When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God's love for us.

Anyone who thinks hard work will never hurt you has never had to pay to have it done. Jesus now has many lovers of his Heavenly Kingdom, but few bearers of his cross.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love."

I'd learned that you can't wear a crown unless you bear a cross - that if our Savior had learned obedience through suffering, we should expect the same.

The ill are damped with pain and anguish at the sight of all that is laudable, lovely, or happy.

He simply and unmistakably is happy. None of his circumstances contribute to his joy: He wrote from a jail cell, his work was under attack by competitors, and after twenty years or so of hard traveling in the service of Jesus, he was tired and would have welcomed some relief.

We don't become praising people by avoiding or skipping or denying the pain and the poverty and the doubt and the guilt but by entering into them, exploring them, minding their significance, embracing the reality of these experiences. That is what is so distressing about the religious entertainment industry in our land.

This joy is not dependent on our good luck in escaping hardship. It is not dependent on our good health and avoidance of pain. Christian joy is actual in the midst of pain, suffering, loneliness and misfortune.

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.

The gospel offers a different view of suffering: in suffering we enter the depths; we are at the heart of things; we are near to where Christ was on the cross.

The wounds of calumny, the reproaches of the proud, the venom of the bigoted, the treachery of the false, and the weakness of the true, we have known in our measure; and therein have had communion with our Lord Jesus.

Suffering, if it is accepted together, borne together, is joy.