Suffering

No one has to convince us that suffering is hard. If you’ve lived any amount of time in this broken world you know what it means to suffer. No doubt there are different degrees of suffering, but suffering is universal. Nobody escapes it. Nobody grows out of it. Nobody can buy their way out of it or...

Christ’s cry from the olive press in Gethsemane has a strikingly similar resonance to Job’s anguished complaint from the ash heap of Uz. The resemblances have led some commentators to identify Job as a “type” of Christ, a biblical figure that formally anticipates the coming of our Savior. While...

Think back over the past year of your life. When have you grown the most in knowing, loving, trusting and obeying God? For most of us the answer will not be in times of strength but of weakness, not in times of joy but in suffering, not in times of prosperity but in poverty. Certainly that has been...

Where do you turn in the midst of your suffering? I hope you first turn to the Word of God. But within the Bible there are certain books that teach us to suffer well. Lamentations is one such example. Each one of the poems in the book is an acrostic, literarily bringing order to the chaos God’s...

When you’re in distressing circumstances, it’s hard to rest in God’s providence. Just ask the young married couple who recently buried their first child, or the mother who just learned her son has leukemia. Speak with the couple who is facing great financial loss after years of smart planning and...

After reading through this prophecy, one doesn’t need to make it further than the first five chapters to realize that there is a profound problem. The people of God know the right things to say. In 1:15, they spread out their hands in prayer. They know the right things to do. In 1:11, they...

Tsehay Tolessa – Through a Fiery Furnace When, on July 28, 1979, the Lutheran pastor Gudina Tumsa was abducted at the end of a church service, the troubles for his wife were far from over. [1] Kidnapped at the same time, Tsehay Tolessa was left outside the city walls without any explanations. She...

The Puritans not only preached to comfort the weary and wounded, but admonished those who had close relations with such saints in how to help them. So Timothy Rogers gave instructions to those who had to deal with those under a sense of God’s desertion: Speak kindly and compassionately to those...

If anything gives us the opportunity to be unfaithful to God it is trials. In the midst of suffering we are often tempted to doubt God’s faithfulness and friendship, goodness and grace, and power and promises. We sometimes wonder if we will make it, how we will make it, or why God is doing this to...

In the midst of suffering, I often pray, “Lord, help me to suffer well.” What I mean is that I want to suffer in a way that glorifies God. But what does it look like for the believer to suffer well? In the first part of his letter James speaks about what it means to be faithful in suffering through...