Heavy, Deep & Real ministries

Way back in April of 2013 I wrote a blog called When You Lose Your Trust in God. I honestly was surprised by the response to it. Usually just a handful of people are seeing my blogs, but this one got people’s attention! I’m still getting comments from it 13 years later!

Unfortunately, most the comments are how people are mad at God because He hasn’t shown up for them in the way they need and it really breaks my heart. I’m writing today because yet another person commented just a couple days ago about how he feels God has hurt him.

I think I want to start by saying life can suck – even for God-fearing Christians! Jesus told us plainly that we would have trouble in this world (John 16:33). Scripture tells us that the rain will fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike meaning we’re all going to have those storms in our lives (Matthew 5:45). I shared with a friend recently that scripture tells us that how a man thinks is who he is (Proverbs 23:7) and his response was something to the effect of, “That’s great but there is this thing called REALITY!”

He’s right, of course. We can think or manifest our way out of a sucky situation. But I do think how we respond to the sucky situation matters.

Maybe it’s my age and I keep seeing people dying who are within a decade of me but I can’t help but think about how my meeting with Jesus will go when I die! He’s not going to ask me about how people treated me, the hardships I had due to certain situations, or even the testings and temptations I endured along the way. He’s going to ask me how I responded to these things. Was I like Him in these situations or did I respond in my own way. I think I’m in trouble!! That meeting going over the first 40 years of my life is going to be ROUGH!

But something happened at 40 years old; I surrendered my life to Jesus and transformed my thinking (Romans 12).

When I first went back to church, I met a pastor who gave me a book called Balcony People which was about two types of people, Balcony people who lifted you up and basement people who grabbed you by your ankles and pulled you down with them. I got what that pastor was saying pretty quickly: I was a basement person and needed to transform into a balcony person.

Unfortunately, it was true. I had stinking thinking. Everything was bad, people sucked and couldn’t be trusted, no matter what I did I was going to suffer, and misery loves company so let’s see if I can share it with those around me!

I’m grateful to my friend for giving me that book and also giving me a not-so-subtle kick in the you-know-what to correct my thinking.

For me, life is still difficult at times – especially due to my PTSD issues – but I think about those times completely differently now which is my point.

How a person thinks truly does change a person’s perspective.

The two big arguments I get from people based on the first blog I wrote is:

1. God is sovereign and nothing happens without His permission, so He is responsible for the tragedies and hardships in my life because He allowed them when He could have stopped them.
2. God never responds to my prayers and ignores me which means He is not a loving God and for some they feel God hates them.

I’ll admit that the first argument is a tough one to address because it is true; God is sovereign and nothing happens without His permission.

It reminds me of the book of Job which I preached on just last night. Here’s a guy who righteous and shunned evil, according to God. Then God throws Job to Satan where He allows Satan to destroy Job’s family, wealth, and his health. His friends turn on him and even Job’s wife turns on him!

Why?

Why would God just play this game with Satan to see how Job would respond?

My interpretation of it is more from the spiritual side of things.

You see, there is a spiritual war going on that we usually don’t actually see. Satan is in front of God accusing us like he did Job. God chose Job on purpose. The war was over whether Job would remain faithful when under extreme material, emotional, and physical duress. I put it this way: God chose Job as His champion to take on Satan in a spiritual battle and all Job had to do to win was remain faithful…which he does and restored by God in the end.

Kind of reminds you of Jesus – Jesus remained faithful to the Cross as Satan did his best to destroy Him.

But I digress.

This reading of Job helps me better understand what is going on with me when I suffer. Yes, God is allowing it but there is reason and purpose for allowing it even if that reason is spiritual and I don’t and won’t understand it in this life. I have to trust that God is the God of the Bible – good, loving, merciful, grace-filled, forgiving – and respond to my hardships the way Jesus responded to His.

But this takes renewing your mind through complete transformation about how you think. Again, Romans 12. God may choose you as His champion to go toe-to-toe with Satan and spiritual warfare. Your only job is to remain faithful, but you won’t come out of it unscathed. There is a cost to following Jesus and sometimes that cost is fighting in the spiritual war.

The second one regarding prayer also is a hard one because no hearing from God is crushing. Scripture acknowledges this: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Proverbs 13:12) God knows that we suffer greatly when we feel as if our prayers haven’t been answered. I had a prayer that took 14 years before it was answered! Many of you have waited longer but 14 years seemed like an awfully long time for a prayer to be answered!!

But when I think about it through my spiritual eyes, I actually didn’t wait 14 years. God told me right away that His answer was “Not Yet.” It took 14 years for God to say, “Yes” to that prayer.

You see, God answers every prayer but sometimes that answer is “No” or “Not Yet.” This is especially burdensome when we want and need the answer to be “Yes!”

In my pastoral counseling duties, I ask the counselee to make a prayer list of previous prayers they have sent to God – prayers from years ago. Then I ask them to reflect on how those prayers turned out. Sometimes God was silent which means we wait as patiently as possible. But sometimes the answer was no or not yet and it was taken as silence from God because the person didn’t hear the yes they wanted.

God has left me hanging in my prayer life a lot. But that doesn’t mean that those prayers were ignored. It means either that I am not ready to hear the answer yet or a circumstance that involves the prayer is not ready for me in the mix yet. There’s an old saying that when the door is closed, pray in the hallway. We have to continue to pray even if we feel we’re not getting answers because in truth we are getting answers but possibly not the ones we want to hear!

I think this will be my last thought unless I get to the end of it and more comes!

We have to be careful of judging God based on how we feel about a situation. Scripture tells us that our hearts are deceitful and desperately sick (Jeremiah 17:9) which means that our feelings lie to us. You may be mad at God but chances are REALLY good that Satan is enticing you to be mad at God to disrupt your relationship with Him by clouding your feelings with hurt, disappointment, frustration, and anger.

How we think about things is important. The only thing we can control most the time is how we respond – including how we respond to God.

I was mad at God for a very long time. He allowed my mother to have MS and be bedridden for the first 20 years in my life where she wasted away in a nursing home. It made no sense to me why God allowed her to be afflicted. He could cure her with a divine touch any time He chose. He didn’t. She died when I was 20 years old.

It took a lot of years before I realized what God was doing. That’s a story for another time but let me just say there was purpose to hers and my pain. God had a plan and it has worked out to a T but that plan included a lot of suffering before things were in order.

So my friends, it is true that you can be transformed by the renewing of your mind to have the mind of Christ so that how you think is based on how Jesus saw the world instead of how we see the world. I know some of you don’t believe me or are so far gone that you’ve given up on God. But I would encourage you to give it another try. Pray this prayer:

Father –

I’m disappointed, frustrated, and angry. I don’t hear from you when I need to. Help me to hear you, see you, experience you even if the answer is no or not yet. Holy Spirit, transform my mind so that I see my world the way Jesus does. Lord, give me a break in my discouragement and shine your light through so that I can tangibly see it through the darkness which surrounds me. I pray this in Jesus’s name, Amen.