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The Secret to Finding Rest Amidst Tragedy

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Does it make sense to pursue rest when you are flooded with the trauma of betrayal? Experiencing the disloyalty of another person is painful and disorienting, maybe more than any other life event. Is rest even possible given the chaotic disruption to your sense of peaceful well-being?

Have you ever seen a dog chase its tail? So much energy is spent pursuing a goal that remains unattainable. It’s fun to watch unless you’re the one going in circles.

What is the worst traumatic experience you’ve been through? If you can’t think of anything, you are either very lucky or very disconnected from reality. How easy or hard was it for you to rest in the days and weeks after the trauma occurred?

Or maybe you are in the middle of trying to recover from a horrifying event. It has left you locked into an unending sense of discouragement, distress, or despair. Your thoughts speed around a racetrack, circling ever faster but generating only mental exhaustion.

After being traumatized, it is normal to become disillusioned and want to know why life can be so confusing and difficult. Why did that bad thing happen? Why did you make an unhealthy choice? Why does there seem to be no way forward?

Trust to Find Rest

These questions are all signs of life. You are seeking some deeper answer, meaning, or connection with God. There is good news: answers exist that bring hope instead of despair. But the answers usually come in the context of a growing trust in God, rather than an immediate blessing of good fortune and circumstances.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6 ESV

Don’t try to solve problems that are “beyond your pay grade.” Trusting in God brings instant relief (Isaiah 26:3). Try it. Think of something you are anxious about. Now tell God you trust Him. Even if you have to imagine you are trusting Him, it helps. The burden shifts off your shoulders and onto God’s.

I’m not saying your relief will be complete, instantaneous, and permanent. You can experience an overall peace while simultaneously agonizing and grieving.

When God asks you to trust Him, He means at all times–whether your circumstances are pleasant or heart-breaking. You can experience betrayal and still look to God for security.

God wants us to:

  • believe He is good while experiencing pain
  • live in the reality of heaven even while experiencing a cursed earth

How you experience life depends on how you prioritize your perspective. Are you focused on your pain or on your God? Are you caught in a loop of trying to escape something you cannot change? Are you caught believing a temporary circumstance is permanent? If so, I have a prayer for you.

Pray to Find Rest

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time; accepting hardship as a pathway to peace; taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will; so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

Reinhold Niebuhr

This prayer is profound. It shares a lot in common with Proverbs 3. Most people stop with the first sentence. But the second sentence contains the secret to finding rest: acceptance and trust. What are some ways you can adjust your expectations of life, creating some space for you to rest in God’s understanding?

Be patient with yourself as you work through betrayal and learn to trust. You can’t heal in isolation. You need to know someone is hearing your pain.

Read about living free of worry.
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Your Past Is The Secret To Your Faith

Your Past Is The Secret To Your Faith

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Focusing on your past can help you trust God with your future. Many people discount the past. They say things like:

  • “It’s already done.”
  • “I can’t change the past.”
  • “Dwelling on the past is a waste of time.”

Faith is normally thought of as forward-looking. Faith involves trusting during times of uncertainty. Do you know what is going to happen next in your life? The future might be more uncertain than the past, but the past can also instill doubt. Therefore, the past is as much alive as the future but in its own way.

Faith is Required for The Future

The future is mostly hidden and unknown. Even though the Bible is clear about the ultimate future of all believers (in heaven), no one knows for sure when that will happen. Only God fully knows the past and the future because only He is in complete control.

Remember the things I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me. Only I can tell you the future before it even happens. Everything I plan will come to pass, for I do whatever I wish.

Isaiah 46:9-10 NLT

These verses address the past (remember it), the future (God knows it), and sovereignty (God can do whatever He wants). These two verses, then, are sufficient reasons to trust God, or at least to fear Him. So, we have no choice really. We must trust God with the future. But what about the past?

Faith is Required for the Past

If the past is a done deal, why would trust be necessary at all? Consider this: Which has more influence over your present behavior, the past or the future?

The past provides much stronger clues about your identity, the identity of the world, and even God. The past is alive because you are alive. You can remember experiences, draw from their reality, and make decisions in the present. If you have been through an overwhelmingly (or any) negative (or positive) event, it is still likely influencing your understanding of the world and ultimately your behavior.

One can make an argument that we also need to trust God with the past. Experience can remain as unreconciled mysteries. You can be certain that an event has taken place, but what about the meaning of the event? Can you be certain you understand historical events?

The past is fully visible and fully known to you, but does it make any sense? It certainly raises many challenging questions such as:

  • Why did such and such happen? What is the purpose of it?
  • Why does God allow so many bad things to happen?
  • What can I learn from it? How is it relevant to me?

Your Testimony is Your Past

How has God been working in your life? What is He doing? What has He brought you through? When you can look back and feel confidence rather than doubt, something powerful has happened.

These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

1 Peter 1:7 NLT

God wants you to focus on the past, so you can remember who He is. This can fuel your faith in Him, allowing you to make faithful decisions in the present. The future might remain elusive, but based on your experiences you can let God worry about the future.

The longer you have lived, the more past you will have to go on, and the less future to worry about. That’s not to say anyone should wish they were older, but to enjoy the present because we are making memories today that will benefit us later.

More about Faith.
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Find Purpose Focusing On The Kingdom

Find Purpose Focusing On The Kingdom

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Whenever you are lost, look up. Whenever your purpose is elusive, be mindful of God’s kingdom.

Life can be confusing. God might be mysterious, but He’s not confusing. He is perfectly clear about His intentions for His people. He gave us an example of how to live in Jesus. The rest of life is just details. As long as you are seeking to be more like Jesus, you can pursue whatever course in life that God allows. God’s will is not met by choosing one particular vocation, place to live, or church, but it is met by focusing on God’s kingdom.

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

Matthew 6:33 ESV

God’s kingdom begins with the recognition that Jesus Christ, the human-God who lived among us, has something amazing to offer all of us who believe. Jesus has a past, present, and future message for you that is personal. What Jesus has to say is relevant to the whole of your life.

Purpose Has a Context

It is impossible to understand the meaning of life without the ability to see God’s kingdom. Those who can see Jesus and believe He is God will be able to hear God’s voice and know God’s will in daily living. Purpose, then, comes together in the combination of:

  • What needs to be done to further God’s kingdom.
  • What God the Father wants done at a particular moment in time.
  • What gifts and abilities God bestowed upon you.

The context for these three parts is the work God has prepared for us in advance (Ephesians 2:10). You can’t understand yourself apart from God’s creative purposes.

Purpose Has a Cost

Without the connection-to-Jesus context, any work becomes personal effort for a personal kingdom. This is why Jesus tells us to lose our sense of life in order to find life.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.

Matthew 10:39 ESV, NLT

There is a necessary step in the Christian life to be willing to do anything and everything that Jesus wants for you (Luke 14:26–33). This means giving up immediate satisfaction for what will make an eternal difference if the satisfaction interferes with the building of God’s kingdom. Doing so is difficult because it comes with a cost. It takes genuine faith to pass on the immediate for the eternal.

Purpose Has a Focus

For the person who can give up their life, there is complete freedom. Purpose will no longer be clouded by sin, guilt, or shame because of a focus shift.

Without God’s perspective, you have only yourself to focus on. You will more easily become lost in your inadequacies. You can discount and overlook the wonder of being created in Christ Jesus for good works. But when you look into God’s face, you can receive His approval and diminish your shame (Psalm 34:5).

Purpose is Without Equal

Purpose is an active state of living out the unique aspects of who God created you to be in the midst of work (ministry) that is God’s will. Each person can minister God’s grace in its various forms to fulfill God’s will in unique ways (1 Peter 4:10).

Many things in life can be lost, but in Jesus, many things are found and can never be taken away. By God’s grace, you can enjoy the existence that God has given to you. The way you experience and respond to life is personal between you and God.

Read more about purpose.
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The Christian’s Advantage to Lasting Fulfillment

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Reading time: 5 minutes

The secret to fulfillment is hunger. The stronger your desire, the greater your fulfillment. You can strengthen your desires by first being aware of them and then correctly prioritizing them.

You can starve for lack of a healthy desire. When you ache for the right stuff, you’ll be satisfied.

Do you realize you have more than one way to experience fulfillment?

When most people think of their desires, they focus on their immediate physical needs. But God also created you with emotional and spiritual desires, which provide a deeper level of satisfaction. Think of these desires as three stomachs, each with its distinct appetite or craving:

  1. Worldly Desires (food, sex, entertainment, etc.)
  2. Identity Desires (purpose, love, etc.)
  3. Kingdom Desires (glorifying God by living for Christ)

To experience contentment and satisfaction, you must learn how to manage your desires. You can’t rely on one stomach to the exclusion of the others. You’d starve. The secret to fulfillment is attending to all three desires with the right priority and balance.

After your worldly fulfillment reaches its capacity, move on to experiencing and fulfilling your identity desires. As your identity fulfillment reaches its capacity, move on to your kingdom desires.

Worldly Desires

Worldly desires are temporary physical wants or needs. They won’t be around in heaven, or they’ll function differently. Physical desires are like sugar. Sugar is highly desirable but fails to provide lasting nutrition.

Being satisfied, content, and fulfilled aren’t only possible, they’re also God’s will for you. However, gaining your heart’s desire doesn’t mean you can have every possession or pleasure you’ve ever wanted. Having every superficial want met in the way you want it isn’t possible. If you eat too much of the same food, your taste for the food will eventually become saturated.

Instant pleasure is different than lasting joy. Most things are wants, not needs. If you ache too long for the wrong things you might end up getting what you want.

Don’t make the things of life more important than God intended. If you don’t exercise self-control, you could end up getting what you want without fulfilling God’s purpose for your life. Some desires really are distractions and not worth the effort.

Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

Matthew 10:39 ESV

Identity Desires

Identity desires are like organic, whole foods. They fully nourish and fill you in ways that sugar can’t.

Meeting these desires should take priority over your worldly desires. When you focus on identity desires, you reach for the best things in life — the things that no one can steal.

Five longings God meets when you’re His child:

  1. Unconditional Love and Acceptance: God knows who you really are. He always sees you at your best, even when you’re at your worst. God is love.
  2. Persistent Hope: God has the plan to make life better. At some point in the future, life is guaranteed to be perfect and last forever.
  3. Imminent Purpose: God created you to play a critical role in accomplishing His plans. God wants your active participation. God has a specific purpose for your existence. In this respect, you’re indispensable. You aren’t optional or replaceable. You’re significant and important.
  4. Faithful Security: God is always with you. He will never abandon you. He will never leave you nor forsake you.
  5. Meaningful Connection: God participates in an interactive relationship with you. God wants a dialogue with you. God is your father.

God is responsible for meeting these needs. No other person is completely capable like God is. Cloud and Townsend say that relationships are God’s delivery system for all emotional needs. However, you can’t expect or insist any one particular person meets your needs.

You won’t be able to enjoy life unless your identity desires are being met. If you’re unsatisfied with work and life, this probably means a basic emotional need is unmet. When these needs go unmet, your hunger should drive you back to God.

Kingdom Desires

Kingdom Desires are fulfilled by spiritual food. While all healthy desires are from God, kingdom desires are an exceptional hunger for seeing God’s work completed.

Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”

—John 4:31–34

You have an advantage as a Christian. You have a stomach (an appetite) for spiritual fulfillment. Humans won’t ever be completely satisfied until they experience a spiritual hunger only God can fill.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.

—Matthew 5:3, 6

If your identity desires are met, you should be able to pursue your kingdom desires. But this doesn’t mean you’ll naturally pursue kingdom desires unless you intentionally put them first. To appreciate spiritual fulfillment sometimes you must fast from worldly desires and look beyond identity desires.

God desires that you pursue Christlikeness and fulfill the great commission. When Paul explains contentment to Timothy, he mentions several examples of Christlike behavior: righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.

—1 Timothy 6:6–11

Godliness is acting maturely like God. Contentment means you’re satisfied with what you have while pursuing God’s kingdom. Don’t give up the eternal in order to hold onto the temporary.

How fulfilled are you as a Christian? Do you see your advantage? Isn’t God amazing how He created you to have multiple appetites? What can you do right now to ensure you have a balanced desire diet?

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Wake Up From A Terrifying Dream

Wake Up From A Terrifying Dream

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Do you remember your dreams? Some people sleep so soundly that they rarely wake up in the middle of a dream. Dreams can help you process your understanding of the world, yourself, and God.

Dreams are interesting. Sometimes they can feel real. They can be wonderful-exciting but they can also be scary-exciting–at least until you wake up from them. How can you tell if you’re in reality or in a story about your reality? Sometimes you can’t see the difference until you wake up. Being awake allows for a greater degree of awareness. Once you’re awake you can do a reality check. “That was so weird. Thank God that was only a dream.”

But even when we are “awake”, we can still be asleep. I am thinking of being spiritually blinded to God’s truth. One day, in heaven, Christians will be fully awake and able to see everything clearly.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

1 Corinthians 13:12 ESV

Seek Truth To Wake Up

The way you understand the world should be constantly changing. As a child, what you experience early on becomes your best understanding of what the world is all about. If that experience was horrible or even neutral, you’ll form that kind of worldview (understanding of the world) and self-image (understanding of yourself).

Until you experience God’s truth, which points you toward God, your understanding will continue to deteriorate. You’ll become more deceived as you continue to live with your vision blurred and darkened. Thank God that He has redeemed us. He is calling us out of the darkness so we can wake up from a bad dream.

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

1 Peter 2:9-10 NIV

Having mercy and never receiving mercy are two very different places to be.

Seek Ephiphanies To Wake Up

What you experience becomes truth to you until something more true takes its place. Something totally wrong can feel definitively true. When God gives you a new heart and exposes you to the light, only then can you see the contrast. This experience can be so shocking, it’s hard to discern what is true and what is false. A psychological term for this is cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is good for you. When you struggle to make sense of life, you are experiencing an opportunity to grow–to move further into the light. You should be experiencing epiphanies regularly. Here are some examples:

  • Do you remember the first time you realized that Santa Claus wasn’t real?
  • Have you developed your own worldview, or are you still running off of your parent’s worldview?
  • How does your view of the opposite sex compare to when you were 10 years old?
  • If you’re married, do you remember what you thought marriage was before married?
  • What was your life like before you became a Christian? How do you see God differently now?
  • How has your self-worth changed over the years?

How have you changed in the past year? What has God been doing to help you wake up from your false beliefs? Take a moment to thank God for His light. Ask Him to shine it upon you so you can see more clearly.

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

Numbers 6:24-26 NIV

Read more about truth and lies.
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Suffer For The Right Reasons

Suffer For The Right Reasons

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Reading time: 4 minutes

God works out everything for the good of those who love Him. But in the midst of suffering, those words from Romans 8:28 can feel trite. God wants us not to repay evil for evil. The person that can achieve this will demonstrate that God is real (1 Peter 3:15). That’s because the ability to respond to evil with kindness can only come from God.

However, the right response doesn’t always mean continuing to allow someone to take advantage of you. There are times when it makes sense to move out of harm’s way and times when God calls us to suffer for His purposes.

Appropriate Suffering Advances God’s Kingdom

When God expects us to endure suffering, there is always a purpose with eternal consequences. Enduring hardship for the right reasons allows God’s purposes to come to fruition. Because of sin, we live in a world where doing the right thing often results in suffering:

  • we don’t feel better and might even feel worse
  • we don’t get what we want and might even feel miserable
  • our immediate living (on this earth) might seem unproductive (by this world’s definition)

Jesus has an extremely difficult teaching for us. God’s kingdom is more important than any happiness or satisfaction you can derive from this life.

There are many different paths people can walk on in life. But there is only one kind of path that takes you to a desirable destination. It is the path of suffering and growth. This path is undesirable because it is difficult to walk. Choosing this path is counter-intuitive. It’s the right path, but it will feel wrong because it’s impossible to walk it without suffering.

The other paths appear much more desirable and are much easier to walk. In fact, there may even lead to a long period of ease and pleasure. But there is a catch: the journey is easy, but the destination is undesirable. What good is an easy path if it only takes you to an accursed destination?

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Matthew 7:13-14 NIV

Needless Suffering Only Contributes to Evil

Hopefully, I have made the case that suffering is necessary and natural some of the time–when it is directly connected to keeping your faith in Jesus and your witness to Him.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matthew 5:11-12 NIV

But there are probably even more ways we all suffer needlessly. There is no reason to allow suffering to continue in any of the following circumstances.

  • The suffering does not advance God’s purposes
  • The adversity only harms or confuses the person being hurt (such as when a child is abused). The person does not have the capacity to endure the suffering without loss of personal integrity.
  • Pure evil is causing the torment, so there is no way that tolerating it will soften a heart.

In any of these kinds of situations, do all that you can to prevent or stop the suffering. Don’t embrace pain if you don’t have to. God’s will is not to suffer needlessly. But it is God’s will that you walk the path that leads to life, which often involves some heartache to accomplish God’s kingdom work.

For it is better, if it is God’s will, to suffer for doing good than for doing evil.

1 Peter 3:17 NIV

Finally, remember that even though the right path has many difficulties and obstacles, it is still the only sane path (all other paths lead to destruction), and God guarantees that once you start on the path, you will reach the glorious destination (heaven).

The righteous person may have many troubles, but the LORD delivers him from them all;

Psalm 34:19 NIV

Read more about avoiding needless suffering.
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