Afflicted, and Brought Near

When God Uses Affliction to Restore Us

“Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word”.

—Psalm 119:67, ESV

The psalmist is not lamenting his suffering. He is confessing his gratitude for it. Somewhere in the middle of this longest chapter in Scripture—this massive meditation on the sufficiency, beauty, and authority of God’s word—he pauses to acknowledge a mercy that arrived disguised as hardship. Before affliction, he wandered. After affliction, he kept the word. The pain was not incidental to his restoration; it was instrumental—God’s chosen means to interrupt drift, expose compromise, and draw a wandering heart home.

Psalm 119 is a spiritual autobiography shaped by crisis. It pulses with urgency—enemies surround, princes persecute, the arrogant mock, the wicked lay snares. And yet the psalmist’s response is not complaint but clinging. He clings to the word. He treasures it, meditates on it, petitions God to teach it, and vows to keep it. The entire psalm is a testimony to what happens when pressure drives a soul back to the only foundation that holds. And verse 67 names the turning point: affliction brought him back.

What Affliction Reveals and Restores

Affliction reveals what wandering conceals. It exposes the quiet drift of the heart, the erosion of seriousness, the illusion of self-sufficiency. And because God loves his people, he uses affliction to restore what comfort corrodes—driving us back to his word, back to dependence, back to nearness. Psalm 119:67 is not an anomaly; it is a pattern. Scripture shows again and again that the pressures we resist are often the very means by which God draws near, teaching us to hear his word with new urgency, to lean on him with fresh humility, and to walk with him in a closeness we had forgotten.

Affliction Restores Seriousness to the Soul

Comfort has a way of making the heart light in all the wrong ways. Not the lightness of joy, but the lightness of inattention—careless, distracted, spiritually thin. When life flows smoothly, the weight of eternity fades. God’s voice becomes background noise. Obedience becomes optional. The soul drifts on autopilot, and the drift feels like freedom.

But affliction presses weight back onto life. It wakes us up. It tunes us to the gravity of God’s voice. The psalmist says, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). The affliction did not merely sober him; it taught him. Pain created the conditions for learning that prosperity had dulled. And in that seriousness, God drew near.

David knew this pattern. In Psalm 34, written after he feigned madness before Abimelech and escaped, he declares, “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). The crushing came first. The nearness followed. God does not wait for us to clean ourselves up before he approaches. He comes close in the breaking.

This nearness is not metaphorical. It is the presence of God himself, meeting the soul that suffering has made attentive. When hardship strips away the distractions and false comforts that crowded our days, we discover what we had been ignoring: God was always near, but we were far. Affliction closes the distance by removing the static.

Affliction Restores Our Dependence

Self-reliance is a slow poison. It kills trust without announcing itself. We lean on our competence, our plans, our resources, our ability to manage outcomes. And as long as these supports hold, we do not notice how little we are leaning on God. Their collapse is often the first time we feel their true weight.

The Hebrew verb yāsar (יָסַר) appears throughout Psalm 119 and the wisdom literature. It means to discipline, to instruct, to train through correction. In Psalm 94:12, the psalmist writes, “Blessed is the man whom you discipline, O LORD, and whom you teach out of your law.” The discipline and the teaching are parallel—not opposed. God’s yāsar is not punishment; it is pedagogy. He trains us by removing the false foundations we trusted and pressing us back onto himself.

The supports collapse, and we discover what they were hiding: our need. And in that exposure, God meets us. “The LORD is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth” (Psalm 145:18). Calling in truth means calling without pretense, without the illusion of self-sufficiency. It means approaching God as we actually are—weak, needy, dependent. Affliction restores that honesty by stripping away the lies we tell ourselves about our strength.

Paul learned this in his own thorn in the flesh. God’s answer to his repeated plea for removal was not healing but sufficiency: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). The affliction remained, and in remaining, it became the ongoing occasion for dependence. Paul’s weakness became the stage for God’s strength. And Paul’s conclusion—”For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10)—is the testimony of a man who learned that affliction restores what prosperity destroys: radical dependence on God.

Affliction Restores Our Hunger for the Word

The psalmist cries out for God’s promises because suffering has made the promises essential. Verse 50 says, “This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.” The word moved from the margins to the center. It became the bread of survival, not a supplement to other nourishments. Pain pushed it there.

This is not psychological coping. It is spiritual reorientation. When the lesser comforts fail—comfort in reputation, comfort in health, comfort in circumstances—the soul learns to feed on something weightier. The Greek term thlipsis (θλῖψις), often translated “affliction” or “tribulation,” carries the imagery of pressure, crushing, pressing. It is the weight that squeezes out everything extraneous and forces the soul to seek sustenance from God alone.

And God invites that seeking. Hebrews 4:16 says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” The confidence to draw near is not confidence in our worthiness; it is confidence in God’s invitation. And the invitation is issued precisely to those in need—those whose affliction has made them desperate for mercy.

The wilderness generation learned this the hard way. God fed them manna daily, and Moses explained the purpose: “And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deuteronomy 8:3). The humbling and the hunger were not cruelty. They were curriculum. God used affliction to teach dependence on his word. He restored their hunger for what truly sustains.

Affliction Restores Our Fellowship with Christ

The psalmist did not yet know the fullness of this fellowship, but the New Testament reveals it: suffering in faith is participation in the life of the Son. Paul’s longing in Philippians 3:10 is not merely to know facts about Christ but to know him experientially—”that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.” The Greek word koinōnia (κοινωνία) means fellowship, partnership, sharing in common. Paul desires koinōnia in Christ’s sufferings. He wants to participate in what Christ endured, not because suffering is good in itself, but because it is the pathway into deeper union with the suffering Servant.

This is not masochism. It is christological realism. Christ learned obedience through what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8). If the sinless Son was perfected through suffering, how much more will the redeemed children require it? Hebrews 12:10 makes this explicit: “For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.” The goal of God’s discipline is not behavior modification but holiness—participation in the very character of God through union with Christ.

Affliction, then, is not a detour from Christ but a road into him. It conforms us to his image by pressing us into the pattern of his life: suffering, death, resurrection. And in that pressing, we discover a nearness to Christ that prosperity never produces. The fellowship of his sufferings is fellowship with him—shared experience, shared identity, shared life.

Affliction Restores Purity

Peter writes, “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin” (1 Peter 4:1). The context is suffering for righteousness—persecution, hostility, rejection for the sake of Christ. And Peter’s claim is that such suffering has a purifying effect. It weakens sin’s grip. It makes the competing desires that once dominated the heart lose their urgency.

Why? Because suffering clarifies. It burns away the trivial. It exposes what matters and what does not. The sinful impulses that once felt irresistible—pride, envy, lust, greed—lose their appeal when life presses hard. Affliction makes the soul too sober for triviality. It pushes out the desires that cloud spiritual sight and makes room for the desire that sustains: God himself.

The psalmist knew this. In Psalm 73:28, after watching the prosperity of the wicked and nearly stumbling in envy, he concludes, “But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.” The nearness to God is the good. Everything else—prosperity, comfort, security—is negotiable. And that nearness grows clearest not in abundance but in affliction, where the heart learns to want God more than gifts.

The Hebrew root ʿānâ (עָנָה) means to afflict, to humble, to bring low. It is the word used in Deuteronomy 8:2-3, where God humbled Israel in the wilderness to test them and teach them. And it is the word behind the psalmist’s confession in Psalm 119:67. The affliction was not random. It was ʿānâ—God’s purposeful lowering, his intentional humbling, designed to restore what pride and prosperity had eroded. Affliction purifies by pressing the soul down into dependence, and in that lowering, God lifts the gaze toward himself.

Affliction Restores Obedience

The psalmist’s testimony is clear: “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word” (Psalm 119:67). The affliction did not merely constrain behavior; it redirected desire. The Greek term paideuo (παιδεύω), often translated “discipline” or “train,” appears in Hebrews 12:6—”For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” The discipline is not aimless. It has a target: obedience, holiness, likeness to Christ.

And the means are often uncomfortable. Hebrews 12:11 acknowledges this: “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” The pain is real. But the fruit is real too. Affliction trains us in righteousness by making disobedience costly, obedience precious, and God’s word essential.

This is not behaviorism. It is transformation. The affliction does not produce mere emotional stirring or temporary resolve. It teaches the heart to love what it once ignored and to treasure what it once took for granted. And in that reorientation, obedience flows not from fear but from restored affection. The soul that affliction has brought near to God discovers that nearness is the reward of obedience and obedience the pathway to nearness.

Affliction as an Instrument of Grace

So when the psalmist says, “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I keep your word,” he is not describing defeat. He is confessing restoration. Affliction was not the enemy of his spiritual life; it was the instrument of its renewal. Pain was the hand that turned him back, the mercy that drew him near, the discipline that taught him to treasure what comfort had taught him to neglect.

If the Spirit grants us the same grace—if he uses affliction to restore what our wandering has eroded—we will learn to see suffering not as interruption but as invitation. Not as punishment but as proximity. Not as the absence of God’s love but as one of its severest expressions. The God who afflicts is the God who draws near—and the soul he humbles is the soul he holds.