What does the Bible say about misery?

• Deuteronomy 28:67, dread in your heart
• Judges2:15, the Lord sent misfortune
• Job 2:7-8, Job sat among the ashes
• Job 15:20, the wicked writhe in pain all their days
• Psalm 12:5, the Lord will rise up and give safety for those who need it
• Lamentations 1:20, O Lord see how distressed I am
• Mark 5:2-5, Jesus met a man with an unclean spirit
• Luke 4:18-19, Jesus was sent to proclaim release to the captives and recover of sight to the blind
• Luke 6:20-21, the Beatitudes
• Romans 2:9, "There will be anguish and distress for everyone who does evil,"
• 2 Corinthian 11:25-26, Paul sustained difficult journeys
• 1 Timothy 6:10, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil"

Sermon ideas about misery

Superficial distress (owing to food stains, lost car keys, bad hair days) doesn't qualify as misery. The distress has to be significant.

Examples

People feel walled in by loneliness. Whether homesick or obsessively nostalgic or exiled or romantically forlorn or alienated even from themselves, lonely people ache because they are separated. People also suffer boredom. People suffer from fear. They fear cancer, job loss, the death of love. They fear war and God and the IRS. Some must deal with anxiety, an enduring and free-floating fear. Some are overcome by a sense of futility. Their lives haven't turned out as they had hoped. They haven't married well, their work seems inconsequential, their children are a disappointment to them. Their faith, if they have faith, doesn't comfort them. Humans and animals are finite beings, as transient as the flowers of nature and just as vulnerable to its forces. Every season in every land, nature itself takes a terrible harvest of living creatures by way of fire, wind, water, or sudden burial under snow or earth. Birth disorders, disease, and accidents take more lives. Even strangers to these events, if they are compassionate, are sobered by them, or dismayed.

Some misery is owing to other people's sin. Violence in the Middle East (terror strikes, wanton destruction of homes and orchards, forced confinement) causes fear, anxiety, poverty, despair. Racism and other bigotries have similar effects. All the injustices detailed and condemned in Scripture — and especially against what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls "the quartet of the vulnerable" — widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor — are so detailed and condemned because they cause misery within vulnerable people's lives. (Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs, Princeton University, 2008, pp. 75-82) Injustice causes isolation, indignation, despair, and poverty itself, with all its want, discomfort, and indignity.

Less dramatically, but just as systemically, abuse within a family causes suffering of its victims, who are then exceedingly likely to abuse or spoil their children so that sin causes misery which occasions more sin and more misery — all of it ricocheting down the generations with seemingly awesome inevitability.

But I may also cause my own misery. If my word is no good, people will not trust or befriend me. I have caused my own alienation. If I am thoroughly ungrateful, I am also likely to be thoroughly bored. If I steal and get caught, I am likely to face some combination of guilty feelings, anxiety, and captivity.

In Scripture, the connection between sin and misery is as old as Adam and Eve's disobedience and subsequent shame. The big pictures of shalom, especially in Isaiah, and Jesus' promised salvation in the gospels feature salvation from sin, but often — and sometimes especially — from misery as well.

In its Answer 2, the Heidelberg Catechism famously states that to be saved, the first thing I have to know is "how great my sins and miseries are." Diagnosis before cure.