How to Grow Spiritually During Difficult Seasons
Written by the Scripture Guide Team
Difficult seasons have a capacity to produce genuine spiritual growth that comfortable seasons typically cannot generate — but only when the difficulty is engaged rather than endured. This article examines the specific biblical mechanisms through which hard seasons produce spiritual maturity.
There is a specific gardening image that runs through the Psalms, the Prophets, and the letters of the New Testament that is worth taking seriously as more than decoration: the image of growth through pruning, through the deep plowing that breaks up hardened ground, through the winter that prepares the seed for the spring's fruit. None of these processes is comfortable. All of them are productive — but only if the person undergoing them understands that the discomfort is the productive process rather than an interruption of it.
The person who experiences the plowing as only loss — the breaking up of what was settled, the exposure of what was hidden, the disruption of the comfortable patterns of life — and who spends the difficult season trying to restore what was disrupted, will emerge from the season with the disruption as their primary experience. The person who understands that the plowing is the preparation — that the breaking is specifically for the planting that follows — has a different relationship to the same season. They are not pretending that the plowing is comfortable. They are understanding what it is for.
This is the framework through which Scripture consistently describes spiritual growth during difficult seasons: not as the coincidental benefit of hardship for those with the right outlook, but as the specific design of a God who uses the difficulty of hard seasons to produce what comfort cannot.
James 1:2-4
My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
The word "count" — hēgeomai — is a deliberate cognitive act, not a spontaneous emotional response. The person is instructed to assess the trial theologically — to evaluate it for what it is actually producing — rather than to respond to it with the instinctive emotional reaction. The patience that the tried faith produces is not the passive endurance of difficulty. It is the active, sustained forward movement under pressure that the difficult season is specifically designed to develop. The completeness at the end of the process — "perfect and entire, wanting nothing" — describes a person who has been formed by the process rather than merely survived it.
Hebrews 12:11
Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.
The writer's acknowledgment — "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous" — is one of Scripture's clearest statements of spiritual honesty about the difficulty of growth seasons. The grief of the process is not denied or spiritualized. What is insisted on is the afterward — the peaceable fruit that the grievous process produces in those who are exercised by it. The word "exercised" — gymnazō — is the word for athletic training: the difficult season is the practice that forms what the competition requires, not a deviation from the training program.
John 15:2
Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
The Father's pruning of the fruit-bearing branch establishes that difficult seasons are not always corrections of failure. They are sometimes the specific activity of the One who wants the fruit-bearing branch to produce more fruit — the removal of what is consuming resources without contributing to fruitfulness. The person who interprets every difficult season as evidence of spiritual failure has misread the vine keeper's activity. Some pruning is directed at future increase, not at present deficiency.
Psalm 66:10-12
For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, as silver is tried. Thou broughtest us into the net; thou laidest affliction upon our loins. Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place.
The psalmist's description of God as the agent of the trial — "thou hast proved us; thou hast tried us, as silver is tried" — and the trajectory from trial to the wealthy place establishes the full arc of the difficult season: God-governed beginning, God-governed process, and God-governed end. The fire and water and affliction are not accidents within a story God is not governing. They are the specific form of the refining process, governed by the One who knows exactly what the silver is being refined for.
1 Peter 1:7
That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.
Peter's comparative — the trial of faith more precious than gold tried with fire — establishes that the difficulty of the trial is specifically related to the value of what is being tested and refined. Gold is tried with fire because gold is valuable and fire is what reveals and purifies the value. The faith that is worth the fire is the faith whose tested genuineness will be "found unto praise and honour and glory" — its worth established by what the test revealed rather than by what comfort produced.
Deuteronomy 8:3
And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
God's explanation for Israel's wilderness deprivation — the hunger and manna — is the production of a specific knowledge: that life is sustained by the word of God rather than by natural provision alone. The knowledge could not be taught without the experience of the deprivation that required the supernatural provision to demonstrate it. The difficult season produced what no classroom could have communicated.
Romans 8:29
For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
Conformity to the image of Christ is the specific end toward which the difficult seasons of Romans 8 are directed. The "all things working together for good" of verse 28 is defined in verse 29: the good is conformity to the Son's image. Hard seasons that produce this conformity — that form in the person the character of Christ that comfortable seasons do not require — are accomplishing precisely the purpose that God's governance of all things is moving toward.
Deep Dive
The Difference Between Enduring and Engaging
The most important distinction for spiritual growth during difficult seasons is the difference between enduring the season and engaging it. The person who endures a hard season treats it primarily as an obstacle to be survived — something to get through with the minimum damage, after which normal spiritual life can resume. The person who engages a hard season treats it as the season in which specific formation is occurring — asking what God is producing, where the pruning is directed, what the trial is testing and developing. The distinction is not always easy to maintain in the middle of the season's intensity. But the posture that produces growth is the posture of engagement rather than endurance: the person who brings the hard season to God with the question "what are You forming in me through this?" rather than only the question "how long until this is over?" has a different relationship to the same difficulty. The first posture positions the person as a participant in what God is doing. The second positions them as someone waiting for God to stop doing it.
What Hard Seasons Specifically Produce
Several specific spiritual capacities are consistently associated in Scripture with the formation that hard seasons produce. Patience — the capacity to sustain forward movement under sustained pressure — is the first thing James identifies as the product of the tested faith. This is not a character quality that can be developed in comfortable conditions. The patience of the person who has endured extended difficulty is qualitatively different from the patience that has only been tested by minor inconvenience. Compassion toward others who suffer is another specific product of hard seasons. The person who has been through genuine suffering has a different interior capacity for being present with others in suffering — the 2 Corinthians 1:4 comfort that is transmissible because it was genuinely received. The knowledge of God that Job describes as sight rather than hearing — the encounter with God that the suffering made possible — is a third product of hard seasons that comfortable ones typically cannot generate.
Cooperating With What the Season Is Producing
The instruction to "let patience have her perfect work" in James 1:4 introduces the concept of cooperation with what the difficult season is producing. The person undergoing the trial is not passive — they are being instructed to allow something to happen rather than to prevent it. Specifically, they are being instructed not to short-circuit the productive process of the trial by seeking premature relief at every available opportunity. This is not a call to masochism or to the refusal of legitimate comfort when it is offered. It is the recognition that the completeness — "perfect and entire, wanting nothing" — that the process is moving toward requires the process to run its course. The person who exits the hard season at the first available opportunity, before the patience has had its perfect work, has received the discomfort without the formation it was producing. Cooperating with the season's productive work sometimes means remaining in the discomfort long enough for what the discomfort is forming to be complete.
The Refining Fire and Its Specific Work
The fire imagery — the tried faith more precious than tried gold, the silver tried in the fire, the fire and water of Psalm 66 — consistently describes a process of purification rather than punishment. The fire removes what does not belong in the gold rather than damaging what does. Difficult seasons that function as the refining fire are doing the same work: exposing and removing what is present in the person's life and character that does not belong there — the dross that comfort does not reveal because it does not apply sufficient heat. The practical question during the refining season is: what is the fire exposing? The dross that becomes visible under pressure — the anxieties, the misplaced trusts, the idolatries that comfortable seasons permit to remain hidden — is exposed specifically to be removed. The exposure is not the punishment. It is the first stage of the purification that the refiner is directing toward the gold that the dross is obscuring.
Practical Application
- Practice the deliberate cognitive act that James 1:2 describes: count it — evaluate it, assess it theologically — for what it is actually producing rather than only for how it feels. Write down one specific capacity, character quality, or knowledge that the current difficult season is specifically producing that the comfortable season before it was not. Let the writing make the invisible formation visible.
- Identify whether you are enduring the current difficult season or engaging it. The difference is not about the intensity of the difficulty or the quality of the emotional response. It is about the primary question being asked: "how long until this is over?" versus "what is being formed in me through this?" Practice shifting the primary question, not as a denial of the desire for the difficulty to end, but as the posture that enables genuine growth during it.
- Ask the vine keeper's question from John 15:2: is the current pruning directed at a deficiency (removal of the unproductive), or at increase (the formation of more fruitfulness)? Not every difficult season is a correction of failure. Some of the most productive pruning is directed at the fruit-bearing branch that is being prepared to produce more.
- Identify one person who is further through a similar difficult season than you are and who has engaged rather than merely endured it — whose character or faith has been visibly formed by the difficulty. Ask them specifically what they engaged with that they believe produced the formation. Testimony from the other side of the refining process provides specific guidance that abstract encouragement cannot.
- Practice Hebrews 12:11's "afterward" — the deliberate holding of the future harvest against the present grief of the process. Not the pretense that the grief is not real, but the dual holding of both present grief and future fruit simultaneously. The after does not eliminate the now. But the now held in the light of the after has a different character than the now held alone.
Prayer
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