that God's entire engagement with the world focused on his radical scandalous grace that came through the Father’s suffering Son. This grace culminated and found full expression in the surrender of His son to death on the cross. Who would ever imagine the perfect expression of the love of God would be the brutal crucifixion of God's son? God's heart was fixed on this radical surrender to suffering from eternity past.Suffering brings us to the cross of Christ. As we stand beneath the suffering of Jesus on the cross, we stand beneath a scandalous grace. It is a scandalous grace because the cross was, and still is, an affront to all religious sensibilities. What God says and what God does in Christ's cross assaults all religious propriety. What He says is this, "I love you through suffering and sacrifice, the suffering and sacrifice of my own Son."As we plumb the meaning of Christ’s suffering sacrifice, we see that God's just judgment against all sin is satisfied. Now God's extraordinary mercy on sinners is poured out lavishly. As a result we are placed in Christ and have access to participate in the life of the living God! But we must never forget that we were placed into his sufferings as well as his sacrifice. In our sufferings we enter the presence of the God who enters our suffering and who puts to death our eternal death.At the cross of Christ, God invites us beyond all our pretensions of self-defined goodness and notions of self-sufficiency. At the cross of Christ, we stand surrendering all our designs of self-fixing, and in faith embrace God's gift of love and life. At the cross of Christ we can surrender ourselves again to the God who brings us home to the living God and to ourselves. And at the cross we see that our suffering has meaning and will be transformed by the scandalous grace of our God.