Growth Through Pain, Part 1

I have recently come across a couple of things in my reading that stress that personal and spiritual growth comes through pain. I would like to quote these passages that I have read in the hope that they will be the blessing to you that they have been to me.

On page 355 of her book, Total Truth, author Nancy Pearcey writes:

All of us discover at some point that the most profound spiritual growth typically comes through crises. Because we are fallen creatures living in a fallen world, the winnowing of our character is usually a painful process.

And then I was blessed with this passage from an article by Bishop Fulton Sheen:

Our uneasiness even in the midst of thrills is a kind of pain. As Sir Almroth Wright has put it, “A pain in the mind is the prelude to all discovery.” We generally do not strive to solve a problem until it hurts us to leave it unsolved; many of us would not move unless the unsolved problem hurt us badly.

Even fallen men, who have never tasted God’s salvation, often require a crisis to stir their creative potential in seeking solutions to the crisis. It has been said that “necessity is the mother of invention.” People tend to just drift along making no advancement so long as things are easy. Now to be sure, growth means change and change can itself be a painful experience as it involves effort, trial and error, awkwardness, and fear of the unknown. When do people with a problem seek change? When do they seek a solution? People seek change when the pain of the problem becomes greater than the pain of change.

As we find ourselves in the midst of an economic crisis when people are losing their jobs, their homes, and their investments, this thought of growth through pain should encourage us. It will be interesting to see just how resourceful people become as things become more difficult. It is amazing what people can do when the pain of circumstances forces them.

As for God’s children, who have been saved by His grace, they still bear a fallen nature that ever gravitates to the path of least resistance. Although they have the grace of God within them, they all too often do not use that grace to attain greater spiritual growth unless they are spurred on by a crisis, by something that hurts them. It is for this reason that we read verses like this in the Bible:

Psalms 119:71 It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.

James 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;

3 Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.

4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

Those words perfect and entire describe a believer that has reached full maturity. But observe that this stage of advanced growth is reached through the work of patience that is experienced in the trial of faith. It takes the purging of the fiery trial to purify the gold so as realize its full value.

1 Peter 1:6 Wherein ye greatly rejoice, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations:

7 That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ:

The pain of the fiery trial brings about the perfecting, the maturing of the believer. It is a process of growth through pain. I have some more to write about this, but we’ll save it for next time.