Inspirational Quotes on Suffering

“We long for the call to come home. But until He calls, we wait.... And how do we wait? With patient eagerness. (See rom. 8:25,23) Patient eagerness. Not so eager as to lose our patience, and not so patient as to lose our eagerness. ...we grow so patient we sleep!... ... Or we are so eager we demand. We demand in this world what only the next world can give. No sickness. No suffering. No struggle.”

“Faith is tested throughout our lives (James 1:3; I Peter 1:7). As the object of our faith proves Himself faithful throughout these trials, our faith grows. Even if we do not have God’s personal revelation about why we are suffering or how He is weaving our trials into a hidden pattern, we do have the revelation of God’s hidden purposes for us and for creation in Jesus Christ. God has demonstrated His faithfulness objectively, publicly, and finally in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.”

“O Achates, where in the world is there a country, or any place in it, unreached by our suffering? Look; there is Priam. Even here high merit has its due; there is pity for a world's distress, and a sympathy for short lived humanity.”

“We, poor fools, spent this our last day decorating with festal greenery every temple in our town.”

“The prayer of faith is a prayer of trust. The very essence of faith is trust.”

“Lewis is a rare example of someone who liked to think about life's great questions because they were forced on him by his own experience.”

“If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species.”

“the doctrine that imagined heaven on earth is necessary for rigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food and sick men healing nonetheless because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistaken for the elixir of life.”

“In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him — if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking — then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

“It is for people we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children we are exacting and would rather see. them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records that though He has often rebuded us, condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexcusable sense.”

“On our Earth we can only love with suffering….we cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love”

“which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?”

“I have only you now,” he added. “Let’s go together . . . I’ve come to you. We’re cursed together, so let’s go together!”

“Lidelse og smerte følger altid en dyb erkendelse og et stort hjerte. Jeg tror at virkelig store personligheder altid må føle en stor sorg over lidelserne her i verden.”

“The nature of the love of God for us is thereby revealed. It is not the love of an indulgent parent who gives into every whim of the child. In the end that is not the ‘love’ for the child but a form of self love for the parent. Despite the massive propaganda to the contrary, Our lord’s purpose for us is not to make us happy, but to make us holy. He loves us too much to leave us part saved, part remade, part sanctified. He wills our holiness, and since ‘suffering produces…’ (Rom 5:3), we may expect him to allow things in our lives which, in our self-centred pursuit of happiness, we ourselves would exclude. Yet even in the shadow of his love there is always mercy. Our sorrows are shared by him; he comes to us in our pain. The end of it all is not only his glory, which needs no justifying, but also our good.”

“So what do we do when we feel drained and empty? When no one understands our suffering and no one seems to care? When we feel discouraged and tired and unbearably lonely? Read the Bible and pray. Read the Bible even when it feels like eating cardboard. And pray even when it feels like talking to a wall. Does it sound simple? It is. Does it also sound exceedingly hard? It is that as well. But reading the Bible and praying is the only way I have ever found out of my grief. There are no shortcuts to healing. When I say read, I don’t mean just reading words for a specific amount of time. I mean meditating on them. Writing down what God is saying to me. Asking God to reveal himself to me. Believing God uses Scripture to teach and to comfort me. To teach me wonderful things in his law (Ps. 119:18). To comfort me with his promises (Ps. 119:76). Reading this way changes cardboard into manna. I echo Jeremiah who said, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” ( Jer. 15:16).”

“Joni Tada has said: "Not everyone can be trusted with suffering. Not everyone can endure a fiery ordeal. So the Master scrutinizes the jewels and carefully selects those which can bear the refining, the branches which can stand the knife. It is given for some to preach, for others to work, for others to give, and for still others to suffer. Where do you fit on the scale? He [God] has selected you to handle that particular, unique, individual set of circumstances in your own life. Not everyone could be trusted with what you're wrestling with, but you have been trusted. The grace is God's. The choice is yours.”

“Hear Joni Tada once again as she brings this idea home in a powerful manner: "You probably know at least a few disabled people. But did you ever think of the Lord Jesus in that category? No, he didn't have a physical disability, but he did handicap himself when he came to earth...Talk about handicaps! To b e God on one hand...yet to make yourself nothing. What a sever limitation! If you have a handicap, you're not in bad company. If anything, you're in an elite fellowship with Christ himself.”

“As followers of Christ, we must respect God's creation of all people, and see them not as problems to be ignored or hidden away. Rather, we must see them as mirrors of our own brokenness, and as divine windows through which we can catch glimpses of God's grace. We must do whatever we can to respect God's image in even the most broken and twisted lives. Even the least of these carries intrinsic dignity and worth.”

“When we begin to do for the least of these what David did for Mephibosheth, and what Jesus called his followers to do, we discover this: we are the broken and the needy. They. Are. Us. Perhaps more openly and undeniably, but all the same, they remind us of our true state before God. That is the gift they bring to God's people.”