HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 6, 2025 – People don’t suffer injustices: They suffer tests of spiritual character and due rewards. If you fight back against either, you won’t advance spiritually. Even Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t unjust, as we know from scripture that Jesus agreed to suffer (test of spiritual character) for Adam’s sin (due reward).

Although the concept of willingly suffering tests of spiritual character and due rewards is alien to unbelievers (who run to a doctor for every ache and pain and to a lawyer for every perceived slight), it shouldn’t be alien to us. By “willingly suffer”, I don’t mean we should go out of our way to volunteer to suffer. Jesus didn’t go out of his way to volunteer to suffer. He didn’t petition God to suffer; he agreed to the messiahship that God offered him, part of the terms of which was to suffer crucifixion. Remember how Jesus, in the garden of Gethsemane, tried to last-minute negotiate a way around those terms? God held his ground. Sometimes you just have to go through what you have to go through, as the agreed-upon terms are writ in stone and therefore inviolable.

In those cases, you don’t have to embrace the terms, you don’t even have to like the terms – you just have to accept them and go through whatever you have to go through. But ironically, when you do make that decision to agree to God’s terms (a decision so profound it moves mountains in the spiritual realm), that’s when the real power starts flowing through you. We see this in Jesus, in everything he says and does after he exits the garden of Gethsemane up to and including his time on the cross. We see this in Paul, when he agrees to suffer whatever he has to suffer as an apostle of Jesus and of the Gospel. And I saw this firsthand in me, when I agreed to choose to forgive someone I thought was unforgiveable and was instantly reborn from atheist to full-on believer. In that unmeasurable span between choosing to forgive and being reborn, God showed me that the pain I’d felt (or what I thought was injustice) was the pain I’d earned (through what I’d done to others). And then he filled me with his Holy Spirit.

For us, as born-again believers, there should be no question that we agree to suffer whatever we’ve earned or whatever God imposes on us as a test of our spiritual character. How else is God going to know (hard proof) that we choose him over Satan? It’s all well and good to say “Yes, I love and believe in God” and “Yes, I love and believe in Jesus”, but this kind of talk is as cheap as any other in an age when even solemn vows uttered at an altar are broken with a shrug. So how else is God to know that we choose him over Satan unless we’re tested and again tested and then tested again and again and again and again… until he’s satisfied that he and he alone has our whole heart and soul and mind and strength? Because if we don’t give God everything we have and everything we are, that portion we’re holding back (however small) goes to Satan, and that portion that we’ve forfeited to Satan (however small) will still be enough to lose us our spot in Heaven.

If we’re genuinely born again, we’ve been penciled in for a place in Heaven. Jesus said to his disciples: “Don’t rejoice that you have power over the demons; rejoice that your names are written in Heaven.” The highest privilege that can be granted a human soul is to be recorded by name in the Book of Life, but that privilege can be revoked (hence the penciling), which means we would lose our spot in Heaven. If it happened to angels, it can happen to us; if it happened to whole nations, it can happen to us. So we should never gloat over our privilege or take it for granted but be humbly ever-aware of it so that we do whatever it takes to maintain our heavenly reservation in good standing.

And if what it takes is to suffer our due rewards or tests of our spiritual character, those things are as nothing when compared to what awaits us when we get Home.