What do you do when the thing you prayed against becomes the thing you’re living through?
Most of us were never taught how to suffer well. We were taught to pray harder, believe bigger, and trust that breakthrough was coming. And sometimes it does. But sometimes — often — the breakthrough doesn’t look like escape. It looks like endurance. It looks like finding Christ in the middle of the fire, not just on the other side of it.
Paul understood this. Writing from prison, he penned one of the most audacious declarations in all of Scripture:
“I want to know Christ — yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” (Philippians 3:10)
Notice what he didn’t say. He didn’t say he wanted the power without the suffering. He didn’t ask for the resurrection without the cross. He wanted both — because he understood that you cannot fully know Christ apart from fellowship in His sufferings.
The Context: What Paul Was Giving Up
Philippians 3:10 doesn’t appear in isolation. It is the conclusion of a passage in which Paul has just catalogued everything he had going for him before Christ — his pedigree, his zeal, his blamelessness under the law — and declared it all loss. Rubbish. Refuse. Not because those things were worthless in themselves, but because compared to knowing Christ, they were nothing.
“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Philippians 3:8)
The word Paul uses for “knowing” here is not intellectual knowledge. It is the kind of knowing that comes through relationship, through shared experience, through the intimacy of being with someone in the hardest moments of their life. And Paul says that kind of knowing — the surpassing worth of it — is worth losing everything else to have.
Including comfort. Including safety. Including the life he might have had if he’d never met Christ on the road to Damascus.
Suffering Is Not a Sign of Absence
One of the enemy’s most effective lies is this: if God loved you, He would remove this. If you had enough faith, you wouldn’t be here. The suffering is evidence that something is wrong — with your faith, with your prayers, with your standing before God.
But the cross destroys that lie completely.
The most beloved Son of God — the one in whom the Father was well pleased, the one who had never sinned, the one who was in perfect communion with the Father from eternity — walked straight into suffering. Not around it. Through it. He was despised and rejected. He sweat drops of blood in the garden. He cried out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
If suffering were evidence of God’s absence or displeasure, the cross would be the most damning piece of evidence in history. But it is the opposite. The cross is the supreme demonstration of God’s love — the moment He went furthest into suffering, for us, because He would not abandon us to ours.
Your suffering is not evidence that God has abandoned you. It may be the very place He is most present.
Fellowship, Not Just Endurance
Paul uses a striking word for “participation”: koinonia — fellowship, communion, shared life. He’s not talking about gritting your teeth through hard times. He’s not describing the stoic endurance of someone who has decided to outlast the pain. He’s talking about intimacy. The kind of knowing that only comes through shared experience.
There is a depth of fellowship with Christ that is only accessible through suffering. Not because God requires suffering as a price of admission, but because suffering strips away everything else — every distraction, every false comfort, every thing you were trusting instead of Him — and leaves you with Christ alone. And in that place, you discover that He is enough. Not theoretically. Actually.
When you sit in grief and call Him good anyway — that’s fellowship. When you face uncertainty and choose trust over fear — that’s participation. When you keep showing up, keep worshipping, keep believing in the dark — that’s becoming like Him in His death. And it is in that becoming that you come to know Him in a way that no comfortable season could have produced.
The Ground: Why the Cross Makes This Possible
The fellowship Paul is describing is not a spiritual discipline you achieve through effort. It is a participation in something that has already happened — something that was accomplished outside of you, for you, before you ever suffered a day in your life.
Christ went to the cross bearing the full weight of human sin and suffering. He absorbed the judgment that our rebellion deserved. He died the death that was ours. And He did it so that the suffering we face now is no longer the suffering of the condemned — it is the suffering of the adopted. The suffering of those who are in Christ, united to Him, sharing in His life.
Romans 8:17 makes the connection explicit: we are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.” The suffering is not random. It is the path of the heir — the one who is being conformed to the image of the Son, who is being prepared for a glory that the present suffering cannot compare to.
And the resurrection is the proof that the path leads somewhere. Christ did not stay in the suffering. He rose. And His resurrection is the guarantee that the fellowship of His sufferings is not the end of the story — it is the path to the power of His resurrection. The cross led to the empty tomb. The death led to the life. And for those who are in Christ, the same pattern holds.
The God Who Stays
What Paul is describing in Philippians 3:10 is not a theology of suffering for its own sake. It is a theology of a God who does not leave you in your suffering — who enters it with you, who has already been through the worst of it, and who is present in it in a way that produces something no comfortable season ever could.
He stays. That’s the word. In the waiting room, in the hospital, in the sleepless night, in the grief that doesn’t resolve on schedule — He stays. Not as a distant observer. As the one who has already been through the cross and the tomb and come out the other side, and who is with you in yours.
To know Christ is to know this. Not just the power of His resurrection — though that is real and coming. But the fellowship of His sufferings. The intimacy of the God who stayed.
That’s worth wanting. Even from a prison cell.
Go Deeper
1. Paul says he wants to know Christ — and that knowing includes both the power of the resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings. Why do you think we tend to want one without the other? What does it say about the nature of true knowledge of Christ that Paul refuses to separate them?
2. The cross destroys the lie that suffering is evidence of God’s absence — because the most beloved Son of God walked straight into it. Where in your current suffering are you most tempted to believe that God has abandoned you? How does the cross answer that temptation?
3. Paul uses the word koinonia — fellowship, communion, shared life — for participation in Christ’s sufferings. What would it look like to approach your current suffering not as something to endure until it ends, but as a place of fellowship with the God who has already been through the worst of it and stayed?
— Todd Wallace, 4HG
For those who’ve found Him faithful in the fire — shop the To Know Christ tee at 4HG. A declaration that you want all of Him — the power and the fellowship. The glory and the cross.
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