What the Bible teaches about pain, trials, persecution, and finding hope in Christ through hardship.
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11102 The relationship between secular counselling and Christian faith has been contested territory for decades. Some believers regard therapy as a purely secular enterprise that has no place in the life of someone who has the Bible and the Holy Spirit. Others have embraced therapeutic culture so uncritically that it has reshaped their understanding…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11100 Mental illness is one of the areas where the church has often failed its own people. Whether through ignorance, fear, or a misguided belief that all psychological suffering is fundamentally spiritual in origin, many believers have been left without the help they need. A biblical view of mental illness must take seriously both…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11099 In much of the Western church, persecution is something that happens to other people, to Christians in restricted nations, to believers in hostile cultures, to the early church. The assumption is that the normal Christian life, at least in a free society, should be relatively comfortable. Scripture does not share this assumption. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11098 Few questions cut closer to the heart of lived Christian experience than this one. If God loves His children, if Christ has secured their eternal future, and if the Holy Spirit indwells every believer, then why does the Christian life so often involve pain, loss, disappointment, and grief? The question is not new….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06016 The book of Job is the Bible’s most sustained engagement with the problem of innocent suffering, and it remains one of the most honest, unsettling, and ultimately profound books in all of Scripture. Job’s story demolishes simplistic explanations of suffering while pointing toward something far deeper than any of his friends were able…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06011 This question sits at the intersection of theology and lived experience, and how it is answered shapes everything about a person’s relationship with God. If God directly causes every instance of suffering, then He becomes morally responsible for evil. If He has no involvement at all, then He is either powerless or indifferent….
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 11101 This question generates more anxiety in Christian circles than it should. Some believers feel guilty for taking medication, as though reliance on a prescription is a failure of faith. Others have been told, sometimes by well-meaning pastors and sometimes by manipulative ones, that true Christians should trust God for healing and that taking…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60112 When someone we love suffers, the instinct to help is immediate and strong — but so is the sense of helplessness. What do you say to the person whose child has died, whose diagnosis is terminal, whose marriage has collapsed, whose life has been shattered by tragedy? The temptation is either to say…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60111 Chronic illness presents one of the most sustained tests of faith a believer can face. Unlike an acute crisis that resolves one way or another, chronic conditions persist — day after day, month after month, sometimes for decades. The sufferer is not facing a moment of trial but a way of life, and…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60110 Few questions in pastoral ministry provoke more anguish than this one. A believer prays earnestly for healing, trusts God sincerely, and yet the healing does not come. The result is often confusion, guilt, or a quiet crisis of faith. The question deserves a careful, honest, and compassionate answer, because the stakes are not…