My life goal is to see the world's one billion people with disabilities embraced and encouraged by the church.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him.
Interpretation
What this quote means
True knowledge of God involves shared suffering, not just intellectual understanding.
This quote emphasizes that genuine knowledge of God goes beyond theoretical comprehension found in religious texts; it invites individuals into a deep relationship where they experience suffering alongside God. This suffering is not meant to be faced in isolation, but rather in companionship with the divine, suggesting that understanding God deeply often entails encountering life's challenges together with Him.
Themes
KnowledgeSufferingGodTheologyRelationship
In practice
Example use cases
During a sermon about faith, this quote can be used to illustrate the depth of divine relationship.
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
We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.
Donald HallRead
I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, crumbling plaster revealing the coarse masonry beneath it, windows boarded up or clad with corrugated iron, precisely reflected my own state of mind.
W. G. SebaldRead
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.
Jorge Luis BorgesRead
Other people's lives come at us without a backstory most of the time. The present is like that.
Tom StoppardRead
But how awful would that be? How terrible to live surrounded by the stark, sharp, hollowness of things that simply were enough?
Patrick RothfussRead
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan's architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.
Rem KoolhaasRead