Quotes about Suffering

Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for "pie in the sky.

Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.

Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.

I still have scars that need healing, wounds that may never completely go away. And I still have a lot of unanswered questions about the suffering I've seen. But at least I'm open and willing to have God show me the way. I listen closely to what he has to tell me. I know he helped me stay alive for a reason, and each day I strive to live out that reason.

Suffering always reveal idols of the heart.

God brings us low, even to the point of death, in order to bring us up again.

He brings eventual well-being for those who turn to Him, regardless of any hardship He may allow, but eventual calamity for those who reject Him, regardless of how well their immediate life may be going.

Suffering related to circumstances beyond my control, suffering related to consequences of my besetting sin, and suffering caused by others who refused to see their own sin. In all these instances, the Lord has been at work, refining my focus upon personal holiness, amplifying my ministry through very humbling experiences, and reminding me repeatedly to extend grace not just to the gracious but to those who lack a grace I took too long to come to myself.

They accept for themselves everything that was affirmed of creative life incarnate, including the love and, if necessary, the crucifixion, death, and victory. Looking at what happened to that life, they will expect to be saved, not from danger and suffering, but in danger and suffering.

Unfortunately, the sinner isn't always the victim. Why should it be? said Mathews. Nature does not work by a scheme of poetical justice. Nor does God, said Perry. We suffer for one another, as, indeed, we must, being all members one of another. Can you separate the child from the father, the man from the brute, or even the man from the vegetable cell...?

The greatest evil is physical pain.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.