Suffering has the power to expose what you have been trusting all along. If you lose your hope when your physical body fails, maybe your hope wasn't really in your Savior after all. It was humbling to confess that what I thought was faith was actually self-reliance

Suffering doesn't make us weak; it simply exposes the weaknesses that have been there all along. It exposes the delusion of our sovereignty and independent capability.

There are times when you are tempted to wonder if it's all worth it. But in all this, God is still at work, molding you into the likeness of his Son. It is, in many ways, a multifaceted life of hardship—the hardships of life in this fallen world intersecting with the restorative hardships of grace.

The surprise of situational distress has produced deeply emotional questions that have led them to deeply theological conclusions, but it's been nothing like the sort of theological debate found in a classroom.

Our problem is that we tend to be unfaithful to his holy agenda and get kidnapped by our plans for us and our dreams for our lives. The trials in our lives exist not because he has forgotten us, but because he remembers us and is changing us by his grace. When you remember that, you can have joy in the middle of what is uncomfortable.

The difficulties we face in the here and now are not a sign that God has forgotten or abandoned us. He knows where he has placed us. He has placed us here because he is not after our ease; he is after our hearts.

But here's what you have to face. God, for your good and his glory, has chosen to keep you for a while in this broken-down world. He has chosen to employ the hardships of this world to complete the work that he has begun in you. He does not leave you alone. He does not leave you without resources. He blesses you with his new morning mercies. But he has you right where he wants you.

So remember today that no matter how hard your story is right here, right now, it is guaranteed for you as God's child that it will end better than anything you can now imagine, and that glory will never end!

God is using the difficulties of the here and now to transform you, that is, to rescue you from you. And because he loves you, he will willingly interrupt or compromise your momentary happiness in order to accomplish one more step in the process of rescue and transformation, which he is unshakably committed to.

Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands.

Suffering makes us susceptible to the one voice we should never hear and that will always do us harm.

We all fail somehow, someway every day. Often failure is the workroom God uses in our lives to reform us to be what we need to be in order to be more successful tools in his hands.