Ego-Suffering Unto Life

Our fallen self, our wounded pride, does not go quietly.

Faced with dethronement, suffering, and death at the hands of the Risen Lord, it snarls, fights tooth and nail, and uses every diversionary tactic in the book to delay the outcome.

Left unchecked, our pride destroys us in the end and brings misery to everyone around us.

Suffering is the Cure

And if we don’t understand what God is up to, we may well ally with our sin nature and take its side in its struggle against God.

In other words, suffering is God’s favorite tool to break the grip of our ego, expose its true nature, and roll back its reign over our lives.

And not just any suffering–unrelieved suffering we cannot control, cannot end, cannot change, and cannot fix.

Our pride revels in control and getting its own way.

It prizes comfort, ease, convenience, and favorable conditions.

It therefore takes discomfort, disease, adversity, and unmitigated sorrow to get at it and get to it.

Treatment Plan for the Christian

As a Christ-follower, this makes sense because it’s the very pattern that ended Jesus’ life and set the stage for His resurrection.

Suffering is actually a sign of our increasing freedom, our coming and final liberation from sin’s reign.

It is how we grow up and become more like Jesus in character in this life.

It purifies our dirtiness like a smelter purifies the dross from the silver.

Instead of protecting our ego, we are commanded to continuously crucify it and always put to death the deeds of the fallen ego.

Get with the program, in other words.

Trust God for what grace you cannot yet see and for the good place He’s taking you disguised as suffering.

Fighting the Cure

As I’ve battled chronic insomnia– and the diminished mental alertness and relational liveliness that goes with it– only one response to this suffering has ever helped.

To yield to the God’s treatment plan, and surrender to Him and what He allows as a voluntarily sacrifice.

My first response, however, is usually to fight against it as I would a trap and seek a means of escape.

If that fails, I try to numb the pain through various means or seek relief through diversions or medicines.

If that fails, the final pre-surrender stage is despair and sullen withdrawal from God.

Then, failing that, I finally realize the core issue, and once again turn my life and my will over to God for Him to do as He wills.

Then I start to grow up in trust, in patience, in humility.

Then it’s wash-rinse-repeat time in a different area, or at an even deeper level.

For the Unbeliever

To the pre-Christian, it seems like the alternative to the reign of our ego is sheer chaos, unending death, and unrelieved terror.

But what the sinner cannot understand is God’s supreme love is at work.

You are being prepped.

God is not your tormentor or an aloof bystander.

He’s herding us into the stockade, making us part of His flock.

He’s stripping us of all rivals, and ruining the joy and credibility of our idols.

He’s working to end the reign of our cruel tyrant, the sin-monster, and replace it with the reign of an all-loving Savior.

He desires us.

He desires the person He’s afflicting to know Him and come under the healing charity of His Son.

It feels like we’ll lose everything dear, everything worthwhile, if we yield and let go and get small and be vulnerable and humble ourselves.

But it’s actually losing nothing and gaining everything of ultimate value.

It’s knowing Him and having Him in us and us being in Him.

Get with the program, in other words!