Greater Than Our Suffering: What Colossians 1:24–2:5 Says About Pain With a Purpose

Quick answer Does suffering have a purpose? In Colossians 1:24-2:5 Paul writes from a prison cell and says he rejoices in his sufferings — not because pain is good, and not because the cross came up short. Jesus’ suffering accomplished our salvation, period. Ours helps accomplish His mission of reaching the world for Christ. And at the center of it sits the thing God kept hidden for ages and has now told us plainly: Christ in you, the hope of glory.

In this article

• What is your compass?
• A great paradox
• A great proclamation
• A great process — and a greater power
• Frequently Asked Questions
• About the author

8‑minute read · July 26, 2026

I asked our folks to close their eyes on Sunday morning and point to true north.

Hands went up all over that room, aimed in every direction you can imagine. When I told them to open their eyes and look around, well — to say the least, we had a scattering of opinions.

Now, back in prehistoric times, before God created the interweb, we used these things called compasses. If you were out in the woods and you knew which way was north, you knew which way you were heading and whether you’d wandered off. A compass doesn’t move you an inch. It only tells you which way you’re facing.

The Word of God is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path (Psalm 119:105). It is also a compass. It tells us where north is when everything around us is insisting north is somewhere else.

Some passages of Scripture speak to us more pointedly than others. All of it is God’s Word, all of it. But some verses get hold of you and won’t let go. For me, for decades now, that has been the last two verses of Colossians 1 — and they sit inside a passage about suffering.

“Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

— Colossians 1:24

What is your compass?

Here is what I want you to sit with before we go one verse further. What guides your true north? Not what you’d put on a survey. What actually sets the course of your life and your day-to-day decisions?

Because suffering has a way of scrambling the needle. Grief does. A diagnosis does. A marriage coming apart does. A season where prayer feels like talking to the ceiling does. These things don’t just hurt — they disorient. You lose track of which way is up.

And Paul, of all people, does not begin with an explanation of suffering. He begins with a bearing.

What this means for you this week

Notice what you’re actually navigating by right now. Most of us, under pressure, quietly switch over to something else — how we feel, what people think of us, whether the circumstances are improving. Friends, that’s weather. That is not direction. Ask the harder question: not how am I doing? but which way am I facing?

A great paradox

Paul is in prison. And the word he reaches for is rejoice.

Not endure. Not tolerate. Not grit your teeth and get through it. Rejoice.

Then he says something that has puzzled the Church for two thousand years — that in his flesh he is “filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.”

Now let me be careful here, because this verse has been abused. Somebody said to me, I’ll be fascinated to see how you handle that passage, Pastor. I told him I’d be fascinated to see how I handled it too.

Paul is not suggesting for one moment that Jesus’ sufferings and death were somehow inadequate — that the atonement came up a little short and Paul is topping off the tank. No. Jesus’ suffering accomplished our salvation, period. Let me say that again, because it matters more than anything else in this article. Jesus’ suffering accomplished our salvation, period. Nothing was missing. Nothing was owed.

What is still being paid is not the price of sin. That is finished. What is still being paid is the cost of carrying that finished news to people who have never heard it. Somebody has to carry it. And carrying it costs something.

Think of a mother who dies giving birth. It still happens, far too often, in this world and even in this country. There’s a sense in which she accomplished exactly what she set out to accomplish — she brought new life into the world. But it cost her everything. And that little one still has to grow up. She has to go through the highs and the lows, the joys and the sorrows, the mountaintops and the valleys. She has to embrace life in its fullness. And if she doesn’t, there’s a sense in which her mother’s sacrifice is diminished.

So it is with the church. Jesus gave His life so that we could be born again. We are meant to actually live — not duck, not run. To embrace all of it and say, I do this in the name of Jesus.

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and a psychotherapist who spent time in Auschwitz and Dachau. He came out of that and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, and in it he says a man can survive almost any what as long as he has a why.

Paul had a why. His chains are the reason we have the letters. I don’t know whether he had any inkling, sitting there writing, how much those letters would minister to the church for the next two thousand years. My guess is he didn’t. But God knew.

What this means for you this week

You may not get to pick the what. You do get some say in the why. Take the hardest thing you’re carrying and ask a smaller question than why is this happening to me — ask is there anything God could do with this, if I let Him? I’m not asking you to enjoy it. I’m not asking you to call it good. I’m asking you to quit assuming it’s meaningless.

A great proclamation

Down to verse 28. “Him we proclaim.”

Him. This is so basic that we forget it. What is our message? That Christianity is a better system of ethics and morals and values than all the other faith systems on offer? That’s true, as far as it goes. But it isn’t the message. The message is a Person.

Heidi and I had a good friend years ago who spent a lot of time in our house with our kids. She was not a churchgoer — I don’t know that she’d ever been in a church service in her life. I told her I was going to baptize our youngest that Sunday and I’d love for her to come.

She didn’t say oh, wonderful. She got anxious. What do I wear? What do I bring? Should I bring something?

I said: relax. You don’t need to bring anything. We don’t care what you’re wearing. We just want you to come. Just come.

Folks, that’s the gospel. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing. You don’t bring anything. Just come.

We get this backwards with a kind of genius. We assume there’s a threshold — some minimum of cleaned-up-ness, some level of understanding, some debt to be paid down first. And every time we assume it, we quietly turn the gospel back into the one thing it has never once been: a system with an entry fee.

What this means for you this week

Think of one person who believes they have to get their life sorted out before God would have any interest in them. Invite them to something — a service, a meal, a group — and then say the quiet part out loud. You don’t need to bring anything.

A great process — and a greater power

The verse goes on: “warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ.”

Two things there. Teaching, and warning. And I’ll be honest with you — I don’t like the warning part. One day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. That’s good news. But there’s a hard edge to it, which is that those who do not bow willingly will spend an eternity separated from God. I don’t like talking about hell. I wish it were metaphorical. The Bible doesn’t give me that option.

People get offended when I say that, and I’m sorry. But it isn’t about what I like. It’s about what’s true. Truth is not up for a majority vote.

Then comes verse 29, and this is where I have lived for a long time:

“For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.”

— Colossians 1:29

The word behind “struggling” is agonizomai. We get our word agonize from it. Picture a weightlifter driving the bar up over his head. Picture a sprinter straining for the tape. That’s the image. We get the striving. We get the straining. We get the agony.

And yet — “with all his energy that he powerfully works within me.” The effort is real, and the strength is not ours. Both halves are true at the same time, and most of us collapse one into the other. Either we grit our teeth and call it faithfulness, or we go slack and call it grace.

Rich Mullins — my favorite Christian songwriter, and I still think he may have been the best lyricist we ever had — put it about as well as it can be put: “On this road to righteousness, sometimes the climb can be so steep. I may falter in my steps, but never beyond your reach.”

Three steps forward, two steps back. Two steps forward, three steps back. Some weeks, no steps at all. We are fellow strugglers, all of us. And the power is God’s.

What this means for you this week

Work out which half you lean on. If you lean on grit, ask God this week for strength you do not have. If you lean on grace, pick one concrete act of obedience and go do it. Then tell somebody, so it isn’t just a nice thought you had on a Sunday.

Because here’s the thing about a compass. It doesn’t move you.

It only tells you which way you’re facing.

You still have to walk.

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