Marilyn M​ars Ministries of Restoration​

Aspiring to reconcile to God by helping to restore a sense of divine identity, purpose, potential, and destiny; unearthing potential in every individual.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

................Helen Keller

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths.

................Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

................. Charles Dickens,

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

.................. John Keats 

Simple Definition of suffering

1. the state of a person or thing that suffers.

2. Often, sufferings. something suffered by a person or a group of people; pain:

3. Suffering can be physical, mental, emotional, misery, pain

Either you have, you are, or you will — “through many tribulations we must all enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

But in coming to the Kingdom of God, our suffering can be counted as joy because it brings us to a better realization of ourselves and of God.

For the person who is aspiring to have a greater relationship with God,

Suffering is multifaceted, it have many faces

There are many ways that suffering comes into our life, mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually, but in all this

" We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken;

struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8–9).

Suffering helps to equip us for ministry.

When we experience the pain ourselves, this experience in suffering becomes important to our ministry. In a beautiful explanation of Paul in 2 Corinthians 1:4 it shows that God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be better able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the same comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

When you’ve passed through your own fiery trials, and found God to be true to what he had promised, you have real help to offer others. You now have firsthand experience of both his sustaining grace and his purposeful design. He has kept you through the pain; he has reshaped you more into his image and likeness. . . . What you are experiencing from God, you can give away in increasing measure to others. You are learning both the tenderness and the clarity necessary to help pacify and sanctify another person’s deepest distress.

Suffering brings us into a battlefield

Oftentimes when we are suffering we may be up against principalities and powers, where we have to be strategist in our fight. This is a good opportunity for the testing of our faith in God and his power to deliver us. Many times in these situations persons may be tempted to give up and others may also forget completely that the battle is not theirs, but it is the Lord's, he will teach us how to fight. This is also an opportunity for us to know or strengths and weakness; a soldier can never know his strength unless he has a battle to fight. (Job 2:9–10)

Suffering prepares us for more of God's glory.

The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:17–18 , “This light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight

of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”

Who likes suffering, we naturally try to avoid suffering at all costs, yes we do. But God brings suffering in our lives for

the sake of our eternal joy — yes, even glory.

Some Scriptural verses on suffering:

Romans 5:3

James 1:12

2 Corinthians 4:8-9