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The call to joy and pain

Embracing suffering in your ministry

We rejoice in our sufferings

THE CALL TO JOY AND PAIN
Embracing suffering in your ministry
By Ajith Fernando
IVP. 174 pages. £9.99
ISBN 978-1-84474-249-3

This book is a series of 30 meditations based on Paul’s teaching about his ministry in Colossians 1.24-29, written by the Sri Lankan director of Youth for Christ. The writer takes the different phrases and explains and applies them, referring to his own experience and examples from others lives as he does so.

The meditations are in four sections: he shows that pain and joy are inextricably linked in the teaching of the Bible; that God uses suffering for our growth, in our relationship with Christ and in becoming like him; that God uses suffering for the growth of the church, both in its witness to the world and in building up its members; that God gives leaders responsibility to serve others, which is costly and painful but for which God gives grace to serve with joy.

The writer urges us to embrace suffering rather than trying to avoid it, and observes that suffering should have more of a place in the thinking and teaching of the church than it usually has in the West. As a non-westerner, he comments on our consumerism, individualism, expectation of comfort and satisfaction, and tendency to let suffering rob us of joy. He reminds us that as Christians we always have reason to be joyful because of the unchangeable truths of our relationship with Christ through the gospel, our hope of heaven and the goodness of our sovereign Lord.

The book is not a thorough exposition of Colossians 1.24-29, nor is it a theology of suffering. It doesn’t try to explain why suffering occurs, and it could helpfully focus more on how Jesus’s death and resurrection help us rightly understand suffering. For anyone seriously grappling with the hard questions suffering raises, other books may be more helpful. I am not convinced of its effectiveness as a devotional guide. But it is a readable and helpful corrective to the way many Christians think, and reading it will lead to a more biblical understanding of suffering and the normal hardships of Christian discipleship. It will challenge our tendency to see suffering as a joyless aberration. Its message is one that we need to hear and take to heart.

Barbara Sherwood,
Fairfield Community Church, Kingston-upon-Thames (Co-Mission), and The Navigators, Africa