Quotes about Suffering

Reality's such a pain sometimes, you know?

Romans 8 contains a powerful theology of suffering. There's the groaning of those dying without hope, and in contrast, the groaning of those in childbirth. Both processes are painful, yet they are very different. The one is the pain of hopeless dread, the other the pain of hopeful anticipation. The Christian's pain is very real, but it's the pain of a mother anticipating the joy of holding her child. It

What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?

I have no room for a God who lets children die." "The innkeeper had no room, but it did not thwart God's plan. Who is Ben Fielding to have no room for God? Shall the dog decide whether there is room in the house for the Master? Shall the cricket decide whether there is room in the forest for the Lion?

God uses suffering and impending death to unfasten us from this earth and to set our minds on what lies beyond.

SCRIVEN (1820—1886) wrote "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" after his fiancée drowned. George Matheson (1842—1906) wrote "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" after his fiancée rejected him because he was going blind.

any faith that leaves us unprepared for suffering is a false faith that deserves to be abandoned. Genuine

God's ownership and sovereignty offer a life-changing and freeing perspective when the house is robbed (or burns to the ground), the car is totaled, the laptop computer is stolen . . . or the diagnosis is terminal cancer.

In the Bible, Jesus says more than anyone else about Hell. He refers to it as a literal place and describes it in graphic terms. Jesus taught that in Hell the wicked suffer terribly, are fully conscious, retain their desires and memories and reasoning, long for relief, cannot be comforted, cannot leave their torment, and are bereft of hope. The Savior could not have painted a bleaker picture.

Yes, Satan rebelled. Yes, Adam and Eve freely chose sin, and with it death and suffering. And yes, the all-powerful, happy God could have intervened to prevent those choices. If that intervention would have brought him more glory and us more good, no doubt he would have done it. But God, in his wisdom, determined that not even rebellion and sin could thwart his plan to further his happiness and that of his people.

What we have assumed about Heaven has reduced it to a place we look forward to only as an alternative to an intolerable existence here on the present Earth. Only the elderly, disabled, suffering, and persecuted might desire the Heaven we imagine. But the Bible portrays life in God's presence, in our resurrected bodies in a resurrected universe, as so exciting and compelling that even the youngest and healthiest of us should daydream about it.

The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God." —Margaret Clarkson