A Word from Bob: I’ve taken the following 40 “quotes of note” from my book God’s Healing for Life’s Losses: How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting. Of the 20 books I’ve authored, God’s Healing for Life’s Losses is my personal favorite. I pray that the following quotes will be a blessing to you and to those you love and minister to…
40 Quotes of Note
- In suffering, God is not getting back at you; He is getting you back to Himself.
- There is no human experience which cannot be put on the anvil of a lively relationship with God and man, and battered into a meaningful shape.
- God’s Word empowers us not to evade suffering, but to face suffering face-to-face with God.
- God loves us too much to allow us to forget our neediness.
- God refuses to allow us to get too comfortable here. Instead, He allows suffering—daily casket processionals—to blacken our sun so we cry out to His Son. Suffering reminds us that we’re not home yet.
- We live in a fallen world and it often falls on us.
- Our world is a mess and it messes with our minds.
- It’s normal to hurt and necessary to grieve. It’s possible to hope and supernatural to grow.
- Shared sorrow is endurable sorrow.
- Candor is courageous truth telling to myself about life in which I come face-to-face with the reality of my external and internal suffering. In candor, I admit what is happening to me and I feel what is going on inside me.
- No grieving; no healing. Know grieving; know healing.
- The only person who can truly dare to grieve, bear to grieve, is the person with a future hope that things will eventually and eternally be better.
- When we trust God’s good heart, then we trust Him no matter what. We need not pretend. In Christ, we can face and embrace the mysteries and miseries of life.
- Lament is vulnerable frankness about life to God in which I express my pain and confusion over how a good God allows evil and suffering.
- Biblical complaint and lament complains to God about the fallen world. Ungodly complaint complains about God and accuses Him of lacking goodness, holiness, and wisdom.
- There are more Psalms of complaint and lament than Psalms of praise and thanksgiving.
- Lament is an act of truth-telling faith, not unfaith. Lament is a rehearsal of the bad allowed by our good God.
- When we lament, we live in the real world honestly, refusing to ignore what is occurring. Lament is our expression of our radical trust in God’s reliability in the midst of real life.
- God prizes lament and rejects all deceiving denial and simplistic closure, preferring candid complexity.
- God wants us to make use of our suffering, to remember our suffering, to admit our need for Him in our suffering, and to rehearse our suffering before Him.
- Crying out to God empties us so there is more room in us for God. David wept until he had no strength left, but then he found strength in the Lord (1 Samuel 30:6).
- If God allowed work to work, then no one would ever surrender to God. So He thwarts our attempts to manipulate Him, to make life work on our own.
- Through God’s comfort, we experience the presence of God in the presence of suffering—a presence that empowers us to survive scars and plants the seed of hope that we will yet thrive.
- Faith does not demand the removal of suffering; faith desires endurance in suffering. Faith understands that what can’t be cured, can be endured.
- Grieving is a normal response to loss. However, God does not abandon us in our dark, dank casket. God, who is Light, shines His light of comfort into our hurting hearts.
- Hope waits. Hope is the refusal to demand heaven now.
- Waiting is trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up. Waiting refuses self-rescue.
- In waiting, we cling to God’s rope of hope, even when we can’t see it. In biblical waiting, we neither numb our longings nor illegitimately fulfill them.
- Faith looks back to the past recalling God’s mighty works saying, “He did it that time; He can do it now.” Hope looks ahead remembering God’s coming reward saying, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
- God calls us to long fervently for heaven and live passionately for God and others while still on earth. We say, “I ache for Paradise. But I’m pulling weeds until the day I die!”
- God calls us to see life with spiritual eyes instead of eyeballs only. We look at suffering, not with rose colored glasses, but with faith eyes, with Cross-eyes, with 20/20 spiritual vision.
- Through spiritual eyesight we entrust ourselves to God’s larger purposes, good plans, and eternal perspective.
- Instead of our perspective shrinking, suffering is the exact time when we must listen most closely, when we must lean over to hear the whisper of God.
- True, God shouts to us in our pain, but His answers, as with Elijah, often come to us in whispered still small voices amid the thunders of the world.
- Grace math teaches us that present suffering plus God’s character equals future glory.
- Worship is wanting God more than wanting relief.
- Worship is finding God even when you don’t find answers.
- Worship is walking with God in the dark and having Him as the light of your soul.
- When life dashes our dreams and seems to kill our hopes, we must remind ourselves that we’ve read the end of the story. God is victorious! We are victorious in Christ!
- Knowing the rest of the story provides rest for your soul.
