My life goal is to see the world's one billion people with disabilities embraced and encouraged by the church.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True understanding of Jesus comes from experiencing personal suffering, not just superficial knowledge.
Joni Eareckson Tada emphasizes that while it is easy to learn about and mimic Jesus when life is easy, it is through the experiences of pain and suffering that individuals truly come to know and understand His teachings on a deeper level. Suffering transforms the relationship and reveals the essence of faith in ways that mere knowledge cannot.
Themes
SufferingJesusFaithUnderstandingSpirituality
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared in a sermon to help the congregation reflect on their own spiritual journeys.
More from Joni Eareckson Tada
All quotes →Heartache forces us to embrace God out of desparate, urgent need. God is never closer than when your heart is aching.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
...we will stand amazed to see the topside of the tapestry and how God beautifully embroidered each circumstance into a pattern for our good and His glory.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
My wheelchair was the key to seeing all this happen—especially since God’s power always shows up best in weakness. So here I sit … glad that I have not been healed on the outside, but glad that I have been healed on the inside. Healed from my own self-centered wants and wishes.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
If you truly believe in the value of life, you care about all of the weakest and most vulnerable members of society.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
God deliberately chooses weak, suffering and unlikely candidates to get His work done, so that in the end, the glory goes to God and not to the person.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
Similar quotes
Man lives in only one small room of the enormous house of his consciousness.
William JamesRead
To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.
Fernando PessoaRead
Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.
Mark StrandRead
It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.
Nelson MandelaRead
it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame some one else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.
Leo TolstoyRead
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Sue Monk KiddRead