(Update: the video is now online as well.)
The notes and audio from Eric Mason's message, "The Role of Suffering in Sanctification," are now online. He gave an illustration of suffering from his own life:
Some of you are in situations right now where you're struggling with perspective. No matter how many times suffering happens, during the first 25% of it we typically forget its purpose. When my wife and I first got pregnant, we were really excited. There was one doctor's appointment where I didn't go with her. I was in class at seminary and she paged me and I called her and she told me that the child didn't have a heartbeat.
As I drove to the hospital I was really wrestling with God. When I got to the hospital I laid my hand on my wife's belly and prayed for God to raise the child from the dead. I called the doctor back in to do another ultrasound and we saw that the baby's lungs were collapsed. To make matters even worse, my wife still had to give birth to our stillborn child. Once she did, I prayed for the child and asked for God to raise it from the dead. He didn't.
On top of this, my wife had a liver transplant and had to be cared for for more than two and a half years. During that time, God was taking the paper about suffering I had written in seminary and was working it into my heart.
We're not masochists here, but we allow God to providentially allow times of suffering for his glory.