"Where Are the Nail Prints?" by Charles Colson and Harold Fickett

"No one wants to suffer. Instinctively we do everything we can to avoid it, unless, of course, you’re a stoic, like one of my former White House colleagues, Gordon Liddy, who once held his hand over an open fire to prove he feared nothing. Or some have martyr complexes and go looking for suffering; but you don’t need to — it will find you. It’s a consequence of the fall, an effect of the curse. Sometime in your life you will lose a loved one or find yourself rejected. I have met very few who in the course of life have escaped serious medical problems. Nobody gets through scot-free.

More fundamentally, suffering belongs to our calling as Christians. After their first arrest, the apostles left the Sanhedrin’s court “rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41). It was a privilege to share in His work. In many places today Christians are called to suffer persecution for the sake of the Gospel. In India, North Korea, Myanmar (Burma), and scores of other countries, Christians risk their lives by even professing Christ — something most of us in the West know little of.

This is why easy-believism, the prosperity gospel, is so abominable: it sets a person up for a terrible fall when the first hardship comes, as it will. Whatever glimmer of faith the person might have had may well be snuffed out.

So the real question is not whether we will suffer but how we will react to adversity when it comes. We can see it as a miserable experience to be endured, or we can offer it to God for His redemptive purposes. This is the great truth Christians know: God will always use what we suffer for Christ’s work of redemption if we let him.

I went through a difficult time going from the White House to prison. A Christian friend wrote me to say I should welcome adversity as a blessing. Okay for him to say, I thought, but I was the one suffering. And yet today I look back deeply grateful to God that I went to prison. If I hadn’t, thousands of other inmates who have found Christ and a new life and been able to resettle in their communities or be reconciled with their families would perhaps never have done so. My suffering was trivial compared to what God has done in creating a ministry that is now circling the globe reaching “the least of these.”

The way Christians endure suffering can be, in fact, our most powerful witness. The radio pastor Steve Brown once quipped that whenever a pagan gets cancer, God allows a Christian to get cancer as well so the world will see the difference in how we handle it. This is every Christian’s witness. As the Church Father Dionysius wrote of the heroic nursing efforts of the Christians in Rome, they drew “on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains... transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.” True Christianity is made most visible in the midst of suffering and death.

But it’s not just a witness. Suffering is redeemed in yet another way — in developing character. As one devotional writer put it, in the same way steel is the product of iron and fire, great character is made not through luxurious living but through suffering. And character is the only thing we carry with us beyond this life, because it shapes our soul and deepens our faith.

This is why a well-known pastor once famously said no one is fit for the pulpit who has not been broken. Being broken enables us to understand the needs of others. Our suffering equips us to help others when they suffer.

Suffering is rightly called “the school of faith,” for it is only through trouble, difficulties, and setbacks that we are brought to the end of ourselves. The normal human tendency, particularly for strong-willed people, is to rely on our own strength and resources. But when those are not available to us, when everything has failed, when we have to abandon every other hope, we are forced to trust God alone. Martin Luther’s wife said, “I would never have known the meaning of the various psalms, come to appreciate certain difficulties or known the inner workings of the soul; I would never have understood the practice of the Christian life and work, if God had never brought afflictions to my life.”

The devotional writers speak of “a divine mystery in suffering, a strange and supernatural power in it which has never been fathomed by human reason. There has never been known great saintliness of soul which has not passed through great suffering. When the suffering soul...does not even ask God to deliver it from suffering, then it has wrought its blessed ministry; then patience has its perfect work; then the crucifixion begins to weave itself into a crown.”

No wonder so many believers, from the apostle Paul to the persecuted Church today, have said that they long for “the fellowship of sharing in [Jesus’] suffering” (Philippians 3:10). Hebrews tells us that the “author of our salvation,” Jesus, was made “perfect through suffering” (2:10). Why then should we expect, if we are going to draw ever closer to Christ, that we should be exempt from suffering? Would not God use suffering in our lives for the same purpose He used suffering in the life of Christ? Was this not the message of John Paul II as he lay dying, in terrible agony but with complete transparency, so that the world would see that a saint gladly experiences what his Savior experienced?

It is often said that suffering is the distinguishing mark of the true Christian. There was a popular story in the Middle Ages about Martin of Tours, the saint for whom Martin Luther was named. As the story went, Satan once appeared to Martin in the guise of the Savior Himself. Martin was about ready to fall to his feet and worship him when he suddenly looked at the palms of the apparition’s outstretched hands and exclaimed, “Where are the nail prints!?” At that, the apparition disappeared.

Where are the nail prints? These are the marks of true faith. People should find the nail prints in the lives of true Christians."

From The Faith by Charles Colson and Harold Fickett