Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.
– Charles Spurgeon
Adversity | Trials
Often, we endure trials seeking God’s deliverance from them. Suffering is painful for us to endure or to see those we love endure. While our instinct is to flee trials, remember that even in the midst of suffering, God’s will is being done.
– Paul Chappell
Trials | Suffering
Faith upholds a Christian under all trials, by assuring him that every painful dispensation is under the direction of his Lord; that chastisements are a token of His love; that the season, measure, and continuance of his sufferings, are appointed by Infinite Wisdom, and designed to work for his everlasting good; and that grace and strength shall be afforded him, according to his need.
– John Newton
Faith | Trials | Chastisement
Don’t let your trials blow you down; let them lift you up.
– Woodrow Kroll
Trials
Trials come to prove and improve us.
– Augustine
Trials
Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires.
– John Newton
Trials
We are always in the forge, or on the anvil; by trials God is shaping us for higher things.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Perseverance | Patience | Trials
Trials should not surprise us, or cause us to doubt God’s faithfulness. Rather, we should actually be glad for them. God sends trials to strengthen our trust in him so that our faith will not fail. Our trials keep us trusting; they burn away our self confidence and drive us to our Savior.
– Edmund Clowney
Trials | Faith
God desires to show His power through your storm, but is your lack of faith keeping Him from doing so? God brings storms into your life to show His strength and to gain glory from His providence.
– Paul Chappell
Trials | Providence
Sorrows and trials are like the sand and grit that polish a stone.
– G. V. Wigraw
Trials
God has a purpose for trials and testings.
– Warren Wiersbe
Trials
Life’s trials are not easy. But in God’s will, each has a purpose.
– Warren Wiersbe
Trials | Purpose | God
I never had a trial I wanted to have, but I never had trial I wasn’t glad I had.
– Jack Hyles
Trials
You will have no test of faith that will not fit you to be a blessing if you are obedient to the Lord. I never had a trial but when I got out of the deep river I found some poor pilgrim on the bank that I was able to help by that very experience.
– A. B. Simpson
Trials
The man who has an easy way through life, will be spiritually weak, flabby and impoverished. He won’t be able to do all that God wants him to do. But the one who has gone through trials and testing successfully, will be strong and capable of doing all the will of God.
– Zac Poonen
Trials
In regard of God, patience is a submission to His sovereignty. To endure a trial, simply because we cannot avoid or resist it, is not Christian patience. But to humbly submit because it is the will of God to inflict the trial, to be silent because the sovereignty of God orders it – is true godly patience.
– Stephen Charnock
Trials | Patience
You may readily judge whether you are a child of God or a hypocrite by seeing in what direction your soul turns in seasons of severe trial. The hypocrite flies to the world and finds a sort of comfort there. But the child of God runs to his Father and expects consolation only from the Lord’s hand.
– Charles Spurgeon
Trials
In the secret of God’s tabernacle no enemy can find us, and no troubles can reach us. The pride of man and the strife of tongues find no entrance into the pavilion of God. The secret of his presence is a more secure refuge than a thousand Gibraltars. I do not mean that no trials come. They may come in abundance, but they cannot penetrate into the sanctuary of the soul, and we may dwell in perfect peace even in the midst of life fiercest storms.
– Hannah Whitall Smith
Trials | Peace
It is of no use to say to men, “Let not your heart be troubled,” unless you finish the verse and say, “Believe in God, believe also in Christ.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Trials | Believing
Anger and bitterness are two noticeable signs of being focused on self and not trusting God’s sovereignty in your life. When you believe that God causes all things to work together for good to those who belong to Him and love Him, you can respond to trials with joy instead of anger or bitterness.
– John C. Broger
Anger | Bitterness | Trials
There are two ways of getting out of a trial. One is simply to try to get rid of the trial, and be thankful when it is over. The other is to recognize the trial as a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing than we have ever had, and to hail it with delight as an opportunity of obtaining a larger measure of divine grace.
– A. B. Simpson
Trials
God has ordained that our preaching become deeper and more winsome as we are broken, humbled, and made low and desperately dependent on grace by the trials of our lives.
– John Piper
Preaching | Trials
When a tear is wept by you, think not your Father does not behold; for, “Like as a father pities his children so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” Your sigh is able to move the heart of Jehovah; your whisper can incline His ear unto you; your prayer can stay His hands; your faith can move His arm. Oh! think not that God sits on high in an eternal slumber, taking no account of you.
– Charles Spurgeon
Trials
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, ‘Thou art my refuge.’
– George Macdonald
Trials | Feelings
God delights to increase the faith of His children. We ought, instead of wanting no trials before victory, no exercise for patience, to be willing to take them from God’s hands as a means. Trials, obstacles, difficulties and sometimes defeats, are the very food of faith.
– George Mueller
Faith | Trials
Let the trials of life make you a giant, not a midget.
– Warren Wiersbe
Trials
All our difficulties are only platforms for the manifestations of His grace, power and love.
– Hudson Taylor
Trials
To learn strong faith is to endure great trials. I have learned my faith by standing firm amid severe testings.
– George Mueller
Faith | Trials | Endurance
It is necessary that our sharpest trials should sometimes spring from our dearest comforts; else we should be in danger of forgetting ourselves and setting up our rest here.
– John Newton
Trials | Comfort
Sorrows, because they are lingering guests, I will entertain but moderately, knowing that the more they are made of the longer they will continue: and for pleasures, because they stay not, and do but call to drink at my door, I will use them as passengers with slight respect. He is his own best friend that makes the least of both of them.
– Joseph Hall
Trials | Respect
No physician ever weighed out medicine to his patients with half so much care and exactness as God weighs out to us every trial. Not one grain too much does He ever permit to be put in the scale.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Trials
If you’ll quit moaning and crying, I’ll use the things to make you into someone I can use in the lives of others to show them that no matter where they’ve been, no matter how deep the hole, no matter how painful the trial, there’s hope. There is victory.
– Kay Arthur
Trials | Hope | Victory
It is the great support and solace of the saints in all the distresses that befall them here, that there is a wise Spirit sitting in all the wheels of motion, and governing the most eccentric creatures and their most pernicious designs to blessed and happy issues.
– John Flavel
Trials
Sorrows and trials are not only like the sand and grit that polish a stone, but I shall be made to taste, through the trouble, what Christ is to me.
– G.V. Wigram
Trials
To remove warfare from a spiritual life is to render it unspiritual. Life in the spirit is a suffering way, filled with watching and laboring, burdened by weariness and trial, punctuated by heartbreak and conflict. It is a life utterly outpoured for the kingdom of God and lived in complete disregard for one’s personal happiness.
– Watchman Nee
PrayerTrials
We must learn to live on the heavenly side and look at things from above. To contemplate all things as God sees them, as Christ beholds them, overcomes sin, defies Satan, dissolves perplexities, lifts us above trials, separates us from the world and conquers fear of death.
– A. B. Simpson
Heaven | Trials | Overcoming
If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.
– Adoniram Judson
Trials | Suffering
We are so easily entangled in earthly affairs and so easily consumed with the desire for those things that do not last. We will not live on this earth forever, so even our trials should be viewed in the light of eternity.
– Theodore Epp
Life | Eternity | Trials
If I had not felt certain that every additional trial was ordered by infinite love and mercy, I could not have survived my accumulated sufferings.
– Adoniram Judson
Trials | Suffering
Some people go back into the past and rake up all the troubles they ever had, and then they look into the future and anticipate that they will have still more trouble, and then they go reeling and staggering all through life.
– Dwight L. Moody
Trials
A burden shared is a lighter load.
– Woodrow Kroll
Trials
So surely as the stars are fashioned by His hands, and their orbits fixed by Him, so surely are our trials allotted to us: He has ordained their season and their place, their intensity and the effect they shall have upon us.
– Charles Spurgeon
Trials
As I look back over fifty years of ministry, I recall innumerable tests, trials and times of crushing pain. But through it all, the Lord has proven faithful, loving, and totally true to all his promises.
– David Wilkerson
Trials
If you can’t pray for help, then please stop praying for hindrances.
– Victoria Thomas Pollar
Prayer | Trials
I find that when the saints are under trial and well humbled, little sins raise great cries in the conscience; but in prosperity, conscience is a pope that gives dispensations and great latitude to our hearts. The cross is therefore as needful as the crown is glorious.
– Samuel Rutherford
Trials | Conscience | Prosperity
Faith is like insurance. It needs to be wholly in place before there’s a crisis.
– Pamela Christian
Trials | Faith
The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Love | Trials
As men cherish young plants at first and fence them about with hedges to keep them from hurt, but when they are grown they remove these things and leave them to the wind and weather, so God sustains His children at first with props of inward comforts, but afterwards He exposes them to storms and winds because they are better able to bear them. Therefore let no man think himself the better because he is more free from troubles than others; it is because God sees him not fit to bear greater.
– Richard Sibbes
Trials
A measure of trials is necessary for the exercise and manifestation of your graces; to give you a more convincing proof of the truth and sweetness of the promises made to a time of affliction; to mortify the body of sin; and to wean you more effectually from the world.
– John Newton
Trials
If we desire our faith to be strengthened, we should not shrink from opportunities where our faith may be tried, and therefore, through trial, be strengthened.
– George Mueller
Faith | Strength | Trials
Good people must never expect to escape troubles; if they do, they will be disappointed, for none of their predecessors have been without them.
– Charles Spurgeon
Trials
It is of no use to say to men, “Let not your heart be troubled,” unless you finish the verse and say, “Believe in God, believe also in Christ.”
– Alexander MacLaren
Trials | Believing
God sometimes doth not mind his children when they cry, that they may hereby take occasion to remember how oft he hath cried and they have not minded him.
– Abraham Wright
Trials
Poor human nature cannot bear such strains as heavenly triumphs bring to it; there must come a reaction. Excess of joy or excitement must be paid for by subsequent depressions. While the trial lasts, the strength is equal to the emergency; but when it is over, natural weakness claims the right to show itself.
– Charles Spurgeon
Depression | Trials
In any trial, in any bitter situation, you are not alone, you are not helpless, you are not a victim. You have a tree, a cross, shown to you by the Sovereign God of Calvary. Whatever the trial or temptation, it is not more than you can bear. It is bearable. It can be handled. You can know as Joseph knew, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive” (Genesis 50:20).
– Kay Arthur
Trials | Bitterness | The Cross
Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty friction of our everyday life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit, which makes inward peace impossible.
– Henry Drummond
Trials
Let thy great joy and comfort evermore be, to have His pleasure done in thee, though in pains, sickness, persecutions, oppressions, or inward griefs and pressures of heart, coldness or barrenness of mind, darkening of thy will and senses, or any temptations spiritual or bodily.
– Robert Leighton
Trials | Holiness
God sometimes doth not mind his children when they cry, that they may hereby take occasion to remember how oft he hath cried and they have not minded him.
– Abraham Wright
Trials
We say, then, to anyone who is under trial, give Him time to steep the soul in His eternal truth. Go into the open air, look up into the depths of the sky, or out upon the wideness of the sea, or on the strength of the hills that is His also; or, if bound in the body, go forth in the spirit; spirit is not bound. Give Him time and, as surely as dawn follows night, there will break upon the heart a sense of certainty that cannot be shaken.
– Amy Carmichael
Trials | Truth
What can be lighter than a burden which takes our burdens away, and a yoke which bears up the bearer himself?
– Assorted Authors
Trials
Without faith we are not fit to desire mercy, without humility we are not fit to receive it, without affection we are not fit to value it, without sincerity we are not fit to improve it. Times of extremity contribute to the growth and exercise of these qualifications.
– Stephen Charnock
FaithTrialsGrowth
We are to bear with those we cannot amend, and to be content with offering them to God. This is true resignation. And since He has borne our infirmities, we may well bear those of each other for His sake.
– John Wesley
Trials
In trouble we are prone to forget all that we have heard and read that makes for our comfort. Now what is the reason that a man comes to think of that which otherwise he should never have called to mind? The Holy Spirit brings it to his remembrance; He is a Comforter, bringing to mind useful things at such times when we have most need of them.
– Richard Sibbes
Trials
Trouble never troubles God.
– Woodrow Kroll
Trials
God’s dawn always follows grief’s darkness.
– Woodrow Kroll
Trials
Trouble is one of God’s great servants because it reminds us how much we continually need the Lord.
– Jim Cymbala
Trials
It belongs to your calling of God as a minister, that you should have a taste of the various spiritual trials which are incident to the Lord’s people, that thereby you may know how to speak a word in season to them that are weary; and it is likewise needful to keep you perpetually attentive to that important admonition, “Without Me ye can do nothing.”
– John Newton
Trials
The bottom of the soul may be in repose, even while we are in many outward troubles; just as the bottom of the sea is calm, while the surface is strongly agitated.
– John Wesley
Trials
When we grow careless of keeping our souls, then God recovers our taste of good things again by sharp crosses.
– Richard Sibbes
Trials
Keep God’s covenant in your trials; hold you by His blessed word, and sin not; flee anger, wrath, grudging, envying, fretting; forgive a hundred pence to your fellow-servant, because your Lord hath forgiven you ten thousand talents: for, I assure you by the Lord, your adversaries shall get no advantage against you, except you sin, and offend your Lord, in your sufferings.
– Samuel Rutherford
Suffering | Sin | Trials