Getting Up Again: Learning to Suffer Well as Followers of Christ

In Acts 16:22–24, Paul casts a demon out of a fortune-teller, disrupting the livelihood of her masters who depended on her for their wealth.  As a consequence, it says:

“A mob quickly formed against Paul and Silas, and the city officials ordered them stripped and beaten with wooden rods. They were severely beaten, and then they were thrown into prison. The jailer was ordered to make sure they didn’t escape. So the jailer put them into the inner dungeon and clamped their feet in stocks.”

When I read this passage, I had to pause and truly put myself in their place.

A mob forms around them. (Yikes.) They are stripped. (How humiliating.) They are beaten severely with wooden rods. (Ouch.) They are thrown into prison. (What now?)

And not just any prison. They are placed in the inner dungeon, their feet clamped in stocks. Trapped. Exposed. Powerless. Treated like animals.

The entire scene is absolutely appalling. Honestly, I don’t think I would survive something like this.

But then we come to the very next verse.

Acts 16:25:

“Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God…”

What?

After all of that?  After the humiliation, the pain, the injustice, they pray. They sing. They worship.

That’s the moment this passage stops being about Paul and Silas… and starts being about me.

I had to ask myself a hard question:

Do I suffer well?

Around the time I was reading this passage, I had woken up angry. The Lord was changing things in my life - at my church and in my profession - and I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve been pretty change-averse my whole life, and that morning was no exception.

“Why, Lord?” I asked. “What are You doing?”

And then Scripture did what it always does when we let it: it corrected my perspective.

Compared to Paul and Silas, I wasn’t suffering at all. I wasn’t being beaten, imprisoned, or publicly humiliated. I was simply being asked to change. To trust. To let go of control.

Reading Acts 16 shifted something in me. My anger softened into surrender.

I can do this. I can suffer well.

Because what felt like suffering to me was really an invitation - an invitation to trust that God might be making room for something new. Something that would ultimately bring glory to His name, not mine.

We also see this pattern of Paul's in Acts 14:19–20:

“Then some Jews arrived from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowds to their side. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of town, thinking he was dead.”

They stoned him so brutally that they assumed he was dead?!

Can you imagine that kind of pain?

But the passage continues:

“But as the believers gathered around him, he got up and went back into the town. The next day he left with Barnabas for Derbe.”

Let that sink in.

He got up.

Paul either had an extraordinarily high tolerance for pain, or the Lord miraculously restored him through the prayers, presence, and care of fellow believers - or both.

Either way, Paul suffered well.

He got up and walked right back into the very town where he had been nearly killed. And the next day, he continued on, faithfully sharing the Gospel in Derbe.

That’s not just resilience—that’s obedience. That’s faithfulness forged through suffering.

I long to be like Paul.

So now I want to ask you the same question I had to ask myself:

Do you suffer well?

When life beats you up—physically, emotionally, mentally, or relationally—do you stay down?

Or do you get up and continue walking in the calling God has placed on your life?

Scripture reminds us:

• “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.” (Acts 14:22)

• “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance.” (Romans 5:3)

• “Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him.” (Job 13:15)

Paul understood something we often forget: suffering does not disqualify us from God’s purposes, it often deepens them.