Quotes about Struggle

Your Lord pries open your hands and takes away your crutches and distractions. He exposes your weaknesses so that you will cry out for what he knows you need, but what you have been willing to live without.

Only when we are progressively freed from our bondage to ourselves do we come to love God as we should; and as we love God as we should, we love people in the way that God has designed. For this struggle, there is amazing, perseverant grace. God bestows on us his eternal transforming love so that by means of that love we will become people who find our rest in his love, and because we do, we are then able to love others well.

In a fallen world there is a powerful pressure to constrict your life to the shape and size of your life. There

As you struggle, you must not view your marriage as bad luck, or poor planning, or as a mess that you made for yourself. No, God is right smack-dab in the middle of your struggle. He is not surprised by what you are facing today. He is up to something.

I have talked with many pastors whose real struggle isn't first with the hardship of ministry, the lack of appreciation and involvement of people, or difficulties with fellow leaders. No, the real struggle they are having, one that is very hard for a pastor to admit, is with God. What has caused ministry to become hard and burdensome is disappointment and anger with God.

Suffering makes us susceptible to the one voice we should never hear and that will always do us harm.

The minute your functional theology tells you that God is not good, it's very hard to hold on to the confessional theology that declares he is.

Face the fact today that you'll never outgrow your need for grace, no matter how much you learn and how much you mature, until you are on the other side and your struggle is over because sin is no more (see Phil. 3:12—16). The way to begin to celebrate the grace that God so freely gives you every day is by admitting how much you need it.

suffering is not an unusual, surprising experience; it's the experience of everyone who lives in this dramatically broken world.

But here is the reality: all of the horizontal battles are the fruit of a deeper war. The most important war, the one that needs to be won, is not the war they are having with each other, but a war that wages within them individually. Real change is all about winning this war.

The crisis of faith that often accompanies suffering is the result of a collision between our will and God's will and our glory and his glory.

The commands, principles, and case studies of Scripture will take you only so far in your quest to figure out your life. There will be moments when you simply don't understand what is going on. In fact, you will face moments when what the God who has declared himself to be good brings into your life won't seem good. It may even seem bad, very bad.