Sermon quotes on pain
Augustine of Hippo
We cannot pass our guardian angel’s bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.
Phillips Brooks
God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, even when we have every reason to deny him hotly.
Paulo Coelho
Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept.
Richard Dahlstrom
Trials are the ruler and scale to reveal in our lives.
Julian of Norwich
So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, to make us to know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord to plead for mercy.
Adoniram Judson
In spite of sorrow, loss, and pain, our course be onward still; we sow on Burmah’s barren plain, we reap on Zion’s hill.
Timothy Keller
One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.
Charles Kingsley
Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.
C.S. Lewis
Pain removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.
C.S. Lewis
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Kenji Miyazawa
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey
Bob Marley
Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.
Chuck Palahniuk
It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
Diary
Blaise Pascal
All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own room.
Richard Rohr
If you do not transform your pain, you will surely transmit it.
Chuck Swindoll
A teardrop on earth summons the King of heaven.
Rick Warren
God intentionally allows you to go through painful experiences to equip you for ministry to others.
Rick Warren
Your greatest ministry will most likely come out of your greatest hurt.
Philip Yancey
Any discussion of how pain and suffering fit into God’s scheme ultimately leads back to the cross.
Philip Yancey
God wants us to choose to love him freely, even when that choice involves pain, because we are committed to him, not to our own good feelings and rewards. He wants us to cleave to him, as Job did, even when we have every reason to deny him hotly.
Nancy Ortberg
When pain is this fresh and this awful, I’m not sure much light can get through. You have to wait for some of the initial jolt to subside, to let something settle enough that you can emerge from being stunned before you can look for a ray of light. And waiting is excruciating when you are torn.
Russ Ramsey
Cleopas presumed God’s faithfulness was best seen in his ability to shield his people from difficulty. This was a profound error common to most believers of his day and ever since. Glory preceded by suffering was God’s pattern throughout all of Scripture. One way the world would recognize the true Messiah would be by the way he would fit this pattern, not defy it.
Socrates
How singular is the thing called pleasure and how curiously related to pain, which might be thought to be the opposite of it . . . yet he who pursues either is generally compelled to take the other; their bodies are two but they are joined by the same head.
Philip Yancey
Pain is not God’s great goof. The sensation of pain is a gift—the gift that nobody wants. More than anything, pain should be viewed as a communication network.
Ninny Threadgoode (Jessica Tandy)
“A heart can be broken, but it keeps beating just the same.”
Fried Green Tomatoes, (Universal City Studios, 1991)
Jim Carrey
If we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.
Third Way Magazine (January, 2002)
Richard Dawkins (For Contrast)
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. . . . In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, Basic Books, 1996, pp.132-133*
Timothy Keller
The entire book of Job contradicts the common belief that good people will have lives that go well, and that if your life is going badly, it must be your fault. The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of sin—but it does teach that every sin will bring you into difficulty.
The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy (New York: Viking, 2018, p.24).
Max Lucado
Does God guarantee the absence of struggle and the abundance of strength? Not in this life. But he does pledge to reweave your pain for a higher purpose.
Chaim Potok
One learns of the pain of others by suffering own’s own pain, my father would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said.
Edith Hamilton
Pain is the most individualizing thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization comes only when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself. Only individuals can suffer.
Dag Hammarskjöld
We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.
Julian Of Norwich
I was wholly at peace, at ease and at rest, so that there was nothing upon earth which could have afflicted me. This lasted only for a time, and then I was changed…I felt there was no ease or comfort for me except faith, hope and love, and truly I felt very little of this. And then presently God gave me again comfort and rest for my soul…And then again I felt the pain, and then afterwards the delight and the joy, now the one and now the other, again and again, I suppose about twenty times.
Ann Voskamp
Not one thing in your life is more important than figuring out how to live in the face of unspoken pain.
Flannery O’Connor
Some kind of loss is usually necessary to turn the mind toward faith. If you’re satisfied with want you’ve got, you’re hardly going to look for anything better.
Alia Joy
We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reaches out toward our car with his cardboard sign. We admire pain only if it’s healed, only if it’s endured with perfect grace, with perfect faith, and never succumbed to in weakness, in f-bombs and rants and curses raised to the heavens.
Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack, Baker Books, 2019.
Alia Joy
So we learn early on that lack is embarrassing. Our pain is uncomfortable not just for ourselves but for those around us. Our need is obscene and offensive to a world that prides itself on its self-reliance and wide-open smiles. A world where we easily dismiss pain we do not ourselves feel.
Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack, Baker Books, 2019.
Tish Harrison Warren
The problem of pain can’t be adequately answered because we don’t primarily want an answer. When all is said and done, we don’t want God to simply explain himself, to give an account of how hurricanes or head colds fit into his overall redemptive plan. We want action. We want to see things made right.
Taken from Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep by Tish Harrison Warren Copyright (c) 2021 by Tish Harrison Warren. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Diana Hill
The more you engage in meaningful activities, the more likely you are to experience discomfort.
Psychology Today
Tony Robbins
Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
“Change happens . . . ,” Goodreads, accessed June 26, 2021.
Matt Haig
We are always bigger than the pain we feel. Always. The pain is not total. When you say “I am in pain,” there is the pain and there is the I but the I is always bigger than the pain. Because the I is there even without the pain, while the pain is only there as a product of that I. And that I will survive and go on to feel other things.
Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) & The Man in Black (Carey Ewles)
Princess Buttercup: “You mock my pain.
Man in Black: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
The Princess Bride, 1987.
John R.W. Stott
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross.’ In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?
Taken from The Cross of Christ by John Stott. Copyright (c) 1976, 2006 by John Stott. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
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