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One of the chief apologetic arguments that atheism has against God involves suffering. How can an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, beneficent God allow innocent people to experience suffering. This is especially true for children. The following text is from the internet. It is the transcription of…

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke of his time in prison, with all its pain, as a gift: It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes…

Malcolm Muggeridge, the Christian journalist who died in 1990, spoke for almost all serious biblical Christians who have lived long enough to wake up from the dreamworld of painlessness when he said: Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating…

I have never been the same since sitting at the feet of Richard Wurmbrand. It was literally at his feet. He took off his shoes and sat in a chair on the slightly raised platform at Grace Baptist Church in south Minneapolis. (I learned later it had to do with damage to his feet during the torture he had…

Brother Andrew, who heads a ministry called Open Doors and who is most famous for his 1967 book, God’s Smuggler, describes Christ’s call in the mid-1990s like this: There’s not one door in the world closed where you want to witness for Jesus.… Show me a closed door and I will tell you how you can get…

Suppose he got pneumonia from all this work and exposure. Would that have been “persecution”? Paul did not make a distinction between being beaten by rods or having a boating accident or being cold while traveling between towns. For him any suffering that befell him while serving Christ was part of the…

It was this calling that Dietrich Bonhoeffer heard. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer wrote, “When God calls a man, He bids him (to) come and die.” Bonhoeffer knew whereof he spoke. He was a rising academic, a promising theologian and a german pastor. His promising academic and ecclesiastical…

In Living by God’s Surprises, Harold Myra writes: My pastor, Bob Harvey, tells how early in his ministry a close friend died. In an effort to comfort the widow, also a close friend, Bob shared all his seminary textbook explanations of how and why God might have let this happen. But the woman rebuked…

David, a two-year old with leukemia, was taken by his mother, Deborah, to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to see Dr. John Truman who specialized in treating children with cancer and various blood diseases. Dr. Truman's prognosis was devastating: “He has a 50-50 chance.” The mother’s ordeal…

Author Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father was a doctor who courageously spoke out against the terrible human rights abuses of military regime which was in power. As you can imagine, the two-bit dictator of this impoverished country took issue with this offense. Local…

Back in October, James Forlines came and spoke in our Missions Conference. We went out for coffee on Saturday night and he was talking to me about his family. He mentioned that one of his children and their spouse had made an interesting decision. They had moved to Memphis and, instead of moving to the…

German pastor Martin Rinkart served in the walled town of Eilenburg during the horrors of the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. Eilenburg became an overcrowded refuge for the surrounding area. The fugitives suffered from epidemic and famine. At the beginning of 1637, the year of the Great Pestilence, there…

Frederick Douglass grew up as a slave in Maryland in the early nineteenth century. He escaped and became one of the century's leading abolitionists, who fought to end slavery forever. He writes in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave about being torn away from his mother's love…

I still remember being in college and being married and having to be a janitor. Every morning at 4 am, I had to get up, get ready, and be at work in Nashville at 6:00 a.m. I hated it, and even resented it. Other guys in school had jobs teaching or working in churches and here I had to get up and go clean…

John White tells of this very thing in a story about his son Scott. He says that when his son Scott was just learning to walk, he fell on a cement driveway and split the area below his chin so deeply that the floor of his mouth was exposed. Hospitals and doctors were 250 kilometers away over tortuous…

Many of you have heard of Gordon MacDonald. He’s pretty famous in the Christian world. I know him as the writer of the book, Ordering your Private World. He tells of his own trouble which he didn’t understand. He was approached by a Christian Organization to send in a resume to be its president. He didn’t…

God allows all of this hurt, disappointment, and struggle for a time, in hopes that we will wake up and realize something's wrong and freely choose to seek the will of the King. Out of love for us, he allows the pain and suffering our choices cause so we will not cling to this life or the things of this…

The fact is that it is the world's greatest sufferers who have produced the most shining examples of unconquerable faith. -- Scottish theologian, James Stewart Jeff Vines, Dinner with Skeptics, p. 107

Sundar Singh was born into a wealthy family in India in 1889. His mother trained him from birth to become a Sikh holy man, and by age seven he could quote by heart vast portions of Hindu holy books. Seeing his intelligence, his mother eventually sent him to a Presbyterian school for a one-year’s course…

He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find Him the rest of the day.—John Bunyan Early African converts to Christianity were earnest and regular in private devotions. Each one reportedly had a separate spot in the thicket where he would pour out his heart to God. Over time the paths to these…

Everyone faces times of adversity. Most of the Psalms were born in difficulty. Most of the Epistles were written in prisons. Most of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress from jail. Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized…

While atheists routinely speak of the problem of evil, they usually don’t raise the problem of goodness. But if evil provides evidence against God, then shouldn’t goodness count as evidence for him? And wouldn’t that be evidence against atheism? From a non-theistic viewpoint, what is evil? Isn’t it just…

Once when I was going through a difficult time, my husband touched his finger to the tears winding down my face, then touched his wet finger to his own cheek. His gesture spoke volumes to me. It said: "Your tears run down my face, too. Your suffering aches inside my heart as well. I share your wounded…

He deserves not the name of patient who is only willing to suffer as much as he thinks proper.—Thomas a Kempis I once heard a preacher explain how trials are like washing machines. You have to let the machine run its course in order for the clothes to be completely cleaned. No matter how badly you feel…

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people - on capable, thrifty, little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for thier modest stock of happiness and know seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. . . Let me…