How can suffering deepen my relationship with God?

Nobody asks for suffering as a spiritual growth strategy. If given the choice, most believers would gladly trade a deeper relationship with God for an easier life. Yet across Scripture and across the testimonies of countless believers, suffering has a way of producing intimacy with God that seasons of comfort rarely match. This is not because pain is good in itself, but because pain has a strange power to strip away everything we normally lean on instead of God.

If you are in the middle of a trial right now, this truth may feel more theoretical than comforting. That is understandable. But understanding how God works through suffering can help you look for Him even in the dark, rather than assuming His absence simply because the pain has not lifted.

Paul described a crisis so severe that he and his companions 'despaired of life itself.' Then he explains the purpose: 'that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead' (2 Corinthians 1:8-9). Notice that Paul does not say the suffering was pleasant or that he understood it fully. He says it accomplished something specific: it broke his reliance on his own strength and competence, forcing him toward a dependence on God that comfort had never required.

This is often exactly what suffering does to us. In seasons of ease, it is possible to functionally trust in health, income, relationships, or your own abilities far more than you trust in God, without even realizing it. When those supports are removed, whatever you were actually leaning on becomes obvious, and suffering has a way of exposing where your real trust has been placed all along.

Comfortable seasons often produce shallow, hurried prayers. Suffering tends to produce the opposite: honest, desperate, sustained conversation with God. The psalmist who wrote 'My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever' (Psalm 73:26) arrived at that confession only after a long, anguished wrestling earlier in the same psalm over the apparent prosperity of the wicked. His deepened trust came out of real struggle, not around it.

David's psalms of lament, born out of persecution, betrayal, and fear, remain some of the most emotionally honest and theologically rich prayers ever written, precisely because suffering forced him into extended, unfiltered conversation with God. If your own prayers have grown deeper and more honest during hard seasons, that is not a coincidence; it is one of the most common ways suffering draws believers closer to God.

Even Jesus, the sinless Son of God, 'learned obedience through what he suffered' (Hebrews 5:8), not because He was disobedient beforehand, but because suffering was the very avenue through which His obedience was tested and displayed in human experience. If suffering deepened the incarnate Son's lived relationship with the Father, it should not surprise us that God uses it similarly in us, conforming us 'to the image of his Son' (Romans 8:29) through the very trials we would rather avoid.

Paul explicitly connected knowing Christ with sharing in His sufferings: 'that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death' (Philippians 3:10). This does not mean suffering earns a deeper relationship with God as some kind of transaction. It means suffering, endured with faith, becomes a place of unusual closeness to a Savior who suffered first and suffers with you still.

It is worth being honest that suffering does not automatically deepen your relationship with God; it can just as easily produce bitterness, isolation, and distance if it is not brought to Him honestly. The difference lies in what you do with the pain. Suffering carried alone, stuffed down, or turned into resentment tends to push people away from God. Suffering brought openly to Him, in lament, prayer, and continued trust, tends to draw people closer, even when the pain itself remains unresolved.

So if you want your suffering to deepen your walk with God rather than damage it, keep bringing it to Him rather than away from Him. Ask Him directly for nearness in the pain, read His promises even when you do not feel them, and trust that the God who used trials to deepen the faith of Job, David, and Paul is doing the same patient work in you, even on days when it feels like nothing is happening at all.