Thursday, September 6, 2012

When life knocks you down …

“Faith says,”I trust God, regardless of what is happening, I will press on; I will not be a wishy-washy, halfhearted, fair-weather friend of God. I will trust God when it is difficult. I will persevere when I see the night is coming. I will persevere when life is hard, when I fail, and when I don’t feel like persevering.”” (Johnnie Moore)

Everyone has difficult times in life. It isn’t a matter of if trouble will come. It is when trouble comes, how will I survive? When I am getting clobbered by the world, how will I deal with it? God doesn’t shield you from difficult times. However, He will help you get through it. He will make you “more than a conqueror”.

We will all cry our share of tears, have our misfortunes, and make our mistakes. We will fail. We will stumble. We will let ourselves down. Even as well-intentioned Christians, we will sometimes respond to problems in ways that just make things worse. We will disappoint ourselves. We will disappoint others. We are sinners. We are flawed people who are apt to prove it sometimes by the decisions we make.

You could have the faith of the Bible heroes Moses, David, and Peter and you will still have to deal with failure and discouragement. These men all failed at some point in their Christian life. (Moses struck the rock. David sinned with Bathsheba. Peter denied Christ.) However, they refused to let failure define them. They found a way to navigate through their failures, deal with their problems, and bounce right back up into serving the Lord.

How did they deal with their sin? Take a look at Psalm 51 as an example. This was written after David sinned with Bathsheba. He confessed his sin. He took responsibility for it. He repented (determined not to do it again). He asked for forgiveness. He asked God to cleanse him from his sin. Only then was his relationship with God restored and David could move forward with his relationship with God.

You might wonder why God would let you encounter some of the difficulties you are experiencing in your life. I think sometimes He allows things to happen in our lives to teach us lessons that can only be learned in the midst of strife and turmoil. (I’ve learned a lot through some difficult times in my life.) Sometimes the difficulties we are going through are our own fault. There are consequences to sin. Sometimes the difficulties are just the result of living in a fallen world. When Adam sinned and sin entered the world, so did some of the difficulties of life. We need to trust God and persevere through them.

God believes in us sometimes more than we believe in ourselves. He knows we will get through it and be better for it in the long run. Some things can only be learned through first-hand experience. Like a young boy learning to play baseball, you have to get in the game to really see what you can do. It’s only when life knocks us down that we really know we have the strength to get back up and do it again.

When we find ourselves stumbling in our relationship with God, disappointed in a decision we’ve made, frustrated with words we spoken, or upset with how we reacted in a crisis, we shouldn’t stay down long. We have a God who loves us, forgives us, and wants us to get back up and persevere through it.

2 Corinthians 4:8-9 “We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.”

We aren’t defined by our failures but by what we do with them. We will have our ups and downs, our good days and our bad, our triumphs and our defeats. That is part of life.

However, we serve a risen Savior. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills. He makes the sun to rise and set. He sees the beginning and the end of time. He is faithful and trustworthy. He loves us with an everlasting love. When life knocks you down, get back up. When you blow it, confess it to God immediately, and then move forward. There’s a whole lot of living left to do. Do it hand in hand with the Savior.

“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.” (Psalm 51:10 – 12)

No comments: