Every biblical counselor eventually sits across from someone who asks a version of the same question. A wife who has prayed for a hard marriage to change for a decade, and it hasn’t. A father in a hospital chair he didn’t choose. A young man whose faithfulness has cost him a friendship, a job, or a reputation he can’t get back. Underneath whatever words they use, the real question is this: does any of this suffering actually accomplish anything, or am I just enduring it until it’s over?
Colossians 1:24 is one of the strangest and most useful verses in Scripture for answering that question. Paul writes, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).
Read it slowly. Paul says he is filling up something lacking in Christ’s afflictions. The first time a counselee hears that phrase, they might be confused, and that is understandable. It sounds like Paul is saying Jesus didn’t finish the job.
What This Verse Does Not Mean
Deal with that concern before you go any further, because your counselee will have it too, even if they never say it out loud. Paul is not saying the cross was insufficient. A few verses earlier in this same letter, he has already said that God was pleased to reconcile all things to himself through Christ, and a few verses later he will say that Christ triumphed fully over every hostile power at the cross (Colossians 1:20; 2:15). Jesus paid it all. There is no balance left in the ledger of redemption for Paul, or for us, to pay.
What This Verse Does Mean
So what is it? Here is the key: the Colossians had never seen Jesus suffer. They weren’t at Golgotha. Everything they knew about the cross, they knew secondhand. What they could see, with their own eyes, was Paul — worn down, imprisoned, afflicted for the sake of the gospel he preached to them. In Paul’s suffering, endured by faith, the Colossian church got a living picture of a Christ they had never laid eyes on.
That is what is lacking. Not atonement. Visibility. The people around your counselee cannot see Christ crucified. They can see your counselee.
Douglas Moo makes the same point carefully in his commentary on Colossians: “Paul is not, of course, suggesting that the redemptive suffering of Christ requires any supplementation. … It is not that there is anything lacking ‘in’ the atoning suffering of Christ but that there is something lacking ‘in regard to’ the tribulations that pertain to Christ as the Messiah as he is proclaimed in the world.”[1] Because Paul’s ministry was, as Moo puts it, “an ‘extension’ of Christ’s work in the world,” Paul could identify his own sufferings closely with Christ’s own — not as a second atonement, but as an ongoing display of the first.[2]
Paul says nearly the same thing to the Corinthians: he and his fellow workers were “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies … so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:10–11). Your counselee’s suffering, carried well, becomes the place where the life of Jesus gets shown to people who would otherwise never see it.
The Cross Was Never Only His
This is exactly why Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). That cross was never meant to stay his alone. He calls every disciple to a kind of dying — to comfort, to being understood, to having their story make sense to everyone watching — precisely so that people who cannot see him crucified can see him in a life laid down.
I preached on this not long ago from Matthew 16, on Jesus’ call to deny yourself and take up your cross daily. It’s the same truth from a different direction: the crucified life is not a tragedy to be managed until it ends. It is a display God intends for someone else’s sake.
Counsel for the Sufferer in Front of You
When you sit with a counselee whose suffering feels pointless, Colossians 1:24 gives you something better to offer than sympathy.
Start with what the verse does not say. Your counselee needs to hear plainly that Christ’s payment for sin is finished, full stop. Nothing in their suffering adds to it, and nothing about their suffering means Christ has failed them.
Then help them see who is watching. Their spouse, their children, their coworkers, and the people in their small group — none of them can see Christ's sufferings with their own eyes. They can see your counselee. When your counselee endures real hardship with real faith instead of despair or bitterness, they are filling up, in the truest sense, what those watchers are otherwise lacking: a visible picture of a suffering Savior.
Do not let this stay abstract. Paul rejoiced “for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24) — this happens inside a local body of believers, not in isolation. Your
counselee needs people who will actually watch them suffer well and be changed by what they see, the way the Colossians were changed by watching Paul from a distance.
Peter says almost the same thing: “Rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:13). That joy is not manufactured cheerfulness in the middle of real pain. It is the settled confidence that suffering carried by faith is never wasted, because it puts Christ on display for people who have no other way to see him.
The Joy Paul Found and Your Counselee Can Too
Notice where Paul starts the verse, not where he ends it. Before he says a word about filling up what is lacking, he says, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake” (Colossians 1:24). The joy comes first. It is not a coping mechanism Paul reaches for after the fact to make the pain sound better than it was. It is the direct result of understanding what his suffering is doing.
Paul is not rejoicing that he is in chains. He is rejoicing in what his chains put on display. The Colossians could see, in a suffering apostle, a suffering Savior they had never seen for themselves. That, to Paul, was worth rejoicing over, even while the suffering itself remained genuinely painful.
Your counselee can find that same joy. Not a forced smile laid over real loss, but a settled gladness underneath it. Their marriage did not become good. Their diagnosis did not become good news. But their faithfulness inside it becomes a window other people can look through and see Christ — in a way no sermon or explanation of theirs ever could. Paul tells the Philippians he wants to “know him and the power of his resurrection, and … share his sufferings” (Philippians 3:10). Sharing in Christ’s sufferings was not a burden Paul merely tolerated; it was, to him, a means of knowing Christ more deeply and of making him known to everyone watching.
That is the joy Colossians 1:24 hands your counselee: not joy instead of grief, but joy underneath it because the very suffering they never would have chosen is showing someone who cannot see Jesus exactly what Jesus is like.
That is the counsel Colossians 1:24 hands us. Not an explanation for why the suffering happened. Something better: a reason it matters now, and how joy can be found in it.
[1] Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), commenting on Colossians 1:24.
[2] Ibid.