Quotes about Suffering

From Jesus I learn that God is on the side of the sufferer.

Oswald Chambers once said that the Psalms teach you how to pray; Job teaches you how to suffer; the Song of Solomon teaches you how to love; Proverbs teaches you how to live; and Ecclesiastes teaches you how to enjoy.

The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure

Virtually every passage on suffering in the New Testament deflects the emphasis from cause to response. Although we cannot grasp the master plan of the universe, which allows for so much evil and pain (the Why? question), we can nevertheless respond in two important ways. First, we can find meaning in the midst of suffering. Second, we can offer real and practical help to those in need.

Even the greatest of miracles do not resolve the problems of this earth: all people who find physical healing eventually die. We need more than miracle. We need a new heaven and a new earth, and until we have those, unfairness will not disappear.

Where is God when it hurts? Where God's people are. Where misery is, there is the Messiah, and now on earth the Messiah takes form in the shape of the church. That's what the body of Christ means.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

The redemptive way goes through pain, not around it.

Virtually every passage on suffering in the New Testament deflects the emphasis from cause to response.

All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.

The kingdom of suffering is a democracy, and we all stand in it or alongside it with nothing but our naked humanity.

Rejoicing in suffering" does not mean Christians should act happy about tragedy and pain when they feel like crying. Rather, the Bible aims the spotlight on the end result, the productive use God can make of suffering in our lives. To achieve that result, however, he first needs our commitment of trust, and the process of giving him that commitment can be described as rejoicing.