Joni Eareckson Tada Suffering Quotations

In the Christian faith, God really puts suffering front and center. He doesn't get squeamish about it.

God deliberately chooses weak, suffering and unlikely candidates to get His work done, so that in the end, the glory goes to God and not to the person.

Now, most people who suffer realize that the Bible contains answers for their plight; they just don't know where to look.

Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him.

We're not the paragons of virtue that we'd all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we're made.

God lets us continue to feel much of sin's sting through suffering while we're heading for heaven. This constantly reminds us of what we're being delivered from; exposing sin for the poison it is.

The problem of suffering is not about something but about someone.

Suffering is arguably God's choicest tool in shaping the character of Christ in us.

The greatest good suffering can do for me is to increase my capacity for God.

Suffering always prompts heart-wrenching questions: if God is good, why would He allow this pain in my life? Is God truly sovereign over accidents and birth anomalies, or does the devil set the world's agenda? How do I counsel people who are despairing of their condition?

When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus.

Suffering provides the gym equipment on which my faith can be exercised.

God always seems bigger to those who need him most. And suffering is the tool he uses to help us need him more.

God turns on its head one form of evil - suffering - in order to defeat another form of evil - that is, our transgressions. It happened at the cross, and it occurs in the lives of followers of Christ every day.