At the root of all fear is the idea that pain is on its way and that pain is bad and to be avoided at all costs. The fearful run in the opposite direction of pain, while the Brave stand and face it, even run toward it when necessary, knowing that the gain they will find on the other side will make all of the pain worthwhile. Your thoughts on pain, then, are the barometer of your emotional life and the presence or lack of the brave stuff in your life.
In this world you will have pain. You will be rejected, hurt, sick, and even dying. Pain is a part of life, and what you think about pain is a very important part of who you are. Knowing the truth about pain sets the Brave free because the truth makes sense of injury, loss, and agony. In a world where pain has no purpose other than to slowly suck the life out of a person, pain is an unwelcome and feared thing. But in the life of the Brave, pain serves a great purpose.
The Brave know pain, and therefore they know gain. The gain that they get from the pain in their life isn’t masochistic but spiritual. Pain serves a purpose, and that purpose isn’t to destroy you but to make you stronger. The fearful avoid pain and dread its appearance because they haven’t fully understood its value. Now, before you scream, “Value? There’s no value to being in pain!” just give pain a chance and listen to what we have to say before you give up on the idea of finding bravery in your pain.
To know the pain in your life and to find gain in it is to know the God in your life and to find him good. Nothing happens, not even pain, unless God in his great goodness allows it for his perfect purposes. The Israelites suffered a lot in the days of Jeremiah, but God had this to say about their pain: “As I brought all these disasters on these people, so I will bring on them all these blessings that I have promised them” (Jer. 32:42). God doesn’t disappear when hard times come; he isn’t absent and out of touch but is very much a part of every aspect of your life. As a believer you have to know that God doesn’t save you from pain but in pain. That means that pain serves a great purpose, and this is where the Brave find their power: they see purpose in their pain rather than uselessness and nonsense. They see the amazing power that pain can have in their lives, and they believe the words they read in Philippians 1:29: “God has given you the privilege not only to believe in Christ but also to suffer for him.”
Pain, suffering, and struggles are all part of life for every human being on earth, but for the Brave they are gain because they are all under the control of their perfect, trustworthy, and faithful Father. He not only works everything together for their good but also promises a great reward for those who suffer and yet keep the faith all the while (see Matt. 5:11–12; Rom. 5:3–4; 8:17; 2 Cor. 4:17–18; Heb. 12:10).
For the Brave, pain serves a far greater purpose than destruction and diversion. Pain serves the purpose of forcing them to rely completely on God. In 2 Corinthians 1:8–9 Paul says it like this:
Brothers and sisters, we don’t want you to be ignorant about the suffering we experienced in the province of Asia. It was so extreme that it was beyond our ability to endure. We even wondered if we could go on living. In fact, we still feel as if we’re under a death sentence. But we suffered so that we would stop trusting ourselves and learn to trust God, who brings the dead back to life.
Paul’s pain served an amazing purpose: it taught him to stop trusting himself and to start trusting God. But this is only true because Paul knew the source of everything in his life, and that made him a part of the Brave. Charles Spurgeon, the famous pastor, was intimately aware of the gain of pain. He suffered from severe gout and bouts with depression, and he could not bear to think of it as being from anyone but God himself. He said, “It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.”[3] The Brave know who has their life in his hands, and because of that they can know pain and know gain.
Pain is a great teacher in the life of the Brave. It’s worth reading one more thing that came out of the painful life of Spurgeon, just to show you how faith receives the trial of pain. Take a look at his wishes for others: “I dare say the greatest earthly blessing that God can give to any of us is health, with the exception of sickness. . . . If some men that I know of could only be favored with a month of rheumatism, it would, by God’s grace, mellow them marvelously.”[4] The Bible agrees with this idea of mellowing, or maturing, a person through pain when it talks about faithfully persevering through pain so that you can become “mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:4 NIV). So pain is the great maturer. The Brave, who live through great pain successfully without allowing it to become the end of them or to tear them away from their faith, mature at a far quicker rate than others their age. From the pain comes all kinds of wisdom, grace, compassion, and faith for those who are willing to accept the perseverance that it requires. You can cling to and remember this purpose of pain whenever pain threatens to be your destruction. Always remember that it cannot destroy you, but it can bring you growth and maturity beyond your years.
You might not trust God enough just yet to accept the pain in your life, but the pain will get you there, because the pain is what produces endurance. No pain, no gain. Know pain, know gain. You can be happy when you run into problems and trials, because those trials develop your endurance. And endurance builds your strength of character, and your strength of character builds up your confidence in your salvation, not just for heaven, but from the sins of this world as well. And guess what? This hope doesn’t disappoint, because God loves you so much that he has given you the Holy Spirit to fill your heart with his very own love (see Rom. 5:3–5). Bang! Welcome to the land of the free and the home of the Brave. God’s Word confirms it: you have all you need inside of you to endure, and endure well, anything that comes your way. The Holy Spirit is on your side. He isn’t watching from a distance but lives inside of you, actively moving in your life. And because of that nothing—not trouble, distress, persecution, hunger, nakedness, danger, or violent death—can separate you from his love (see Rom. 8:35–39). This is the way the Brave live—not by their own strength but by his. And it’s the way you can live too.
This might seem like anything but the truth when you are in the throes of pain, but the Bible promises that you can “consider those who endure to be blessed” (James 5:11). Blessings await endurance. One of those blessings is that pain teaches you compassion. Second Corinthians 1:4 says that when you suffer and let God comfort you, showing you his compassion, it has an amazing side effect: that “whenever other people suffer, we are able to comfort them by using the same comfort we have received from God.” Pain teaches your soul compassion so that you aren’t out just for yourself, but you become aware of the pain around you and also know how to respond to it with help and comfort, just like you have been comforted. So pain serves the purpose of making you able to help and to comfort others.
Pain is not God’s weapon used to destroy you but his tool used to teach and grow you. He doesn’t inflict pain to torture you but allows it to mature you. Sometimes pain comes as a result of sin, in the form of discipline, but sometimes pain has nothing at all to do with sin. In fact, the pain that Jesus endured is evidence of that. He had no sin in him at all, and yet he endured all the pain in the world in one day. But this pain served a great purpose—not only the salvation of mankind but also his own obedience. Hebrews 5:8 teaches us another purpose of pain: “Although Jesus was the Son of God, he learned to be obedient through his sufferings.” Your pain can serve the purpose of teaching you obedience as well, if you are willing to trust him with your pain. Can you be willing, when the aches come, when the heart breaks, and when the prognosis isn’t good, to accept the comfort of God and to trust that he has a great purpose for the pain in your life? If you are, then you have become one of the Brave.
The Brave Don’t Worry about Future Pain
I’m giving you my peace. I don’t give you the kind of peace that the world gives. So don’t be troubled or cowardly. (John 14:27)
While fear has to do with the arrival of pain, worry ponders the fear of future pain. This pain may or may not ever come, but worry promises that if we think about it long enough, we might overcome it. Worry tells us that the more we concentrate on a problem, the more the concentrated energy of our thoughts will protect us from what we fear and maybe even keep it from happening. Worry is your body on alert, guarding itself, pacing the wall, keeping an eye out for enemies, trigger finger ready. But the trouble is that it has no bullets, nothing to hurl at intruders to stun them or disable them. So they just keep on coming. Worry is powerless to do what its express purpose is: to protect you.
As we’ve mentioned, when Hayley was younger, she was afraid of flying. She was on the verge of a panic attack every time she got onto a plane. She worried so much about crashing that she had to have a window seat so she could monitor things outside the plane. The idea of not being able to see outside was like the idea of driving a car with a blindfold on. Her worry needed comfort, and the comfort it got was from believing that it was safer for her to look out the window than to sit on the aisle, as if the pilot needed her eyes in order to keep the plane up in the air. Closing the shade and choosing not to look out the window was not an option to her worried mind. She was scared to death, and worrying was the only way she could feel any control over the situation. Worry believes it is active and in control, while faith is inactive and not in control.
But the activity of worry is deceiving. It pretends to be really busy, watching for rogue planes coming into its airspace, keeping an eye out for storm clouds and lightning bolts. Worry has a big job, or so it says. “I’ve got my hands full just thinking about everything that could go wrong,” says worry. Worry promises comfort to the fearful, hope to the helpless, and safety to the anxious.
Worry is all about protecting you from whatever it is you dread the most. It feeds on your anxiety that whatever you fear would be terrible, horrible, and unbearable. Worry works as hard as it can to protect you from pain. Pain, or the fear of it, is the fuel of all worry. At the root of everything that consumes you is this idea that if a certain thing happens you will suffer, and in your mind, pain is a bad, bad thing. So you worry about friends, you worry about disaster, you worry about pain. You worry that you will lose something, that you will have to do something, or that you will find out something. Worry is an early protection system for your heart, and it does its best to guard against any kind of pain or suffering that might be coming.
But while worry is promising to protect you, it’s silently destroying you. Worry makes you sick to your stomach with uneasiness. It makes it hard to fall asleep, which makes you tired and grumpy. It makes you anxious and panicked. It gives you headaches and sore muscles. It makes you nauseated and nervous. Thus it ends up giving you an early down payment on the thing that you are worried about—pain—in the form of self-inflicted pain. Worry trades imagined pain for real pain and future stress for current stress, and it keeps you from living a life that is effective and strong.
Oddly enough, what the worrier is fearing might be the very thing that God is allowing. Remember that if it happens to you, then God allowed it to happen, such as the destruction Satan let loose on Job, but only after getting God’s permission (see Job 1). In Lamentations 3:37–38 this truth is crystallized when it says, “Who was it who spoke and it came into being? It was the Lord who gave the order. Both good and bad come from the mouth of the Most High God.” That means that nothing is out of God’s control, not even the pain you are suffering or might suffer tomorrow. So if God is going to allow some pain to come into your life, why would you argue with him and tell him that you are afraid of his choices for your life, as if your choices would be better ones? It might sound impossible right now to not fear future pain, but ask yourself this: “Would I rather have God’s will for my life, no matter how painful, or my own, no matter how ungodly?” You’re choosing the latter when you worry. Worry says, “God, your choices for my life might be too dangerous, too ugly, and too bad for me, and my choices, my dreams, and my hopes are perfect, and without them I cannot go on.” Is that really what you think—that you are wiser and a better judge of what’s best for you than your perfect heavenly Father? That’s what worry says.
This idea of believing the best instead of worrying about the hard stuff has its foundation in faith, but researchers at Harvard and Yale universities recently found the same to be true when they conducted a study. It is a little-known fact that stress can actually enhance the human brain and body when it is looked at properly, and the researchers proved this point when they showed two groups of stressed people two different videos. The first group saw a three-minute video on the effects of stress and worry on the body. This group got stressed-out by the video. The second group watched a video that talked about how stress can actually improve the ability of your brain to function. They were taught that it can improve your memory and intelligence, increase your productivity, and even speed up your recovery from things like knee surgery. This group, unlike the first, didn’t stress out, because they were comforted by the knowledge of the benefits of their stress. They learned that stress can make you more mentally tough and give you deeper relationships, a heightened awareness, a new perspective on life, a sense of mastery over something, an appreciation for life, and a heightened sense of meaning. It can even strengthen your priorities. Because they began to see the benefits found in a degree of stress, they were more relaxed than the first group.[5]
Like the group that got knowledge rather than more stress over stress, the Brave are set free from the domination of worry because they are so certain of God’s goodness that they can let go of their death grip on their future and their panic over the present. They can say, “Whatever he wills is the best for me.” They can stop all worry in their lives because of the certainty that God is in control and that no matter how bad things look, he can be trusted.
The Brave Are Confident
The Brave know that the pain that might or might not come into their lives isn’t something to fear but a chance to trust, so they are set free from worry. But what about those times when you say, “Sure, I can trust God—I just can’t trust myself. I’m going to mess things up, not him”? This kind of self-doubt or insecurity can be a major problem, especially in relationships with other human beings. Out of this come feelings of shyness, self-loathing, insecurity, and low self-esteem. Those feelings don’t belong in the life of faith, because they are all the result of focusing on the wrong thing. The subject of all these bad feelings isn’t God but self. It’s no wonder you have doubt in yourself, because you aren’t perfect, you are human, you are broken, and you don’t know everything. Of course, making you the focus of life is going to disappoint!
But the Brave aren’t focused inward. They don’t live to serve the good of themselves. If they did, they would have no reason to rise above the sensation of pain to serve one greater than themselves, because none would be greater. Low self-esteem, self-loathing, and insecurity might look like symptoms of a low view of who you are, but the truth is, they are actually a high and prideful view of who you are. Sounds impossible, but it’s true: those feelings of self-defeat, worthlessness, and grief over a miserable life have at their root the idea that you deserve better and that you are such a special case that no one else could possibly be as bad off as you. You are in fact the “worst” person in the world, which in a weird twist of self-obsession means you are in one way more incredible than others because you have achieved more in the area of misery, weakness, or grief than anyone before or since you. Pride focuses on self and makes self the center of the universe. When that’s the case, you believe every bad thing that happens, happens to you, every evil person in the world is sent to destroy you, every bad day was made just for you, and on and on. This inward-focused way of thinking makes your life the star and puts Christ in the backseat.
The Brave see a different story: they see their lives as unworthy of the suffering of Christ. Charles Spurgeon, who we mentioned earlier, said, “Your pains are sharp, yet ‘his strokes are fewer than your crimes, and lighter than your guilt.’ From the pains of hell Christ has delivered you. Why should a living man complain? As long as you are out of hell, gratitude may mingle with your groans.”[6] The Brave see that they don’t deserve to have even a day of happiness because of the depth of their sinfulness, so they are invigorated and inspired by the fact that God was so gracious to them that he sent his one and only Son to take on their sin so that they might live forever, even though they have time and again turned their backs on God. The Brave know that there is no one who is righteous, not even one (see Rom. 3:10), so they aren’t surprised by their weakness or their sinfulness. They don’t condemn what God has forgiven. Sure, they confess their sin, but they also accept the immediate forgiveness that God offers to all who confess (see 1 John 1:9). They don’t hold on to their sin as if God isn’t big enough to take it away or to forgive and forget it, removing it as far as the east is from the west (see Ps. 103:12).
The Brave have confidence not in themselves but in God. You might say that they too lack self-esteem but have replaced it with God-esteem. Any time you find all your value and goodness in who you are, you will be disappointed sooner or later, because you will fail. But when you find your value in who he is, you will never be disappointed. The Brave are confident because of who God is. They aren’t consumed with the fear of pleasing other people because that isn’t their goal; pleasing God is all they want to do. So when God commands them to love others (see John 13:34–35), to show hospitality (1 Pet. 4:9), and to show compassion and mercy (see Zech. 7:9), they don’t have the luxury of labeling themselves as too shy or introverted, because they have decided this life is not about them and their failures but about him and his victory.
If you are shy by nature, it doesn’t have to be a life sentence. Your weaknesses can be turned into strengths when you don’t hold on to them for dear life but let them be transformed by the renewing power of his grace (2 Cor. 5:17). Faith changes things. It makes the scared, brave and the shy, outgoing. It makes the old way of the flesh outdated and unacceptable and makes the new way of the Spirit the only way to go.
The Brave have victory over the pain inflicted by the thoughts and actions of other people because they no longer live for themselves. They are soldiers in the army of God, so they don’t let themselves get involved in civilian affairs anymore but take their orders from their commander and trust that the war is under his control (see 2 Tim. 2:4). All the Brave have to do is follow commands, not protect themselves or resist the commander’s call to “Charge!” The Brave are never insecure, because all their security is found in the rock of their salvation, the one who never changes and who can always be trusted (see Num. 23:19; Jer. 17:7). What they know of pain because of this is that “suffering creates endurance, endurance creates character, and character creates confidence” (Rom. 5:3–4). Out of the enduring pain they gain the confidence that others can never find. This confidence might not come easy, but it is strong and enduring, and once you have it, you will never fear others again.
The Brave Accept Failure
If you’re following us so far, you probably can also believe that the Brave accept failure. Failure is subjective. One man’s failure might just be another man’s victory. It’s how you look at it that affects what impact it makes on your life. The Brave look at failure in light of who God is, not who they are. Failure, if it has the fingerprints of God on it, is just turning you away from the wrong direction and toward the right one. And the Brave are certain that God’s fingerprints are on all parts of their lives when they are going after and trusting in his perfect will. The Brave categorize failure into two camps. One kind of failure comes from sinning. When you don’t do what God commands you to do, failure is bound to follow. When you refuse to submit to authority, failure comes in the form of discipline, sometimes called punishment, from those in authority over you. Failure comes when you don’t do what God commands because what God commands is meant for your good. That means that the result of not obeying is going to be something bad. So failure serves to teach you not to do something that isn’t good for you. This kind of failure is called discipline (see Lam. 3:39; Heb. 12:6).
While discipline can be uncomfortable and no fun to live through, it is meant for your good. So the Brave say “thank you” when discipline shapes and corrects them, and they don’t let the pain of discipline or the sting of failure get the better of them.
The Brave don’t confuse this discipline in the form of failure with God’s will for their lives. For example, the Brave don’t sin and then blame their failure in life on him. An example of this would be a person who knew that God forbids premarital sex having it anyway, getting a sexually transmitted disease, and then saying, “It must be God’s will that I’m sick now.” No, it is never God’s will for his people to sin, and that’s why he disciplines them. So the result of sin is God’s discipline, not God’s perfect will. Making you more like Christ for God’s glory is his will. Discipline is different than God’s judgment. Take for example the sin of divorce.[7] It is never okay to say, “Well, God sure blessed my divorce.” God doesn’t bless sin. But God does allow failure to become a blessing when you learn from it, take the consequences as good discipline, and agree that God’s way is perfect and your failure to follow his will is what led to your failure in this area of life.
But what about the second kind of failure—when you are looking to please God and that ends in failure? How can you look at that failure in a good light? Think about it like this: failure is a lot like God shutting a door that it wouldn’t be best for you to go through. Failure isn’t always the result of sin but can be part of God’s perfect will. Think about the life of Moses. God told him to go back to Egypt and tell the Pharaoh to set his people free. God ordered Moses to do this, but when Moses did what he was told, he failed. Not just once, but nine times. That was through no fault of his own but because God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Exod. 14:8), which means it was all a part of God’s plan. So when you obey God, you can’t get all dramatic over how you must not have heard him right because you failed. Maybe, just maybe, you did hear him and failure was what he required in that moment.
The only hard and fast rule about failure is that you can never let failure defeat you. The Brave have courage in the face of failure, because they don’t see failure as an attack from the enemy or as a failure of God’s plan or God’s law, but they see it as evidence of God’s hand on their life, giving it what he will give it and taking from it what he will take. Failure isn’t the end for the Brave but is the next step on the road to faith. The Brave let failure do its work, driving them to repentance and to an undying trust in the sovereignty of God.
The Brave Understand Trials
For the Brave, everything can be used for good. The Brave don’t let anything in their lives go to waste—not their pain or their failure and most definitely not their trials. Trial is the stuff that faith is made of. In the beginning of the book of James, as we peeked at earlier, these famous words were penned:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2–4 NIV)
Not only are trials something that make your life better, but they are something that should be considered pure joy. Huh? Sounds impossible! But for the Brave, who are certain that everything serves God’s purposes, it is not. Joy can be a part of your trials too when you see each trial as a tool of sanctification instead of destruction. Sanctification is the ongoing process that is moving you toward holiness and away from the sin that used to be yours. Sanctification is purifying, strengthening, and invigorating. And while it often involves some pain, it’s a good kind of pain, the kind of pain that you feel when you lift weights. Weight lifters get the idea of know pain, know gain. The muscles have to be torn in order for them to be rebuilt stronger than they were before. This tearing can hurt and make you sore for days, but it’s easier to bear when you know what the pain is doing to your body. When you think about what the result will be once the muscles grow back, you can be joyful in the midst of the pain. But if you think the pain is the be-all and end-all and that you can’t bear the pain, then your failure to see the end result will end up making your pain worse than it needs to be.
The Brave understand that in the life of faith, it’s the same kind of thing. Trials and pain all can be used for God when your love for him outweighs your fear of the pain that you might have to live through in order to be changed more into the image of his Son. The Brave believe every word when they read that “The purpose of these troubles is to test your faith as fire tests how genuine gold is. Your faith is more precious than gold, and by passing the test, it gives praise, glory, and honor to God” (1 Pet. 1:7).
Your trials aren’t meant to destroy you, so they don’t have to be feared but can be faced with bravery and courage. For people who blame their trials on the enemy of God, suffering pain can be an ugly thing. No one wants to suffer at the hands of the devil, but to that we say, “Why would you give the devil so much power?” Satan isn’t God, so he isn’t all-powerful. He has to have God’s permission to operate in this world (see Job 1). So the real person to think about when trials come your way is God himself. Knowing what you know to be true about his goodness and kindness, what can you conclude about your trials but that they are for your good? Giving God the power in your trials takes it away from the enemy. The Brave get this and don’t let themselves serve the fear of God’s enemy but instead fear God himself and his awesomeness and power.
The Brave understand trials and the pain they might promise, and they refuse to let them be used for evil. They take each trial as a gift from God and wait with confident anticipation for the ultimate deliverance that God will bring to the life of the faithful. Even if they will see relief only on the other side of eternity, in heaven itself, they will still stand confident in God’s goodness and control of any and every situation, knowing that what awaits them when they die will be completely worth it all.
The Brave know gain in life because they know pain and they put it in its rightful place. Pain is unavoidable, and sometimes it’s going to be uncontrollable as well. You are going to face times in your life when no habit will stop the ache and when no drug will take away the continual pain. You are going to have hard times in life, no doubt, but when you have an accurate view of what you live for, who you serve, and why you exist, then no pain can derail you from your path. You have to remember that pain is meant not to destroy you but to put you back at the feet of the Father. Pain directs your steps and forces you to rely completely on him. If he wills it, then you have to know that it’s the best for you right now.
Accept the hand of God on your life. Know the value of a healthy understanding of stress and pain, and don’t let that value be lost on your worry, doubt, or fear, but use it all for good. Take God at his word and know pain in order to know gain.