The Works of God

And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 3:15-16 ESV)

This is a universal call to peace and thankfulness – not just in and during circumstances that are pleasant.  Dr. Mark Talbot explains why even suffering is something for which we can praise God:

We must come to see through the illusion that life’s ordinary pleasures are enough for us.

And this is another part of what significant and chronic suffering can do: when our lives begin to be significantly and perhaps rather consistently unpleasant, our quest for life’s ordinary pleasures tends to lose its appeal and our Lord’s declaration that “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” may begin to strike home (Luke 12:15; see, e.g., Ps. 107:17-20).

Moreover, the new taste of the new creature in Christ – the taste, that is, for God himself and thus for the “hidden treasure of the holy joy” that alone can satisfy our deepest desires – tends to grow as we lose taste for merely mundane satisfactions.

Pain often affords us our first real taste for the things of God.

Mark Talbot, “When All Hope Has Died: Meditations on Profound Christian Suffering,” in For the Fame of God’s Name: Essays in Honor of John Piper, edited by Sam Storms and Justin Taylor, p. 84.