Monday, August 1, 2023
I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; from where shall my help come? My help comes from the LORD, Who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not smite you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever. Psalms 121:1-8
Trouble comes into every life. We know that, but what can we do when trouble comes? This past Sunday, John Strappazon gave us some good steps to follow when we are overwhelmed with life’s trials.
The first thing we should do is to Turn to God and the second thing is to Grab Perspective.
Turn to God first - Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. 1Peter 5:7
The Psalmist asks the question … “Where does my help come from?” And in the same breath he answers his own question … “my help comes from the Lord.” We usually look in every direction but up when trouble comes our way. We try to solve our problems on our own. We ask friends or family members for help before we ever take it to the Lord. Our very first response to any trouble should be to turn to God.
Prayer is focusing on God and on God and His resources and power. Prayer is recalling the promises of God and resting in them. Prayer is releasing the problem to Him and waiting for His guidance and deliverance. God wants us to pray about everything. He wants us to tell Him how we feel and what we think, and to bring all our concerns and questions to Him. Fix your eyes on Him and not your circumstances. He is ready and waiting and so much more capable than we are to handle our problems.
Grab perspective - God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear… Psalm 46:1-2
When we pray, and focus on God, we get grounded. The best perspective we can have is the perspective of life and our circumstances through the lens of a child of God. This is a perspective we can grab onto. When we view our circumstances through our own eyes, we see nothing but hopelessness, because we know we really don’t have the power to fix anything. Our Heavenly Father is with us always – He is ever-present in our lives. That means He is in the middle of our financial problems, our scary diagnosis, our broken relationships, our job loss, and every other heartache and trial in life. He is with us, and He has already overcome it all. We can fully surrender to Him, rest in Him, and find peace in Him.
Sometimes when we are faced with trouble, we just want to do something – anything. We somehow think this makes things better. True surrender to God means that we are willing to go where He wants us to go, stay where He wants us to stay, and accept what He wants us to accept. That means when the diagnosis comes back different than we expected, we may not be ok with it, but we still trust. When the job doesn’t pan out, when the money doesn’t come in, or when plans don’t go the way we think they should, we still trust. Letting go in surrender is hard but sometimes accepting what comes back is even harder. Sometimes it involves climbing mountains of adversity and forging rivers of sorrow. But for every mountain we climb and every river we forge, God is with us every step of the way.
We may find ourselves saying to God “This is not what I meant” when we get unexpected results from our surrender. We need to grab that perspective that tells us that our Heavenly Father know what is the very best and wants good things for us. The right perspective helps us to know that we can trust Him in everything.
You keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on You because he trusts in you.
Isaiah 26:3
