No flower can bloom in Paradise which is not transplanted from Gethsemane. No one can taste of the fruit of the tree of life, that has not tasted of the fruits of the tree of Calvary. The crown is after the cross.
Suffering
Lou Giglio
It’s possible to not be okay, and believe Jesus is okay at the same time.
Sarah Bessey
I remember hearing a preacher once claim the miracle of a good parking spot. As in, she taught a church full of people how to pray for a good parking spot, how to claim it, and how to rejoice when it came. My side eye at this cannot be overestimated. If your greatest notion of suffering is having to walk a few more rows to the Target, then I think we can safely say you’ve lost the plot.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work.
Holley Gerth
Sometimes what we see as wasted time is actually the training ground for what God has in store for us. The lessons we learn and the obstacles we overcome are preparation. Even the rocks you’re struggling to climb over today may be the stepping-stones of tomorrow. God never wastes anything. There is great value in where he has led you. And even if you have strayed from his path at times, he’s a Redeemer who can transform those mistakes into future benefits to you as well.
Randy Alcorn
While Western atheists turn from belief in God because a tsunami in another part of the world caused great suffering, many brokenhearted survivors of that same tsunami found faith in God. This is one of the great paradoxes of suffering. Those who don’t suffer much think suffering should keep people from God, while many who suffer a great deal turn to God, not from him.
Timothy Keller
If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?
R.C. Sproul
We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.
Phillip Yancey
Christians believe that Jesus is, as Colossians tells us, “the exact likeness of the unseen God” (1:15 TLB). If we want to know how God feels about people who are suffering—from poverty, oppression, cancer, or the COVID-19 virus—all we need do is look at Jesus’s compassionate response. God is on their side. As the scholar, Jacques Ellul reminds us, “The suffering of Jesus is in no way good news to him… No, from the biblical point of view, suffering is a horror; it is an act of ‘Satan,’ the ‘devil’s pleasure.’” When Jesus faced a personal ordeal of suffering, he reacted much like any of us would, recoiling from it and asking if there was any other way.
Edmund Clowney
Christ’s suffering was redemptive not because suffering itself is redemptive, but because Christ himself is the Redeemer.