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Paul captures this beautifully when he writes of being burdened beyond his strength, despairing of life itself, and feeling as though he had received a sentence of death. Yet this was God’s strategy to “make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8–9). When you slow down and let those words settle, you can almost hear the theological dynamite beneath them. God does not merely permit moments that dismantle your self-reliance; He ordains them. He brings you into seasons that expose the limitation of your abilities, the fragility of your wisdom, the insufficiency of your coping strategies, and the futility of your self-protective instincts. You were never meant to be strong apart from Him. You were never made to sustain your own life, engineer your own outcomes, or build a kingdom where your will sets the standard.
At conversion, God saved you from the penalty of sin; through sanctification, He is saving you from the illusion of independence. That process cannot happen without death; the death of all the things you once believed would keep you safe. Paul understood this with sobering clarity. His life was not a sequence of unfortunate events; it was a God-designed curriculum in suffering. Paul did not merely experience hardship; he was trained by it, shaped by it, and redirected through it. He saw suffering not as an intruder to resist but as a tutor that ushered him deeper into the power and presence of Christ. Even as he catalogues his afflictions—beatings, imprisonments, sleepless nights, betrayals, hunger, shipwrecks—there is not even a hint that he sees suffering as something that contradicts the goodness of God.
This is why he can say that his hardships pushed him toward true greatness. His suffering was not wasted; it magnified Jesus. When Paul speaks of wanting to know Christ and the power of His resurrection, he does not separate resurrection power from suffering. Those two realities—power and pain—belong together. Resurrection power is not primarily about outward victory; it is about inward transformation. Paul longed to share Christ’s sufferings because he understood that suffering is one of God’s most effective chisels for shaping Christlikeness in His people. He knew that God never wastes pain. He never lets trials drift without purpose. Suffering is one of God’s chosen instruments for crucifying the self and unleashing grace.
This raises unavoidable questions for every believer. What animates your innermost thoughts? What fuels your deepest affections? When you look at your dreams, your goals, your purpose statements, your prayers, and the things you complain about, what do they reveal about your chief desire? Is your life primarily driven by a passion to know Christ and be shaped into His likeness, or is it driven by the desire for a better, more comfortable, more pleasant life than you currently have? These are not intellectual questions. They are diagnostic questions that reveal the operating system of your soul.
Paul was a man who understood what truly mattered. He had one controlling passion: to know Christ and make Christ known. For him, suffering was not a violation of that calling but a vehicle for it. Every insult, persecution, thorn, loss, and sorrow became another window through which Christ’s beauty could be seen more clearly. Suffering did not compete with Paul’s mission; it advanced it. This perspective is radically different from modern assumptions about suffering. Many believers today assume that suffering is the enemy of spiritual vitality, the antithesis of blessing, the obstacle to joy. In Paul’s mind, suffering was the companion of joy, the pathway to spiritual vitality, and one of the clearest markers of genuine union with Christ.
This is why suffering never made Paul cynical. It made him worship. It expanded his view of Christ, not diminished it. It kept him small, which allowed Christ to appear large. Paul lived with a kind of spiritual realism that few believers embrace today. He understood that suffering was an essential part of his sanctification, not a detour from it. Every Christian must eventually see what Paul saw. If your purpose in life is to avoid suffering, you will resent the very processes God uses to mature you. You will view hardship as a violation rather than a gift. But if your purpose in life is to display Christ, you will not despise the thorns He allows. You will not waste energy wishing for a different story. Instead, you will begin to see weakness as a strange and beautiful mercy because when God drains you of self-reliance, He is not destroying you; He is freeing you.
Problem-solving is where the biblical counseling movement has, at times, unintentionally muddied the waters. Without meaning to, some counselors create the impression that the goal of counseling is problem removal. They drift into thinking that victory means symptom relief, circumstantial improvement, relational ease, emotional stability, or the disappearance of difficulties. But Scripture gives us a far different vision. Imagine Paul knocking on your counseling office door. He is prayerful. Mature. Spiritually driven. A giant of faith. And he says, “I have a thorn that torments me. I have pleaded with God to remove it, but He has not done so. Will you help me get rid of it?” If your counseling model assumes that success equals problem elimination, you will spend your energy trying to accomplish what God has no intention of doing.
God never planned to remove Paul’s thorn. In fact, God gave it to him. If you misunderstand that, you will mislead God’s people. Paul’s thorn was not a failure of faith; it was a gift of grace. It kept him small. It kept him dependent. It kept him usable. It kept him free from the pride that would have ruined him. When the Lord tells Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you,” it is not a theological band-aid. It is the revelation of how God intends to shape every believer. The Lord does not say, “My grace will remove your thorn.” He says, “My grace is enough for you while the thorn remains.” This is the theology modern Christians desperately need. You do not live in a culture that helps you embrace this truth. You live in a world that celebrates recovery, pain-avoidance, therapeutic comfort, and quick fixes. The culture promises escape from discomfort. The gospel promises transformation through discomfort.
One message fuels self-pity; the other fuels worship. A strong counseling model must make room for both possibilities: sometimes God removes a thorn, and sometimes He sustains you beneath it. But the aim is always the same: Christ magnified in your body, whether by life or by death. When your ultimate goal is not comfort but Christlikeness, you stop seeing suffering as an interruption and begin seeing it as an invitation. It is a sacred place where you meet the God who raises the dead. If Paul teaches us anything, it is that the Christian life cannot be reduced to a pain-management program. A gospel-shaped life is not a life free from burdens, but one transformed by them. This is where so many modern believers stumble. They assume that if God loves them, He will remove what hurts. But Paul experienced something radically different. The closer he walked with Christ, the more the Lord dismantled his self-confidence.
Paul did not outgrow weakness. He grew into it. He learned to see weakness as the doorway to real strength. Not a dead-end. Not a punishment. A doorway. This is why Paul could say without hesitation that he rejoiced in weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. When he embraced weakness, he was not celebrating suffering for its own sake. He was celebrating what weakness made possible: the power of Christ resting on him. Weakness was never the prize; Christ was. But weakness was the God-assigned pathway to the prize. When Paul said, “When I am weak, then I am strong,” he was not speaking poetically. He meant it literally. Weakness was not the obstacle to spiritual strength; it was the condition for it. This perspective is profoundly countercultural. Everything around us preaches the opposite message.
The modern West worships comfort, avoids pain, idolizes autonomy, and exalts the self. Virtually every message from the culture—advertising, entertainment, social media, therapeutic models—aims to convince you that a meaningful life is a life where you get what you want, avoid what you fear, and eliminate what discomforts you. The world’s gospel is a gospel of personal sovereignty: “You are entitled to a life without suffering. You can define your truth. When that message seeps into a Christian’s mind, suffering becomes offensive, and sanctification becomes incomprehensible. You begin to assume God’s goodness is measured by how closely He aligns with your preferences.
But God never makes such promises. He promises Himself, not a life without difficulty. He promises resurrection power, not circumstantial ease. This is why Paul’s thorn is so instructive. He asked three times for the Lord to remove it, which is a thoroughly reasonable request. Yet the Lord refused, not because He was indifferent but because He was kind. Removing Paul’s thorn would have robbed him of the very thing God intended the thorn to produce: humility, dependence, clarity, power, endurance, and a deeper knowledge of Christ. This is the radical truth we often resist: God will sometimes leave something in your life that you desperately want removed because it is the only tool sharp enough to carve Christlikeness into your soul. God is not committed to your comfort; He is committed to your transformation. And the two rarely travel together.
If you cling to your own understanding of what a “good life” should look like, you will fight God’s purposes. You will resent His providence. You will interpret unanswered prayer as rejection rather than redirection. The thorn that frustrates you may be the thorn that keeps you alive. A theology of suffering is not optional for the Christian; it is essential. The Bible is uncomfortably clear that suffering is not the exception but the expectation. Jesus said plainly, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” That is not sentimental language. Taking up your cross is not a metaphor for mild inconvenience; it is a summons to die. The cross is the instrument of execution, the symbol of self-death. Jesus does not hide the cost of discipleship. He lays out the path clearly: “Following Me means dying with Me.” If He had told you anything less, He would have lied.
Paul’s words echo the same reality. To know Christ is to know the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. The resurrection and the sufferings are not enemies; they are companions. You cannot experience resurrection power without embracing cruciform living. The path to glory runs straight through Gethsemane. In Christian counseling contexts, this truth is essential. Many counselees arrive with a singular focus: “Make this problem go away.” They imagine the counselor’s job is to remove their suffering, dissolve their tension, and engineer the life they long for. Counselors—often unintentionally—can reinforce that assumption, especially if they are more concerned about immediate relief than long-term transformation. But Christ is not primarily interested in your relief; He is interested in your renewal.
Counseling that does not account for this reality will inevitably mislead the believer. It will feed unrealistic expectations. It will give the impression that the good life is the pain-free life. And then, when suffering persists—as it inevitably will—the counselee will feel betrayed by God, disappointed with counseling, and confused about their faith. Paul never looked at life that way. He saw suffering as a gift, and sometimes a severe gift, but always a sanctifying one. Whether the thorn was removed or remained, his question remained the same: “How can this situation be used to display Christ?” That is the question every believer must learn to embrace. Christianity is not the path to circumstantial ease; it is the path to Christ. And Christ is most clearly revealed when the believer is stripped of every illusion of self-sufficiency.
So many Christians collapse under the weight of disappointment because they have unknowingly absorbed the world’s promises rather than God’s. They believe the “best life now” is attainable. And when those expectations collapse, they interpret the collapse as evidence that God has failed them. But God never promised any of those things. He promised something better. He promised His presence. He promised His strength made perfect in weakness. And that means something profound: Your greatest spiritual growth will often emerge from the very places you begged God to remove. The things you fear may be the things that free you. If you resist the Lord’s work in your suffering, you will remain spiritually shallow, emotionally fragile, and relationally brittle. But if you embrace the death He calls you to die, you will find His life rising within you in ways you never imagined.
This is why Scripture speaks so plainly about weakness. God does not hide the fact that we are clay jars. He does not pretend we are sturdy, self-contained, or autonomous. He tells us plainly that we are fragile, dependent, and easily broken. That is not an insult; it is a safeguard. You cannot walk with God unless you walk in weakness. He will not compete with your strength. He will not pour His power into a vessel already full of itself. He calls you to die so that Christ may live in you. If you are committed to the world’s version of strength, your spiritual life will feel like a battlefield of frustration. You will fight every limitation. You will resent every trial. And in doing so, you will cut yourself off from the very grace that makes you whole. But if you embrace God’s version of strength, strength through weakness, hope through suffering, gain through loss, you will find yourself rooted in something the world cannot give, and trials cannot take away.
And this is the paradox that sits at the center of the gospel: You must die to live. You must descend to rise. You must surrender to overcome. You must lose to gain. You must become weak to be strong. This is not spiritual poetry. It is a spiritual reality. Christ died and rose again, not simply to rescue you from hell, but to teach you how to live a crucified, resurrected life in Him. The gospel is not merely the doorway into Christianity; it is the blueprint for the entire Christian journey. Every day, Christ calls you deeper into His death so He can lead you further into His life. This kind of dying will not happen naturally. The flesh never volunteers for crucifixion. You will need the Spirit to pry your hands off the controls. You will need the Word to reorient your desires. You will need the body of Christ to speak the truth to you when you drift into self-pity. And you will need prayer—the kind of prayer that echoes Gethsemane: “Not my will, but Yours be done.”
Dying to yourself is not a concept to admire; it is a command to obey and a reality to practice. The Lord is calling you to examine where self-reliance still hides. The question is not whether God is putting you to death in certain areas. He is. The question is whether you are cooperating with His work or resisting it. Take time this week to sit before the Lord with honest openness. Ask Him to show you where you are still clinging to life instead of surrendering it. And ask Him to give you the courage to embrace weakness as the doorway to Christ’s strength. Then take these questions to a trusted friend. Let someone else speak into your life. Let someone diagnose what you cannot see. Sanctification was never meant to be private. Death and resurrection always happen in community.
Let the Spirit do His deep work. Let others walk with you. Let weakness become the place where Christ rests on you with power.
Brother or sister, dying to yourself is not a journey of despair but a journey of freedom. The death God calls you to is not the crushing death of condemnation but the liberating death of surrender. He is not stripping you of life; He is stripping you of the things that keep you from life. Do not fear the places where He exposes your insufficiency. Do not resent the moments where He dismantles your strength. Do not run from the thorns that humble you. These are not the signs of His absence but the proofs of His presence.
Christ went before you in suffering. He meets you in suffering. He transforms you through suffering. And He will raise you through suffering. Let His death be your pattern. Let His resurrection be your hope. And let His strength be your confidence as you learn, day by day, to die so that you may truly live.
Rick launched the Life Over Coffee global training network in 2008 to bring hope and help for you and others by creating resources that spark conversations for transformation. His primary responsibilities are resource creation and leadership development, which he does through speaking, writing, podcasting, and educating.
In 1990 he earned a BA in Theology and, in 1991, a BS in Education. In 1993, he received his ordination into Christian ministry, and in 2000 he graduated with an MA in Counseling from The Master’s University. In 2006 he was recognized as a Fellow of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors (ACBC).
