Overcoming Life’s Obstacles: Wisdom from 10 Trusted Christian Leaders
Wisdom from Stanley, Warren, Evans, Keller, Meyer, Piper, Graham, Caine, Stanley, and Jakes on What to Do When Life Gets Hard
Life isn’t always smooth sailing. You can be going along just fine when suddenly a crisis hits — a diagnosis, a broken relationship, a financial collapse, or the quiet storm of the soul that leaves you feeling dry and defeated without being able to say exactly why.
Trouble comes to all of us, even to faithful, church-going Christians. The difference isn’t whether hard times arrive. It’s what we do when they do. Below are insights from ten trusted Christian ministers — men and women who have taught, lived, and preached what it means to keep walking when the road goes hard.
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33
Ten Voices on Trouble, Trial, and the God Who Holds Us Through Both
Voice One
Charles Stanley — Obey and Leave the Consequences to God
1932–2023 · In Touch Ministries · First Baptist Atlanta
Stanley’s teaching on adversity was consistently grounded in the sovereignty of God. When we’re facing hard times, he said, we don’t need all the answers. We don’t need the full picture. What we need is faithful obedience — to keep doing what God has said, and to trust that He is working in the parts we cannot see.
This is a harder instruction than it sounds. Obedience in uncertainty requires trusting a character, not a plan. It means releasing the outcome to a God who sees more than we do and cares more than we realize.
Voice Two
Rick Warren — God Doesn’t Waste a Hurt
b. 1954 · Saddleback Church · The Purpose Driven Life
Warren has preached widely on how God uses pain for both His glory and our growth. His message took on particular weight after the loss of his son Matthew to mental illness — a suffering so personal that it could have silenced him or made his teaching ring hollow. Instead, it gave his words about pain a weight they would not otherwise have carried.
For Warren, pain is not pointless. It is shaped by divine purpose — especially when we allow our trials to become the basis for helping others through theirs. The comfort we receive becomes the specific resource we are equipped to extend. God does not waste a hurt. He repurposes it.
Voice Three
Tony Evans — Trials Are Tools, Not Traps
b. 1949 · The Urban Alternative · Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship
Evans’s reframe is practical and direct: stop looking at adversity as a roadblock and start looking at it as equipment. Trials, in his framework, are not obstacles to the life God intends — they are often the means by which He produces it. They develop character, build endurance, and prepare us for things we would not be ready for without them.
The goal is not to escape the difficulty but to extract from it what God put there. The trial is not the trap. The trap is thinking we can become what God intends without going through what the process requires.
Voice Four
Tim Keller — Suffering Is at the Heart of the Christian Story
1950–2023 · Redeemer Presbyterian · Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering
Keller’s treatment of suffering goes deeper than most. His central insight: Christianity is unique among worldviews in that it does not try to explain suffering away, minimize it, or use it as evidence against God. It points to the cross — where God Himself entered human suffering — and says: He knows. He was here. He went further into it than we have.
Trials, in Keller’s framework, purify faith in the specific way fire purifies metal — by burning off what is not real, and leaving what cannot be destroyed. The suffering tests whether we treasure God above everything else, or whether what we called faith was actually just comfort dressed in religious language.
Voice Five
Joyce Meyer — The Battle Is Won or Lost in the Mind
b. 1943 · Joyce Meyer Ministries · Battlefield of the Mind
Meyer’s contribution to this conversation is psychological and practical. Most battles, she teaches, are won or lost before any outward action is taken — in the interior conversation we have with ourselves about what is happening, what God is doing, and what is possible. Renewing the mind in the Word is not a metaphor for her. It is a daily discipline with concrete steps: read Scripture, speak it aloud, declare God’s promises over your situation, and refuse to let your thoughts run unchecked in directions that contradict what God has said.
The mind is a battlefield — and abandoning it to anxiety, bitterness, and fear is not humility. It is surrender to something you were given authority over.
Voice Six
John Piper — Don’t Waste Your Suffering
b. 1946 · Desiring God · The Misery of Job and the Mercy of God
For Piper, suffering is not merely something to endure — it is something that, rightly received and rightly used, can demonstrate something to the watching world. When a Christian faces loss, chronic pain, or grief without losing joy in Christ, it says something nothing else can say: Jesus is more valuable than comfort, more satisfying than health, more real than the circumstances that threaten to define us.
That is the testimony trials make possible. Suffering rightly borne becomes witness. The person who weathers devastation while remaining anchored in Christ is showing, not telling, that God is sufficient. Piper’s phrase is both a warning and an invitation: don’t let what cost you so much accomplish nothing.
Voice Seven
Billy Graham — The Valley Is Where We Grow
1918–2018 · Evangelist · Hope for the Troubled Heart
Graham’s pastoral wisdom on suffering was shaped by decades of walking alongside people in crisis — in hospitals, in prisons, in the aftermath of national tragedies. His consistent message: God is not only present on the mountaintops, in the times of clarity and joy and easy faith. He is present in the valleys — perhaps more actively present there than anywhere else, because that is where His people most need Him and most reach for Him.
Even when you cannot feel Him — especially then — He is there. Guiding, comforting, carrying forward. The feeling of abandonment is real. The abandonment is not.
Voice Eight
Christine Caine — Pressed, But Not Crushed
b. 1966 · A21 Campaign · Unexpected
Caine speaks about suffering with unusual authority — she is a survivor of childhood abuse and has fought cancer — and her message is not theoretical. The distinction she returns to repeatedly is between being pressed and being crushed. These are not the same thing, even when they feel identical in the moment. The Scripture she anchors this in is Paul’s description of his own experience of ministry: hard pressed, but not crushed; struck down, but not destroyed.
If you belong to Christ, there is a limit to what trouble can do to you. It can press. It cannot crush. The difference is not your resilience — it is the One who holds you while you are being pressed.
Voice Nine
Andy Stanley — Obedience in the Dark Matters
b. 1958 · North Point Ministries
Stanley speaks to a specific experience that many believers know but few discuss honestly: the season when God seems silent. You have prayed. You have been faithful. You cannot see the next step and the clarity you need has not come. What do you do?
His answer is both simple and demanding: keep doing the next right thing. God does not always give us the full map. He gives us a lantern for the next step. Obedience in uncertainty — keeping going when you cannot see why — is not less valuable to God than obedience in the clear light. It may be more so. The question is not whether the path makes sense to you. The question is whether you trust the One who can see it end to end.
Voice Ten
T.D. Jakes — Crushing Is Preparation
b. 1957 · The Potter’s House · Crushing
Jakes’s contribution is the most visceral: the crushing seasons are not accidental, and they are not punitive. They are productive. Just as grapes must be pressed to become wine, and olives must be crushed to yield oil, there are things in the human character that can only be produced under pressure. The anointing, the depth of compassion, the authority in prayer — these do not come from easy seasons.
The invitation is not to pretend the crushing is comfortable or to perform gratitude for pain. It is to trust that the One pressing you knows what He is after, and that what He is producing in you is worth what the process costs.
No matter where you are today — staring down a diagnosis, sitting beside a broken relationship, trying to make sense of a season that has taken more from you than you had budgeted for — God is not done with you.
Ten trusted voices, with different emphases and different decades of pastoral experience, point us back to the same essential truth: trouble is real. But so is God. And He is not finished.
The key isn’t to avoid hardship. It’s to meet it with faith, holding fast to the One who holds us fast — the One who entered our trouble Himself, and overcame it from the inside.
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33
Key Scriptures: John 16:33 · Romans 8:28 · 2 Corinthians 1:3–4; 4:8–9, 17 · James 1:2–4 · 1 Peter 1:6–7 · Romans 12:2 · Isaiah 41:10 · Proverbs 3:5–6 · John 15:2 · Psalm 23:4
Want to Go Deeper?
These companion posts in MVM’s series address the theological foundations behind what these ten leaders are saying:
- If God Is Good, Why Is There Evil and Suffering? — the theological framework that grounds every pastoral response on this list — why suffering exists and where God is in it
- How to Live a Life That Pleases God — eight practices that sustain faith through the kinds of hard seasons all ten leaders here are describing
- How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell? — the companion post on divine justice, which is the same question of God’s character that adversity raises from a different angle
- Elder Don’s Testimony — what these ten principles look like in the specific story of a veteran who walked through decades of fog and found the God who had been there the whole time
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“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” — 1 Peter 5:7
