You have been discouraged for a while and it seems like nothing is going to get better for you. In fact, there are probably countless things you could name from this past week alone that gives you a reason to be discouraged as a Christian. I want to encourage you to not look at your present circumstances, but look to Christ.
You may be falling behind on your bills. The children may be unbearable as of late. Work may be getting stressful. There may be certain sins that are still holding on to you. You may be going through a very rough patch in marriage. Cancer may have come back. The car just broke down. A loved one just died. God seems distant. It seems like things are not going to get better and you feel like giving up.
I can relate to some of these experiences and have been going through challenges of my own, that if I dwell on them too long they can overwhelm me, prevent me from seeing any slither of hope, and distract me from Jesus. I want to remind you like I often have to remind myself; our present circumstances don't define us, Christ does. If we are looking for some form of hope around us, it is never going to happen, it has to come from above. Christ doesn't want us to look at our circumstances for hope, he wants us to look to Him and his Father. The good news is the Holy Spirit will empower us, even in our weakest and darkest moments to help us to look up. Jesus himself, modelled this to us, that in his darkest hour, he looked to his Heavenly Father for his hope, even though the cross awaited him.
I don't want to see you lost or defeated in the current circumstances that you are facing, even though it very well may feel like you are defeated and there is no way things are going to get better. I have definitely had those moments in the last two years. However, I want to share with you a couple of truths that will help you push through your discouragement and help you keep looking to Jesus. These truths don't mean that the circumstances will go away or that the feelings of discouragement and despair will evaporate, but these truths are meant to help us combat our discouragement and to anchor us in Christ and find our hope in him.
The first thing I want to share with you is that you don't need to feel ashamed for your discouragement, but openly share your discouragement with God. There are some Christians who would tell you that you shouldn't feel that way which only adds to our discouragement. We sometimes can't help how we are feeling, but that doesn't mean we need to allow those feeling to define us and control us. I am thankful that the Bible is filled with countless men and women in the who were discouraged. A lot of those men and women took their discouragements to God, instead of hanging on to them or taking matters into their own hands.
I believe I have mentioned this before in my other posts, but the book of Psalms is a prime place in the Bible where we see discouraged and weary believers unload their discouragements and their hopelessness to God. In many cases, their discouragement had a lot to do with how they felt God wasn't answering them or helping them in their circumstances. They felt confident enough in their relationship with God and they had a big enough view of God that they believe they could tell him how they were feeling. If you read the Psalms carefully there are some harsh accusations against God. In Psalms 13, the Psalmist accuses God of forgetting him and hiding his face from him. Psalm 22 opens up with the question "My God My God, why have you forsaken me?" In Psalm 73, the Psalmist is questioning why does it seem like God allows the wicked to prosper.
If you are discouraged, I encouraged you to read the Psalms and see how the Psalmist unloaded his discouragement to God. May it encourage you to share your burdens with the LORD and be brutally honest with how you are feeling. God won't punish you for doing this, but he will remind you of His truth and who he is, and he will open your eyes to the reality of what is actually going on around you.
One of the things I love about the Psalms is that many of the Psalms open up with cries, pleas and discouraging circumstances, but end with hope. It seems like the Psalmist is reminding himself about who God is in the midst of his prayer. Once he was able to share his discouragement with God and how he was feeling, he was able to have hope and see the truth about God. It is amazing how our circumstances can blind us from reality and cause us to forget the truth about God. Psalm 13 began with the Psalmist accusing God of hiding from him, but at the end of the Psalm, he praises God and puts his trust in him.
Secondly, God is a present help in times of trouble, despite what we believe. Over and over again in the scriptures, God reminds his people that he is their present hope and that he will never forsake them. The Psalmist proclaims God is our present help in times of trouble (Psalms 46:1-2), even though he often questions God's presence. Why do we need to be reminded over and over and over and over and over again that God is present with his people in the midst of difficult times? WE FORGET.
Despite how many times God has proven his faithfulness to us and how he was present in the past, we allow the current circumstances to convince us that God has abandoned us. "If God truly was for me, if God was present, surely he wouldn't allow _______ to happen. He wouldn't allow my boss to fire me. He wouldn't allow my spouse to cheat on me. He wouldn't allow me to have cancer." We see the same thing in the book of Exodus, God rescued Israel from Egypt and gave them a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night to show them that he was with them, and even then they still doubted that he was present and that he was good.
As God's children, we tend to think that in order for him to be present he has to remove us from the wilderness experience and protect us from any difficulties. We see this with Israel in the book of Exodus, and sadly we see it with the Church today in North America. God doesn't need to remove the circumstances to show that he is present, he often uses our circumstances to prove that he is present amongst his people. In the Old Testament he provided them signs and wonders to show them he was present with them in the midst of their circumstances, but in the New Testament he sent his Son to purchase salvation for his people and gave us his Spirit to apply salvation and seal us with his presence. The proof of God's presence in a believer's life is not health, wealth, and a comfortable life, but the living Spirit of God who indwells us when we come to faith in Christ. As the Holy Spirit works in us, he produces in us the fruit of the Spirit, a deeper awareness of God's presence, and a contentment that is rooted in God regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Dear Christian, could God being using the most discouraging and hopeless circumstance in your life to show you his presence? Could it be that through these circumstances he desires to do good to you, not harm you? Could it be that he wants you to find contentment and rest in him, not in the outcome of the circumstances?
Lastly, I encourage you to look at what you can't see, instead of what you can see. It is very easy to look at our finances and say there is no way things will get better. It is very easy to look at the rebellion of our children and think there is no way they will come back to God. It is very easy to look at the cancer diagnosis and say that this is the end. However, scripture encourages us to look at what we can't see. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 says "Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day. For our light and temporary affliction is producing for us an eternal glory that far outweighs our troubles. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
This is a beautiful portion of scripture that doesn't get used that often in our churches. God has a purpose to the current troubles in your life right now, no matter how big or small they are not pointless, he is doing something with them. He is producing in us an eternal glory that we will receive when we get to Heaven, ultimately that glory leads us to Christ. This glory he is building in us will never be taken away from us, but it reaches its completion when we get to Jesus. He is building in you holiness, hope, perseverance, faith, a future, a confidence, an everlasting joy that wouldn't be in you unless those troubles happened. This eternal glory serves to help you run the race of faith in this life so you can make it to the finish line and receive your prize which is Jesus.
Oh dear Christian, do not lose heart. I cannot begin to imagine the pain, confusion, disappointment you are going through right now, but we have a Savior who is our present help in times of trouble and he invites us to look to him and come to him so we can lay our discouragement and burdens down at his feet so he can walk us through it. He is at work in your hardships to build in you a glory that will bring you home to him.
Blessings sibling in Christ,
Josh Dorey
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