Quotes About Struggle

The central lie of Satan to all God's suffering children comes in the form of this question: "Where is your God now?" The lie embedded in this question is that our suffering is clear evidence that we have been forsaken by God.

Ministry leadership is not a fortress against spiritual attack; it's the front line.

When you feel unprepared, alone, overburdened, and besieged, what but God is able to give you reason to hope again, to believe again, and to live again?

Face the fact today that you'll never outgrow your need for grace, no matter how much you learn and how much you mature, until you are on the other side and your struggle is over because sin is no more (see Phil. 3:12–16). The way to begin to celebrate the grace that God so freely gives you every day is by admitting how much you need it.

suffering is not an unusual, surprising experience; it's the experience of everyone who lives in this dramatically broken world.

But here is the reality: all of the horizontal battles are the fruit of a deeper war. The most important war, the one that needs to be won, is not the war they are having with each other, but a war that wages within them individually. Real change is all about winning this war.

The crisis of faith that often accompanies suffering is the result of a collision between our will and God's will and our glory and his glory.

in the middle of the travail we all face one way or another, God is up to something good.

The commands, principles, and case studies of Scripture will take you only so far in your quest to figure out your life. There will be moments when you simply don't understand what is going on. In fact, you will face moments when what the God who has declared himself to be good brings into your life won't seem good. It may even seem bad, very bad.

If you are God's child, you're either giving in to sin or giving way to the operation of rescuing grace, but your heart's never neutral.

We should never become achievement satisfied, because there is always more gospel work to do. But we must always remind one another that achievement is a spiritual minefield. Achievement has the power to change us—to change who we think we are and what we think we are capable of doing. Sadly, achievement can turn humble servant leaders into proud, controlling, and unapproachable mini-kings. But there is powerful, right-here, right-now grace for this struggle.

There are moments when we get lost in the middle of God's story. We lose our minds, we lose our sense of direction, and we lose our remembrance of him.

No, the message is that God puts an uncompromising standard before us, then sends his Son to perfectly meet that standard on our behalf, so that we can be free to admit our failures and go to God for help. The cross of Jesus Christ means I don't have to deny my struggle as a parent, I don't have to act as if I'm something that I'm not, and I surely don't have to hide from the only One who is able to help me.

In a fallen world there is a powerful pressure to constrict your life to the shape and size of your life.

when we are living in the middle of difficulty, we are tempted to view it as a sign of God's unfaithfulness or inattention.

Our struggle with sin is so deep that it was not enough for God to forgive us, so he also unzipped us and got inside of us by his Spirit.

Parenting is about the condition that makes good behavior seem such a hard and elusive goal.

Scripture never looks down on the sufferer, it never mocks his pain, it never turns a deaf ear to his cries, and it never condemns him for his struggle. It presents to the sufferer a God who understands, who cares, who invites us to come to him for help, and who promises one day to end all suffering of any kind once and forever. Because of this, the Bible, while being dramatically honest about suffering, is at the same time gloriously hopeful.

You're not aware of it, but your envy of others and the pain it produces lock you into a view of life that has a disastrous past and a painful present but is functionally without a future. It feels as if what is will always be.

There is hope for your relationships; there are resources for the struggle, because you have inherited big, expansive, powerful, rescuing, and transforming grace. This grace is so huge and powerful that there is no way to wrap human words around it.

death is literally all around us. We cannot run and we cannot hide and we have no ability to defeat it. Death lives at our address, and there is no escaping.

Suffering, sadness, and death are not yet no more. It is hard to live in the middle, but that is exactly where we live. We live in a world that is still sadly and terribly broken.

proceeded to try to force his beliefs down nature's throat. Strange to say, sometimes he was right, importantly right as you will see. Up till now (it was in the late eighteen

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.