Few ideas sit further outside our instincts than the notion that suffering could be a privilege. We are wired, and for good reason, to avoid pain. We take medicine to relieve it, plan our lives to minimize it, and grieve when it finds us anyway. So when Paul writes to a suffering church that it has been granted to them on behalf of Christ not only to believe in Him but also to suffer for Him, the sentence lands with an unfamiliar weight. Granted is not a word we associate with hardship. We use it for scholarships, for opportunities, for gifts we did not earn but received anyway. Paul uses it for suffering.
This is not because Paul enjoyed pain or treated suffering casually. He was writing from a prison cell, guarded by soldiers, uncertain whether he would live to see his friends again. He knew exactly what suffering cost, physically and emotionally. His willingness to call it a gift was not naive. It came from a settled conviction about what suffering for Christ actually accomplishes, and what it reveals.
Consider what Paul says suffering demonstrates. He tells the Philippians that their willingness to suffer without being frightened by their opposition is itself a sign, a piece of evidence about the reality of what they believe. Anyone can claim to value something. Few things expose whether a claim is genuine like the willingness to endure cost for it. We generally trust that people mean what they say about their priorities in direct proportion to what they are willing to give up for those priorities. A person who says family matters most but never sacrifices time or comfort for their family invites reasonable doubt. A person who says Christ matters most but recoils from any inconvenience on His behalf invites the same doubt, even if unintentionally.
This is part of what makes suffering for Christ a strange kind of gift. It offers us a way of proving, not to God, who already knows our hearts, but to ourselves and to a watching world, that our faith is not merely a preference among many but the actual center of our life. Comfortable faith rarely gets tested in this way. It is entirely possible to believe sincerely and still never discover how deep that belief runs, because nothing has ever asked us to pay for it. Suffering asks. And in the asking, it reveals something true that comfort alone cannot reveal.
There is also a relational dimension to this gift that is easy to miss. Paul was writing to a church that was suffering in the same way he was suffering. He was not lecturing them from a position of safety about a hardship he had never faced. He explicitly connects his own suffering to theirs, noting that they were going through the same struggle they had seen in him and now heard he still had. This shared suffering becomes a bond. It knits believers together in a way that shared comfort rarely does. People who have suffered for the same cause understand each other in a way outsiders cannot fully access. The privilege Paul describes is not suffering in isolation, but suffering as part of a body that stands together through it, bearing one another's weight the way a body instinctively favors an injured limb.
Most of us in the modern West are not facing the kind of suffering Paul or the Philippians faced. We are not threatened with prison or execution for naming the name of Christ. Our version of this test tends to be smaller and, in some ways, subtler: the discomfort of being thought old-fashioned, the awkwardness of turning down what everyone else is doing, the quiet cost of speaking a difficult truth in love rather than staying silent to keep the peace. These are not persecutions in the historical sense, but they are genuine tests of whether our faith is central or peripheral. The question Paul's words put to us is not whether we will face Roman soldiers, but whether we are willing to accept even small discomforts for the sake of Christ, trusting that whatever it costs us is not a tragedy to be resented but an opportunity being extended to us.
None of this makes suffering pleasant. Paul never pretends that it does. But it does offer a different way of holding it when it comes. Rather than asking only why is this happening to me, we are invited to ask what is being entrusted to me through this, and who stands to see Christ more clearly because I did not run from it. Suffering remains difficult. But it need not remain meaningless. When it comes for the sake of Christ, it arrives not merely as loss, but as an unusual kind of gift, one that proves what we say we believe and binds us to others who believe it too.
Dr. William C.K. Yomes is the founding apologist of Faith Makes Sense and the Senior Pastor of Catalyst Community Church in Wilmington, Delaware. This article is part of his ongoing teaching ministry at Catalyst Community Church.