June 29, 2026

Today the church is reckoning with what suffering actually means — and whether Christians have been telling the truth about it. The Gospel Coalition runs a piece this week pushing back on a quietly toxic assumption: that suffering is usually deserved, that pain is God settling a score. It isn't. And the church has done real damage by implying otherwise. Tim Challies comes at the same wound from the opposite direction — not with theology but with a scene. A mother attends the execution of her innocent son. He frames it as a meditation on Mary at the cross, and the weight of it lands differently than an argument would. That question about whether God shows up in innocent suffering hasn't gone away since late March, when several writers were asking whether the church actually believes what it says about the image of God in the middle of pain. It believes it on paper. The harder test is whether it holds when the suffering is specific and the person in front of you is real.

Congo pastors are taking that test right now. Christianity Today reports on clergy comforting Ebola victims while also fighting the misinformation killing their congregants — not metaphorically, literally. Pastoral presence under that kind of pressure is its own theological statement. Meanwhile, Lifeway Research finds that most Americans believe in hell but misunderstand it badly — which matters because a distorted hell produces a distorted gospel, one where God is either a cosmic accountant or barely sovereign at all. Wyatt Graham argues this week that the Sermon on the Mount isn't a moral checklist Jesus offers as an ideal — it's an archway, a demand that exposes exactly how much we need the new heart the Aquila Report says Jesus actually gives. The pieces fit together more than the sources probably intended: suffering isn't punishment, the cross wasn't deserved, and the only way through is a grace that doesn't ration itself by how well we've held up.