If you’ve ever played sports or been to a gym, you’ve probably heard someone say something like “pain is weakness leaving the body.” As a former chronically injured athlete, I take issue with that statement. Sayings like that are meant to motivate you to persevere through discomfort, but sometimes pain means you’re hurting yourself and need to stop.
It’s one thing to push through to the end of a sprint workout when your lungs are on fire and you feel like throwing up, but it’s another thing entirely to try to keep running when you’ve torn a muscle in your leg. Learning to tell the difference between “this hurts, but I can keep going” and “ouch, I just injured myself” can be the difference between getting stronger or being sidelined with an injury and a lengthy and frustrating recovery.
We face both types of pain in our spiritual lives as well. Sometimes we’re in pain because we’re growing and having our character developed, and other times the pain is because we’re hurting ourselves and it’s time to repent and refocus. One is the pain of discipline and refinement (Hebrews 12:5-11, I Corinthians 3:12-15), and the other is the pain of sin’s bad consequences (Numbers 32:23, Romans 6:23).
Learning to tell the difference between these two kinds of spiritual pain is just as important as being aware of what your physical body can handle. We have to know when to persevere and when to quit.
I hope this will free someone up: just because you’re hurting doesn’t always mean you’re doing something wrong. Have you ever tried a new kind of exercise – started lifting weights, or visited a Pilates class, or whatever – and then woke up the next morning so sore you could barely move? That’s not such a pleasant feeling, but if you stick with what you’re doing, your body adapts and your muscles grow stronger. You even start enjoying your sore muscles, because they let you know that you had a good workout.
Sometimes God drops us into a new exercise program, figuratively speaking, and we don’t always see it coming. We wake up one morning (or frequently the middle of the night, in my case) and think, “This HURTS! What did I do?!” God doesn’t ever stir up and expose things in us just to poke at us and make us squirm, though. If he’s poking you in a sore spot, it’s because it’s time to deal with that thing. You can always know that he’s ready to bring freedom and healing in that place.
Here’s the thing: you have to persevere through the pain to get to the freedom and healing. Have you ever been to the gym in January, right after everyone’s made their New Year’s resolutions to get in shape? Have you ever gone back to the same gym in March and wondered where everyone went?
When God highlights a new issue for me to work on, oftentimes my first reaction is that I just don’t want to deal with it. Let’s just push that thing back down where it was and pretend it’s not there. Forget the 5:00 AM alarm telling me to get up and go running, because I am perfectly fine here asleep and not moving.
Lack of perseverance is my main pitfall with spiritual discipline and refinement, but I have the exact opposite problem when I’m dealing with the pain of sin’s consequences – I’ll persevere in my wrong actions despite the pain. I’m great at just wilfully ignoring the problem like it doesn’t exist (Pain? What Pain? Everything’s fine!). When I can’t ignore it any longer, then it’s easy for me to decide that I’m so far down the path that I might as well just keep going. I’m too far gone, too messed up to fix, so what’s the use of trying to change anything?
Just like injuring yourself while out on a run, though, you can’t start rehabbing your spiritual injuries until you STOP RUNNING. It’s time to wake up and realize that as long as you’re still breathing, you’re not too far gone and not too much of a mess for God. Don’t you know that nothing is too hard for him (Jeremiah 32:27)?
Once you finally decide to stop the action that’s causing the pain in the first place, then you can start recovering from the damage. So, when handled correctly, the destructive pain of sin’s consequences leads to the reconstructive pain of discipline and refinement. How cool is that?
You may have guessed by now that I’ve been undergoing some refinement in my life lately. Stay tuned for more on that!
