Quotes about Suffering

Beloved, all that is harsh and difficult I want for myself, and all that is gentle and sweet for thee

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

He clutched his hands into a ball, praying, Why, God, why? I've been a faithful servant and served my church well. So why do You feel the need to test me? Actually, punish would be a more apt description.

She'd do whatever Rylan asked. And if her collar strangled her, or if it was awkward scrubbing floors in a dress, then she'd remember Jesus on the cross and how He'd suffered. Then she'd compare her own meager pain and endure it quietly. A trace of peace crept through her as she prayed…

The heart carries loads that the hands cannot.

He saw you cast into a river of life you didn't request. He saw you betrayed by those you love. He saw you with a body that gets sick and a heart that grows weak. He saw you in your own garden of gnarled trees and sleeping friends. He saw you staring into the pit of your own failures and the mouth of your own grave. He saw you in your own garden of Gethsemane and he didn't want you to be alone ... He would rather go to hell for you than to heaven without you.

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

By his stripes you are healed.

now the Spirit had come, and Mark's account of the baptism makes it abundantly clear that he sees Jesus as the Messianic Son and the Suffering Servant, equipped for his stupendous task with the Spirit of God promised for the end-time. The last days are no longer entirely in the future; in the person of Jesus the end has dawned.

And so the world fell under the influence of one who hated God, hated his creation and in particular hated that part of creation that bore God's image. All the maladies and miseries of the world originated here—all the sickness and suffering began here, with a wrongful ruler given power by our wrongdoing. In the darkness of his evil heart, the devil conceived a plan to oppose God's purposes by stealing the position designed for us.

The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness.

All sufferers can find comfort in the solidarity of the Crucified; but only those who struggle against evil by following the example of the Crucified will discover him at their side. To claim the comfort of the Crucified while rejecting his way is to advocate not only cheap grace but a deceitful ideology.