IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO. You’re offended at something another person has said or done to you, and now you’re filled with righteous anger. You feel perfectly justified in your hatred and may even entertain thoughts of revenge, even if it’s just a matter of planning how you’re going to dress them down with words. You imagine the satisfaction you’ll get when they’re forced to recognize the error of their ways and apologize to you, filled with regret and shame.

And then, somehow, you find out one missing piece of information that completely undoes your interpretation of what they did. Now you know that the other person was innocent of what you had already condemned them for, and you were the one in the wrong for jumping to conclusions and letting your anger consume you.

Has something like that ever happened to you? How did you feel when you found out?

And if you had already said or done something to vent your rage, were you then the one filled with regret?

Something like that, I assume, magnified a hundredfold, was Paul’s experience of being confronted by the risen Christ, as he sat sightless for three days in Damascus, fasting and praying.

Try to imagine what it must have been like to have been so zealous in persecuting the church, only to find out all in a moment how wrong you had been. Did Paul remember the innocent face of Stephen, the man he had watched die while he stood by with smug self-righteousness? Did he remember the faces of the people he had so unjustly targeted, people who, like Stephen, may also have been executed for crimes they didn’t commit?

Quite understandably, there was much that Paul regretted about his past. You can hear it in his words to the believers in Corinth. Some of them, for whatever reason, had somehow stopped believing in the resurrection, stopped thinking of it as necessary to their hope as Christians. Paul countered by reminding them of all the people to whom the resurrected Jesus had appeared, eyewitnesses who could still be asked to tell what they had seen. Paul includes himself in the list of appearances, but does so with poignant humility. Here how he says it, as translated in the Common English Bible:

I’m the least important of the apostles. I don’t deserve to be called an apostle, because I harassed God’s church. I am what I am by God’s grace, and God’s grace hasn’t been for nothing. In fact, I have worked harder than all the others—that is, it wasn’t me but the grace of God that is with me. (1 Cor 15:9-10, NIV)

Paul isn’t suffering from low self-esteem. In fact, I take him as a formerly proud person who was undeniably confronted with his own arrogance and foolishness. By the grace of God, he’s learned to esteem himself differently. Before, he took satisfaction in what he thought was his zeal for God, a product of his own passion and hard work. But now? He doesn’t deny that he’s worked hard, but he takes satisfaction in the fact that this is God’s grace at work in him and through him.

With all this in mind, listen again to how Paul describes his life as an apostle to the Colossians:

Now I’m happy to be suffering for you. I’m completing what is missing from Christ’s sufferings with my own body. I’m doing this for the sake of his body, which is the church. I became a servant of the church by God’s commission, which was given to me for you, in order to complete God’s word. I’m completing it with a secret plan that has been hidden for ages and generations but which has now been revealed to his holy people. God wanted to make the glorious riches of this secret plan known among the Gentiles, which is Christ living in you, the hope of glory. This is what we preach as we warn and teach every person with all wisdom so that we might present each one mature in Christ. I work hard and struggle for this goal with his energy, which works in me powerfully. (Col 1:24-29)

It is God’s “energy” — the word could also be translated as “power” or “ability” — that works in Paul to teach and preach the gospel wherever he goes, always with an eye toward the day in which Jesus will return. He doesn’t shy away from saying that he works hard or struggles; he simply gives credit where credit is due. He wouldn’t be an apostle in the first place apart from God’s grace, and he wouldn’t continue in that commission without God’s grace and power at work in him either.

Nor does Paul shy away from mentioning how he suffers on behalf of the church. He knows that he’s been called to suffer; Jesus, you’ll remember, said this to Ananias in Damascus (Acts 9:16), and surely Paul knows it too. He’s happy to suffer on behalf of the gospel and the church. That’s not because he enjoys suffering itself; this isn’t some kind of spiritual masochism. But given his history, he counts it a privilege to suffer on behalf of those he formerly persecuted.

What does he mean, though, by saying that he is “completing what is missing from Christ’s sufferings”? Given what he’s already said about the cosmic work of Christ on the cross and the reconciliation of all things to God, he can’t mean that somehow Jesus left something unfinished on the cross, that the crucifixion wasn’t sufficient to fulfill God’s purpose. But what, then?

Once again, we have to think eschatologically, in terms of the already and the not yet. The kingdom is present, but it is not yet complete. The Jews anticipated a messianic age that would herald the coming of the Messiah, a time in which God’s people would suffer. Indeed, this is probably the idea behind Paul’s use of the metaphor of the pain of labor and delivery in Romans 8, a passage we recently explored. Jesus had completed his work on the cross, but the church looked forward to the time in which he would return and finish what he started. And in the meantime, the church as the body of Christ should expect to suffer.

Paul does seem to believe that it might be possible to take more suffering on himself, so as to spare others. Moreover, he’s experienced God’s comfort in the midst of suffering, and is glad to share that comfort with others who are suffering themselves (2 Cor 1:3-7).

Thus, all believers will suffer, but not everyone will suffer in the same way or to the same degree. Paul saw his own commission as one in which he was specifically called to suffer in service to the Lord and his gospel, and he hoped to lessen the suffering of others. He knew Jesus himself to be the Suffering Servant foretold centuries before by the prophet Isaiah (see Isaiah 53), and I imagine that this gave great meaning to his own trials on behalf of his Lord.

May we, with Paul, find the grace and power of God working within us when we suffer.