This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.

It is often the case, as all the saints know, that fellowship with the Father and the Son is most vivid and sweet, and Christian joy is greatest, when the cross is heaviest.

In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth -look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment.

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

Believest thou? then thou wilt speak boldly. Speakest thou boldy? then thou must suffer. Sufferest thou? then thou shalt be comforted. For ... faith, the confession thereof, and the cross do follow one another.

wherever answer, deliverance, or salvation are mentioned in Scripture, there we must be quick to understand that cross and suffering are there before.

You must die if you would live under this King. You must bear the cross and the hatred of the whole world. You must not flee from ignominy, poverty, hunger, and thirst, in other words, all the evil that floods the earth.

That's why God imposes the cross on all believers. He wants us to experience and demonstrate God's power.

Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.

The call of the gospel is for the church to implement the victory of God in the world through suffering love.

But the early Christians—who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death—firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory. That is why they told the story the way they did.