Take a moment and reflect on a circumstance in your life that is crumbling all around you. This crumbling is beyond your control, like a sand castle being battered by the rising tide. You’ve tried reassembling the pieces and putting them into their desired shape, but the sand continues to slip through your fingers as the castle dissolves and washes away into the ocean’s abyss.
You’ve prayed and prayed, but the situation isn’t changing. In fact, it’s getting worse.
Where is God in this? Where is His power?
Where do you take your feelings of loss, sorrow, loneliness, and anger?
What coping mechanisms are you turning toward to numb this pain?
Now look back through your memories of learning about God, faith, and prayer. When did you learn that following Jesus would take your suffering and problems away? When did you learn that you struck a bargain with God: if you do your part, He will do His (and give you the perfectly-built sand castle, far removed from the ocean’s waves).
We do learn these things in our faith upbringing. Whether it’s overt or subtle, we pick these beliefs up like crusty barnacles on the bottom of a ship. But when we dive into the Psalms, we discover that these beliefs are not consistent with Scripture. We find confidence in who God is, no matter the threat or suffering we are facing. We find a God who gets the last word over evil, pain, and suffering, and a God who experienced all of these things Himself when He came to earth in the flesh, 100% God and 100% human, in Jesus Christ. We find a God who desires to adopt us and hold us as His precious children in His strong arms—the strongest arms that have ever existed, and can ever exist. But He’s not leading us into an earthly kingdom of power and prosperity. He has brought us into his spiritual, invisible, eternal kingdom (Luke 17:20–21, John 18:36), where sin, Satan, evil, and death are defeated, and King Jesus sits on the throne with a humble crown of thorns on His head.
We shouldn’t diminish the deep loss and pain we experience from our unchanged circumstances—the Psalms certainly don’t. They are raw and real in the swirling chaos of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual pain. But we also shouldn’t put our circumstances’ power above God’s power, promises, and presence, accompanied by His limitless love and care for us.
For more, read Shelter in the Storm: 40 Psalms on God’s Faithfulness by Noah Filipiak.
He is:
Author of Beyond the Battle: A man's guide to his identity in Christ in an oversexualized world
Host of the The Flip Side Podcast
Join an online men's small group led by Noah and team at BeyondTheBattle.net
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