Quotes about Suffering

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.

Everywhere a greater joy is preceded by a greater suffering

Suffering offers a general message of warning to all humanity that something is wrong with this planet, and that we need radical outside intervention

one East European Christian observed, "You Western Christians often seem to consider material prosperity to be the only sign of God's blessing. On the other hand, you often seem to perceive poverty, discomfort, and suffering as signs of God's disfavor. In some ways we in the East understand suffering from the opposite perspective. We believe that suffering may be a sign of God's favor and trust in the Christians to whom the trial is permitted to come.

Unlike many television evangelists, the apostle Paul seemed to expect from the Christian life not health and wealth, but a measure of suffering. He told Timothy, "In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted" (2 Timothy 3:12).

Where is the church when it hurts? If the church is doing its job—binding wounds, comforting the grieving, offering food to the hungry—I don't think people will wonder so much where God is when it hurts. They'll know where God is: in the presence of God's people on earth.