Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense QUOTES

1 " you never just suffer the thing that you’re suffering, but you always also suffer the way that you’re suffering that thing. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

2 " God is not shocked or surprised that you are discouraged. He doesn’t wring his hands, wondering what to do next. He knows every struggle of discouragement in your heart. He knows your cries before you cry. He knew that you and I would be weak; that’s why he promised to be our strength. He has promised never to give up the battle for our hearts until that battle is finally won forever. This means he fights for us even when we have given up the fight. Our desire to follow him may weaken, but he will never give up or turn his back on us. He knows us because he made us, which is why he sent his Son to be for us what we could not be for ourselves and to do for us what we could not do on our own. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

3 " Like fear, doubt is not in and of itself a bad thing. God has given us the ability to wonder and the desire to know and understand. He has wired into us the quest to have our questions answered and our confusion cleared up. He created in us an intolerance of irrationality and contradiction. Doubt can cause you to ask profoundly important questions. Doubt will make you think deeply about very important things. Doubt will allow you to expose and reject falsehood. Doubt can ignite a life that is reasoned, wise, and protective. Doubt can keep you from being all too naive or an easy target for deception. Because doubt drives us to know and understand, it has the power to lead you to the One who knows and understands everything. Your capacity to doubt can drive you to God, but not always. This is why we need to talk about doubt, because this God-given capacity, wrongly functioning, can be disastrous. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

4 " Weakness simply demonstrates what has been true all along: we are completely dependent on God for life and breath and everything else. Weakness was not the end for me, but a new beginning, because weakness provides the context in which true strength is found. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that he’ll boast in his weakness. It sounds weird and crazy when you first read it, but it’s not. He has come to know that God’s “power is made perfect” in his weakness. You see, weakness is not what you and I should be afraid of. We should fear our delusion of strength. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

5 " Left unchecked, discouragement will become your eyes and ears, determining what you see and hear and how you see and hear it. Unchecked, it will become the master of your emotions and the ruler of your choices and actions. Unchecked, discouragement will rob you of your hope and motivation. It will steal your reason for doing good things. It will rob you of your ability to trust. It will make you closed, self-protective, and easily overwhelmed. Discouragement will sap you of your strength and courage. It will cause you to see negative where nothing is negative and miss the positive that is right in front of you. If given room, discouragement will tell you lies that have the power to destroy your life. Discouragement is natural for someone who is suffering, but it makes a very, very bad master. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

6 " In ways that he was unaware of, his private conversation had become progressively theological. More and more, he thought about God, and because of that, the meaning and purpose of his life. But rather than letting what the Bible says about God help him interpret the overwhelming circumstances he was facing, he let his circumstances redefine his view of God. How could a loving God let this happen to anyone? Where were all God’s promises? Why didn’t God answer his prayers? Why were other people being blessed while he got cursed? Why didn’t God use his power to help him? Why was God punishing him? Why had God turned his back on him? Why didn’t God do something to help him? Why? The Bible didn’t answer his questions because he no longer had faith in what it said, and he knew that his pastor and Christian friends would offer him the same tired platitudes that he had once repeated to others in need. His love for God began to morph into anger at God. Worship devolved into an angry demand for change. The faith that had shaped his life now seemed to be a grand trick played on weak people. In his endless and dark conversation with himself, he finally concluded that if there was a God, he was not good or worthy of his trust. And in that moment he was all alone in his overwhelming and increasingly debilitating circumstances. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

7 " Because doubt drives us to know and understand, it has the power to lead you to the One who knows and understands everything. Your capacity to doubt can drive you to God, but not always. This is why we need to talk about doubt, because this God-given capacity, wrongly functioning, can be disastrous. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

8 " The doubt of wonderment is a normal part of a life of faith, and it’s spiritually healthy when it drives you to bring your confusion to the One who has no confusion. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

9 " One of God’s sweetest gifts to us between the “already” of our conversion and the “not yet” of our homegoing is the gift of the body of Christ. God makes his invisible grace visible by sending people of grace to give grace to people who need grace. His people are meant to be the look on his face, the touch of his hand, the sound of his voice, the evidence of his love, the picture of his presence, and the visible demonstration of his faithfulness "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

10 " Peter knows that when we suffer, we are susceptible to the lies that the Enemy whispers in our ears: “Where is your God now?” “Why have you been singled out?” “Perhaps God does have favorites.” “Why isn’t God listening to your prayers?” “Why do others have it so much easier than you?” “Maybe God doesn’t love you after all.” The function of all these lies is to sow seeds of doubt in our hearts when we feel the weakest, the most afraid, and are reaching out for help. The Enemy is seeking to make us doubt the goodness, love, presence, and power of God. He knows that if we begin to question God’s character and power, we will quit going to God and seeking his help. His lies are meant to damage and weaken our faith so that on the other side of our suffering (if there is another side) we will not love and serve him as we once did. Peter understands that "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

11 " When the thing you have been trusting (whether you knew it or not) is laid to waste, you don’t suffer just the loss of that thing; you also suffer the loss of the identity and security that it provided. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

12 " Your suffering is not a sign that you’ve been forsaken; rather, it’s a sign that you live in a world that doesn’t function the way God intended and is in need of complete renewal. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

13 " 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 "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

14 " 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. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

15 " When you are suffering, you have to force yourself to pay attention to your private conversation, that is, the words you say to yourself that no one else hears. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

16 " Good biblical busyness is a powerful defense against debilitating doubt. The more you give yourself to the devotional, discipleship, and missional things God calls all his children to, the more you will be reminded of the enormous blessing and eternal importance of what it means to be a child of God and a part of God’s unstoppable mission of redemption. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

17 " The largest body of content in the psalms is given to lament, in which the psalmist “laments” or mourns the situation he is in and the distress he is facing. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

18 " Suffering reminds us that we are not as righteous as we’ve thought and not as faithful as we’ve confessed to be. Suffering brings you and me to the end of ourselves. It exposes and confronts us. It makes it harder and harder to hold on to the delusion of our righteousness. This is why it is so important to remember that God is faithful to us, not because we are righteous, but because he is. He continues to love us, not because we perfectly love him, but because his love for us remains perfect. He remains near, not because we’ve never thought of running away, but because he would never turn his back on the promises he’s made to us. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

19 " Our blessings are never payment for the good we’ve done, and our trials are never punishment for the wrongs we’ve done. This cause-and-effect equation is always bad spiritual math. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

20 " I want to get you to think about and finally find comfort in the fact that our experience of suffering is never just physical. The pain that stops us in our tracks, that makes us want to pull the covers over our head and not face the day, and at moments makes us wish that we could die, is never just physical. "

― Paul David Tripp , Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense