Prayers for suffering and endurance

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Bible verses about suffering and endurance

What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, and from the words of my groaning?

Psalm 22:1–5

This is a song with a tune name attached and a place in the hymn book. The complaint was not smuggled in at the back. It was set to music and sung in public worship. Jesus says its first line from the cross. So when someone tells you that asking God why is a lapse of faith, the question is already in the prayers they are quoting from.

He took for himself a potsherd to scrape himself with, and he sat amongst the ashes.

Job 2:7–10

Before Job says a single thing worth putting on a card, he is sitting in ash scraping his sores with a piece of broken pot. His wife tells him to renounce God and die, and the book records it without piling on. The line people lift from here is his answer to her, that if we take good from God's hand we should take the bad as well, together with the note that he had not sinned in anything he said. That is chapter two, and it is not the whole book. From the next chapter on he curses the day he was born and demands an answer, and at the end it is Job, not his explaining friends, who is said to have spoken rightly. Their accounts of what he must have done to deserve it are not allowed to stand.

But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives. In the end, he will stand upon the earth.

Job 19:23–27

This gets read at funerals as though it were the calm end of the story. It is not. Job is mid-argument, still unanswered, still covered in sores, and the same speech closes with his heart consumed within him. Hope here is not the absence of anguish. It is one line held on to while everything else is still wrong.

Deep calls to deep at the noise of your waterfalls. All your waves and your billows have swept over me.

Psalm 42:5–11

The psalm asks its own soul why it is in despair, works its way round to an answer, and then asks the identical question again at the end. That repetition is the honest shape of a long illness. You talk yourself round in the morning, and by the evening you are back where you started, saying the same thing over.

we also rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces perseverance

Romans 5:1–5

This is the sentence most often handed to people in hospital corridors, and it is doing something other than what they think. Paul is writing to a church already under pressure, describing what he has watched God do inside it. He is not saying your pain was issued in order to improve you, and he is not instructing you to feel glad about it this afternoon.

the Spirit also helps our weaknesses, for we don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which can’t be uttered.

Romans 8:18–30

Two verses later comes the line about all things working together for good, which gets quoted at people as though it meant their suffering was secretly a good thing. Read what surrounds it. Creation is groaning. Believers are groaning. Nobody in the passage knows how to pray properly. The comfort offered is that your inarticulate groan is already being carried, not that the thing hurting you is fine.

We are pressed on every side, yet not crushed; perplexed, yet not to despair

2 Corinthians 4:7–18

Notice what Paul does not claim. He says he is not crushed, not in despair, not forsaken, not destroyed. He never says he is not pressed. Later in the same passage he calls it a light affliction, and that only makes sense because he is weighing it against eternity rather than against your Tuesday. Nobody else gets to call your affliction light on your behalf.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more.

Revelation 21:1–5

Written for churches under real pressure, not as a distraction from it. Notice what it does not say. It does not say the tears were unimportant, or that the pain was arranged on purpose. It says there are tears there to be wiped and that someone will do the wiping. It is a promise about the end. It is not a timetable for this year.

Quoted from the World English Bible, British Edition, which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text.

Questions people ask

Is my suffering a punishment for something I did?

No. We cannot see your life, but the idea that pain is issued in proportion to sin is exactly the argument Job's friends make, and the book spends most of its length taking it apart. If you are carrying guilt about something specific, that is worth taking to God, or to a priest, minister or counsellor, and dealing with on its own terms. It is a separate matter from why your body hurts.

Is it wrong to be angry at God?

No, and Scripture does not seem to think so either. Psalm 22 opens by asking God why he has abandoned the person praying. Job says harder things than that. The pattern all through the Psalms is that anger gets spoken to God rather than muttered about him from a safe distance. If the alternative is silence and quietly drifting off, say the angry thing.

What do I pray when I have no words left?

Say a name. God's, or your own, or the name of the person you are worried about. Romans 8 says plainly that we do not know how to pray as we ought, and that the Spirit carries the groaning we cannot get into sentences. That is not a lower grade of prayer. On the bad days it may be the most honest one available to anybody. Breathing counts.

Why hasn't God healed me yet?

We do not know, and we are not going to invent a reason. Nobody honest can tell you why one person's pain lifts and another's does not, and anyone who says they can is guessing. Scripture does sometimes hold prayer and the heart it is prayed with together, and Christians differ over how much weight that carries. What none of it gives anybody, including you, is a way to read your unanswered prayer as a verdict on your faith. Keep the medical care. Keep asking. The asking is not a test you are failing.

What if I want it to stop so badly that I want to be dead?

Please tell someone today. Your doctor, someone in the house, or one of the lines at the top of this page, which are answered at any hour. If saying it out loud is too much, write it down and hand it to them. Wanting the pain to end is not a sin and it is not weak faith. Pray as well, by all means, but do not let praying be the only thing you do tonight.

Prayers for suffering that will not end

When it has lasted for years

A prayer for another ordinary bad day

When you cannot pray properly

For the strength to keep taking the tablets

For a body that will not mend

In the middle of the night

A prayer at three in the morning

Words for when the fear rises

When tomorrow already looks too long

When you are angry about it

A prayer that is mostly complaint

When other people's good news hurts

For anger you cannot say aloud

When people say the wrong thing

After someone explained your suffering

For the people who still turn up

When church is hard to be in

For someone you are watching suffer

For someone you cannot make better

A prayer that is only a name

For the carer who is running out

Bible verses about suffering and endurance

Where these verses get misused

Questions people ask