Quotes about Struggle

You cannot know what prayer is for, until you know that life is war.

At one level, the message of the book of Ruth is that the life of the godly is not a straight line to glory, but they do get there.

It seems to me that Christians in the West are being coddled. We suffer little in the name of Christ. Therefore, we read the Bible not with a desperate hunger for evidences of God's triumph in pain, but with a view to improving our private pleasures.

When everything in life is stripped away except God, and we trust him more because of it, this is gain, and he is glorified.

Don't make peace with the sin in your life.

Normal Christian life is a process of restoration and renewal. Our joy is not static. It fluctuates with real life. It is vulnerable to satan's attacks.

When something drops into your life that seems to threaten your future, remember this: the first shockwaves of the bomb are not sin. The real danger is yielding to them. Giving in. Putting up no spiritual fight. And the root of that surrender is unbelief - a failure to fight for faith in future grace. A failure to cherish all that God promises to be for us in Jesus.

We cannot know what prayer is for until we know that life is war.

Cancer does not win if we die. It wins if we fail to cherish Christ.

No one ever said that they learned their deepest lessons of life, or had their sweetest encounters with God, on the sunny days. People go deep with God when the drought comes. That is the way God designed it. Christ aims to be magnified in life most clearly by the way we experience him in our losses.

Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is. . . . The struggle to submit . . . is not a struggle to submit but a struggle to accept and with passion. I mean, possibly, with joy. Picture me with my ground teeth stalking joy—fully armed too as it's a highly dangerous quest. FLANNERY O'CONNOR The Habit of Being

If we were perfect—if there were no remaining corruption in our hearts—there would be no fight. There would be no obstacles to overcome. We won't fight for joy in heaven. But we are not there yet.