Where Is God When It Hurts? Quotes

“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. That, I believe, is the central message of Job. Satan had taunted God with the accusation that humans are not truly free. Was Job being faithful simply because God had allowed him a prosperous life? Job's fiery trials proved the answer beyond doubt. Job clung to God's justice when he was the best example in history of God's apparent injustice. He did not seek the Giver because of his gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“We feel pain as an outrage; Jesus did too, which is why he performed miracles of healing. In Gethsemane, he did not pray, “Thank you for this opportunity to suffer,” but rather pled desperately for an escape. And yet he was willing to undergo suffering in service of a higher goal. In the end he left the hard questions (“if there be any other way . . .”) to the will of the Father, and trusted that God could use even the outrage of his death for good.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“As we rely on God, and trust his Spirit to mold us in his image, true hope takes shape within us, “a hope that does not disappoint.”We can literally become better persons because of suffering. Pain, however meaningless it may seem at the time, can be transformed. Where is God when it hurts? He is in us—not in the things that hurt—helping to transform bad into good.We can safely say that God can bring good out of evil; we cannot say that God brings about the evil in hopes of producing good.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Bear one another’s burdens, the Bible says. It is a lesson about pain that we all can agree on. Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But, the fact is, pain and suffering are here among us, and we need to respond in some way. The response Jesus gave was to bear the burdens of those he touched. To live in the world as his body, his emotional incarnation, we must follow his example. The image of the body accurately portrays how God is working in the world. Sometimes he does enter in, occasionally by performing miracles, and often by giving supernatural strength to those in need. But mainly he relies on us, his agents, to do his work in the world.We are asked to live out the life of Christ in the world, not just to refer back to it or describe it.We announce his message, work for justice, pray for mercy . . . and suffer with the sufferers.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“J. Robertson McQuilkin...was once approached by an elderly lady facing the trials of old age. Her body was in decline, her beauty being replaced by thinning hair, wrinkles and skin discoloration. She could no longer do the things she once could, and she felt herself to be a burden on others. “Robertson, why does God let us get old and weak? Why must I hurt so?” she asked.
After a few moments’ thought McQuilkin replied, “I think God has planned the strength and beauty of youth to be physical. But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we’ll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever. It makes us more eager to leave behind the temporary, deteriorating part of us and be truly homesick for our eternal home. If we stayed young and strong and beautiful, we might never want to leave!”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“The first step in helping a suffering person is to acknowledge that the pain is valid, and worthy of a sympathetic response.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“C. S. Lewis introduced the phrase “pain, the megaphone of God.” “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains,” he said; “it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”3 The word megaphone is apropos, because by its nature pain shouts. When I stub my toe or twist an ankle, pain loudly announces to my brain that something is wrong. Similarly, the existence of suffering on this earth is, I believe, a scream to all of us that something is wrong. It halts us in our tracks and forces us to consider other values.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“As I have said, the Bible consistently changes the questions we bring to the problem of pain. It rarely, or ambiguously, answers the backward-looking question “Why?” Instead, it raises the very different, forward-looking question, “To what end?”We are not put on earth merely to satisfy our desires, to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.We are here to be changed, to be made more like God in order to prepare us for a lifetime with him. And that process may be served by the mysterious pattern of all creation: pleasure sometimes emerges against a background of pain, evil may be transformed into good, and suffering may produce something of value.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Is God somehow responsible for the suffering of this world? In this indirect way, yes. But giving a child a pair of ice skates, knowing that he may fall, is a very different matter from knocking him down on the ice.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Faith in God offers no insurance against tragedy. Nor does it offer insurance against feelings of doubt and betrayal. If anything, being a Christian complicates the issue. If you believe in a world of pure chance, what difference does it make whether a bus from Yuba City or one from Salina crashes? But if you believe in a world ruled by a powerful God who loves you tenderly, then it makes an awful difference.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“But the strength and beauty of age is spiritual. We gradually lose the strength and beauty that is temporary so we’ll be sure to concentrate on the strength and beauty which is forever.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Maybe God isn’t trying to tell us anything specific each time we hurt. Pain and suffering are part and parcel of our planet, and Christians are not exempt.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“The fact that Jesus came to earth where he suffered and died does not remove pain from our lives. But it does show that God did not sit idly by and watch us suffer in isolation. He became one of us. Thus, in Jesus, God gives us an up-close and personal look at his response to human suffering. All our questions about God and suffering should, in fact, be filtered through what we know about Jesus.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“I have mentioned that no one offers the name of a philosopher when I ask the question, “Who helped you most?” Most often they answer by describing a quiet, unassuming person. Someone who was there whenever needed, who listened more than talked, who didn’t keep glancing down at a watch, who hugged and touched, and cried. In short, someone who was available, and came on the sufferer’s terms and not their own.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“I believe Christians walk a mental tightrope and are in constant danger of falling in one of two directions. On this subject, errors in thinking can have tragic results. The first error comes when we attribute all suffering to God, seeing it as his punishment for human mistakes; the second error does just the opposite, assuming that life with God will never include suffering.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Sometimes the only meaning we can offer a suffering person is the assurance that their suffering, which has no apparent meaning for them, has a meaning for us.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“To judge God solely by the present world would be a tragic mistake. At one time, it may have been “the best of all possible worlds,” but surely it is not now. The Bible communicates no message with more certainty than God’s displeasure with the state of creation and the state of humanity. Imagine this scenario: vandals break into a museum displaying works from Picasso’s Blue Period. Motivated by sheer destructiveness, they splash red paint all over the paintings and slash them with knives. It would be the height of unfairness to display these works—a mere sampling of Picasso’s creative genius, and spoiled at that—as representative of the artist. The same applies to God’s creation. God has already hung a “Condemned” sign above the earth, and has promised judgment and restoration. That this world spoiled by evil and suffering still exists at all is an example of God’s mercy, not his cruelty.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“But the Lord say he won’t put more on us than we can stand. If we can’t take it, he’ll be right there beside us giving stren’th we didn’t know we had.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“a sick person is not a sick person, but rather a person of worth and value who happens to have some bodily parts that are not functioning well.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“It is dangerous and perhaps even unscriptural to torture ourselves by looking for his message in a specific throb of pain, a specific instance of suffering. The message may simply be that we live in a world with fixed laws, like everyone else. But from the larger view, from the view of all history, yes, God speaks to us through suffering—or perhaps in spite of suffering. The symphony he is composing includes minor chords, dissonance, and tiresome fugal passages. But those of us who follow his conducting through early movements will, with renewed strength, someday burst into song.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“One man told me the most helpful person during his long illness was an office colleague who called every day, just to check. His visits, usually twice a week, never exceeded fifteen minutes, but the consistency of his calls and visits became a fixed point, something he could count on when everything else in his life seemed unstable.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“The surgery of life hurts. It helps me, though, to know that the surgeon himself, the Wounded Surgeon, has felt every stab of pain and every sorrow.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Paul says that Spirit lives inside us, detecting needs we cannot articulate and expressing them in a language we cannot comprehend. When we don’t know what to pray, he fills in the blanks. Evidently, it is our very helplessness that God, too, delights in. Our weakness gives opportunity for his strength.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“A wise sufferer will look not inward, but outward. There is no more effective healer than a wounded healer, and in the process the wounded healer’s own scars may fade away.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Health and life, I would say, in the full and final sense of those words, are not what we die out of, but what we die into”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“Self-sufficiency which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet that their lack of self-sufficiency is obvious to them every day. They must turn somewhere for strength, and sometimes they go through life relying on their natural gifts. But there's a chance, just a chance, that people who lack such natural advantages may cry out to God in their time of need.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?

“True health is the strength to live, the strength to suffer, and the strength to die.”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?

“Those who have known pain profoundly are the ones most wary of uttering the clichés about suffering. Experience with the mystery takes one beyond the realm of ideas and produces finally a muteness or at least a reticence to express in words the solace that can only be expressed by an attitude of union with the sufferer. JOHN HOWARD GRIFFIN”
― Philip Yancey, Where Is God When It Hurts?: Your Pain Is Real . . . When Will It End?