Have you ever heard someone say "Offer it up"? Sometimes people have a hard time understanding what that phrase means. When you think of the phrase “offer it up”, think of it as “open it up.”

When we “offer up” our suffering, we “open it up" for God to enter into it. This makes our struggle (suffering) fruitful in many different ways, two of them are:

First, when we "offer up" a difficulty to God - instead of succumbing to it in a negative way or trying to push the pain down and not deal with it - it is as if a wall has come down in our heart and we are giving Him access to an area of our life that He was not able to come fully into before. We have "opened it up" to Him. Because He is present there now, we are not on our own and can intentionally draw from His strength and power to face the difficulty. His strength begins exactly where our natural ability ends.

Second, now that He is present, so is His self-sacrificing love, which we can tap into in order to offer up the difficulty as a prayer of intercession for others. In other words, He is present in our difficulty - we are now yoked with him (Matthew 11:28-30) - so that we can, not only bear it patiently, but, we can go even further, and offer it up as an act of love for other people.