Top 100 Quotes About Christian Suffering
#1. This is God's universal purpose for all Christian suffering: more contentment in God and less satisfaction in the world.
John Piper
#2. Our little time of suffering is not worthy of our first night's welcome home to Heaven.
Samuel Rutherford
#3. Until the Second Coming, sin will remain a part of earthly existence. And as long as there is sin, there will be suffering and pain. But suffering by persecution is not a sine qua non of the church. If it is, there are few if any true churches in North America today.
Keith A. Mathison
#4. The PR industry loves the concept that if you just apologize, the problem goes away. The concept of apology is known in the Judeo-Christian sense: You apologize, but then you suffer. The problem is nobody wants the suffering. Everybody wants drive-through redemption.
Eric Dezenhall
#5. The true Christian reaction to suffering and sorrow is not the attitude of self-pity, fatalism or resentment; it is the spirit which takes life's difficulties as a God given opportunity, and regards its troubles as a sacred trust, and wears the thorns as a crown.
James Stewart
#7. It is remarkable with what Christian fortitude and resignation we can bear the suffering of other folks.
Jonathan Swift
#8. Although attracted by the humanities, I had chosen medicine as a career, seduced by the image of the 'man in white' dispensing care and solace to the suffering. But science was lurking around the corner, in the form of an unpaid student assistantship in the laboratory of physiology.
Christian De Duve
#9. Satan can imitate God, but he cannot duplicate Him - God is the only One who can deliver us from our pain and suffering.
David Jeremiah
#10. He must be suffering, too. She had noted the weary sag of his shoulders, the quivering lips, the tear- filled eyes. Somehow she had never thought of him as hurting- of being capable of understanding how she felt.
Janette Oke
#13. Because what's perplexing is not that you and I encounter suffering in this life; what's really perplexing is that He suffered in our place. Why did the innocent One suffer for our sins?
C.J. Mahaney
#14. My own feeling of concern arises from seeing how much moral injury and suffering is created by the superstitions of the Christian mythology.
Harriet Martineau
#15. The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#16. The Christian is not a Stoic. Neither does he flee into a fantasy world that denies the reality of suffering.
R.C. Sproul
#17. Thus the call to follow Christ always means a call to share the work of forgiving men their sins. Forgiveness is the Christlike suffering which it is the Christian's duty to bear.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#18. If we are ashamed to imitate our Lord's sufferings, which He endured for us, and to suffer as He suffered, it is obvious that we shall not become partakers with Him in His glory. If that is true of us we shall be believers in word only, not in deed. When deeds are absent, our faith is dead.
Symeon The New Theologian
#19. No one is exempt from the touch of tragedy: neither the Christian nor the non-Christian; neither the rich nor the poor; neither the leader or the commoner. Crossing all racial, social, political, and economic barriers, suffering reaches out to unite mankind.
Billy Graham
#20. As a Christian, part of my obligation is to alleviate suffering. Explicit recognition of that in the Methodist tradition is one reason I'm comfortable in this church.
Hillary Clinton
#21. But, of old, there was One whose suffering changed an instrument of torture, degradation and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life; and, where His spirit is, neither degrading stripes, nor blood, nor insults, can make the Christian's last struggle less than glorious.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#22. Reckon your weakness as praise of God's power, endure suffering in joy, risk your life on the veracity of Christ, count your loneliness a means of grace.
William Stringfellow
#23. It's true, I suffer a great deal
but do I suffer well? That is the question.
Therese De Lisieux
#25. Let us pray for the many Christians in the world who still suffer persecution and violence. May God grant them the courage of fidelity.
Pope Francis
#27. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life.
Agatha Christie
#28. Fruit-bearing involves cross-bearing. There are not two Christs
an easygoing one for easygoing Christians, and a suffering, toiling one for exceptional believers. There is only one Christ. Are you willing to abide in Him, and thus to bear much fruit?
Hudson Taylor
#29. Americans suffer from mono-lingual myopia - a disease of the tongue that affects the vision.
Tom Brewster
#30. First the lover must learn charity and keep God's law. Then he shall be blessed a hundredfold, and he shall do great things without great effort, and bear all pain without suffering. And so his life will surpass human reason indeed.
Hadewijch
#31. If God suffers in the flesh when He is made man, should we not rejoice when we suffer, for we have God to share our sufferings? This shared suffering confers the kingdom on us. For he spoke truly who said, 'If we suffer with Him, then we shall also be glorified with Him' (Rom. 8:17).
Maximus The Confessor
#32. God points to the peaceful attitude of suffering people to teach others about Himself.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#33. The distinctive mark of the Christian, today more than ever, must be love for the poor, the weak, the suffering.
Pope John Paul II
#34. No healthy Christian ever chooses suffering; he chooses God's will, as Jesus did, whether it means suffering or not.
Oswald Chambers
#35. Many Christians suffer from loneliness because they are sitting instead of serving.
Croft M. Pentz
#36. Many Christians suffer because they're too busy seeking carnal knowledge instead of the Word of God.
Joyce Meyer
#37. It seems to me that doubt is worse than trial. I had sooner suffer any affliction than be left to question the gospel or my own interest in it.
Charles Spurgeon
#38. The apostle said he was "hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed." He made no attempt to mask his pain in a fraudulent piety. The Christian is not a Stoic. Neither does he flee into a fantasy world that denies the reality of suffering. Paul freely admitted the pressure he experienced.
R.C. Sproul
#39. God also allows suffering so that we might learn what it means to depend on Him, not on our own strength and resources.
Charles R. Swindoll
#40. I want you to see persecution and opposition and slander and misunderstanding and disappointment and self-recrimination and weakness and danger as the normal portion of faithful pastoral ministry.
John Piper
#41. Priceless virtues are love, peace, joy, kindness, gentleness, goodness, long-suffering, patience faithfulness and self-control.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#44. Christian hypocrites who pretend to hate life and love death. He may talk about the soul-what he is after is the girl Love means suffering-those who love drag a chain with them. To her it was not a belief but a certainty Trifling incident gains importance when undue emphasis is laid.
Georg Ebers
#45. It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, "maturity," suffering.
Christian Wiman
#46. Jesus' call to bear the cross places all who follow him in the community of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiving sins is the Christ-suffering required of his disciples. It is required of all Christians.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#47. We are suffering from a kind of slow-motion barbarization from within.
George Will
#48. When the church encounters hardship, persecution, and suffering, then it is closest to its crucified Lord. Then there are fewer hypocrites and nominal believers among its members, and then the faith of Christians burns most intensely.
Gene Veith
#49. The cross is the suffering the Christian endures as a consequence of his following Christ in perfect obedience. Christ chose the cross by choosing the path that led to it; and it is so with His followers. In the way of obedience stands the cross, and we take the cross when we enter that way.
A.W. Tozer
#50. It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.
Hans Urs Von Balthasar
#51. The word of God teaches that Christians suffer in order that they might glorify God in their lives.
Billy Graham
#52. Though I cannot claim to be a Christian in the sectarian sense, the example of Jesus suffering is a factor in the composition of my undying faith in non-violence which rules all my actions, worldly and temporal.
Mahatma Gandhi
#53. Sometimes all you could do for the suffering was to make sure they knew someone was suffering right there with them. Someone who had also felt stricken, and smitten, and afflicted.
Beth Moore
#54. It is unjust, but only Christlike, to suffer persecution for doing what is right.
Joyce Rachelle
#55. Humility and suffering free a man from all sin; for the first cuts out spiritual passions, and the latter bodily.
Maximus The Confessor
#56. I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.
Alan Paton
#57. Christian perfection consists in three things: praying heroically, working heroically, and suffering heroically.
Anthony Mary Claret
#58. Whether it's a Christian or a non-Christian, there's nothing like suffering to show us how small, needy, and not in control we are. Suffering has a way of sobering us up to the realization that we can't make it on our own, that we need help, that we're broken.
Tullian Tchividjian
#59. Suffering can bend & break us. But it can also break us open to become the persons God intended us to be. It depends on what we do with the pain. If we offer it back to God, He will use it to do great things in us & through us, because suffering is fertile ... it an grow new life.
John Green
#60. As Christian mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once said: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." He was right. If we recognize the soul lesson, we can grow beyond suffering, and there is no stress in this state of understanding.
Brian L. Weiss
#61. Evil is the most difficult problem in the world. It is also the strongest objection to God's existence. If God does exist, it is also the most problematic challenge to his nature and power. As a Christian, it is my greatest temptation for doubt and unbelief.
Jon Morrison
#63. We are all connected. What unites us is our common humanity. I don't want to oversimplify things - but the suffering of a mother who has lost her child is not dependent on her nationality, ethnicity or religion. White, black, rich, poor, Christian, Muslim or Jew - pain is pain - joy is joy.
Desmond Tutu
#64. Persecution is one of the natural consequences of living the Christian life. It is to the Christian what "growing pains" are to the growing child. No pain, no development. No suffering, no glory. No struggle, no victory. No persecution, no reward!
Billy Graham
#65. There is pain and suffering in this world, but there is also joy, and not just suffering here and joy there, but suffering and joy in the very same place.
Todd Neva
#66. Rabbi Kushner writes from a wealth of Jewish wisdom and pastoral devotion, but his theology is, I find, is wholly in keeping with contemporary Christian thought. So far as there is an answer to the conflict between the goodness of God and the bitterness of suffering, this is it
Gerald Priestland
#67. Every Christian is constantly invited to overcome his neighbor's fear by entering into it with him, and to find in the fellowship of suffering the way to freedom.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#68. Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.
James F. Cooper
#69. Christian hedonists don't discount suffering, they just don't give up until they find the gain in loss.
Beth Moore
#71. Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.
Shane Claiborne
#72. God doesn't promise us escape from suffering or pain. Rather, He promises to miraculously use even bad situations for your ultimate good.
Jim George
#73. You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it. The Church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more than they practice.
Vance Havner
#74. I see no light behind that terrible curtain. I do not think one religion better than another and I think the Christian religion has brought far more misery crime and suffering far more tyranny and evil than any other.
Eliza Lynn Linton
#75. The sick person becomes very adept at distinguishing between compassion and pity. Compassion is someone else's suffering flaring in your own nerves. Pity is a projection of, a lament for, the self. All those people weeping in the mirror of your misery? Their tears are real, but they are not for you.
Christian Wiman
#76. Those who are not Christians go to a place of suffering and torment called hell.
Pat Robertson
#77. There is no university for a Christian, like that of sorrow and trial
Charles Spurgeon
#78. The beginning of all pain and suffering in the world started with one act of disobedience. Christian and non-Christian alike have inherited the consequences from our common ancestors, Adam and Eve - our polluted environment and flawed human nature.
Billy Graham
#80. The Lord was with Joseph, and Joseph remained forgotten for two years. Both were equally true.
Wayne Stiles
#81. I find it hard to swallow the notion that the world is improved by extra suffering. And that goes for a lot of Christian doctrine. Jones commits a crime, so you expiate the evil by nailing Smith to a cross and it's all better. - John Leslie
Jim Holt
#82. Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.
Desmond Tutu
#83. You can look forward with hope, because one day there will be no more separation, no more scars, and no more suffering in My Fathers House. It's the home of your dreams!
Anne Graham Lotz
#84. I only know that when Jesus is with a person, that one can endure the deepest suffering and somehow emerge a better and stronger Christian because of it.
Billy Graham
#85. If you think about life simply as one big waiting room for eternity, who cares if it's not fully air conditioned?
Joyce Rachelle
#87. God does not delight in our sufferings. He brings only that which is necessary, but He does not shrink from that which will help us grow.
Jerry Bridges
#89. We want God to change situations. God wants to change us in them.
Wayne Stiles
#90. Suffering prepares you by training you to trust God and know that He is always at work in your life.
Charles Stanley
#91. If we suffer persecution and affliction in a right manner, we attain a larger measure of conformity to Christ, by a due improvement of one of these occasions, than we could have done merely by imitating his mercy, in abundance of good works.
John Wesley
#92. We also rejoice in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope." Romans 5:3-4. Suffering develops in us, qualities of Christian character, which cannot be developed in any other way.
Christian Love
#93. A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.
John Stott
#94. Though poor in this world's goods, though grieving the loss of loved ones, though suffering pain of body, though harassed by sin and Satan, though hated and persecuted by worldlings, whatever be the case and lot of the Christian, it is both his privilege and duty to rejoice in the Lord.
Arthur W. Pink
#95. The prayer of faith is a prayer of trust. The very essence of faith is trust.
R.C. Sproul
#96. The suffering of the Christian or anyone else in this world is never ultimately an accident. All suffering is within the pale of divine sovereignty. All suffering comes within the broader context of the sovereignty of God.
R.C. Sproul
#97. Being a Christian does not exempt us from tough training, which may mean suffering. If the training were easy, we would not be prepared for the tough days ahead.
Billy Graham
#98. The way of the cross is the way of suffering. Christians are called to die, not kill, in order to show the world how they are loved by Christ.
John Piper
#99. Suffering does not call into question the "big picture" of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture, and are thus unable to fit all of the pieces neatly into place.
Alister E. McGrath
#100. The Christian must know that the season, measure, and continuance of his sufferings are appointed by Infinite Wisdom, and designed to work for his everlasting good; and that grace and strength shall be afforded him according to his need.
John Newton
