When you’re attacked, you have four choices.
1.) Fight in your own strength
2.) Walk away. (If possible)
3.) Hire someone to fight on your behalf.
4.) Trust God to show you what to do.
Number 4 is always the hardest, and sometimes even encompasses 1 to 3. Our natural survival instinct is to fight or run, not to lay down our weapons of defense.
When Judas led the soldiers to arrest Jesus; Jesus had his friends buy swords, so that the prophecy of his arrest would be fulfilled. But he never authorized the use of weapons and rebuked Peter when he cut off the ear of a soldier. Jesus could have commanded legions of angels to his defense any second. Even a single angel could have wiped out that entire city.
This doesn’t make sense, when you’re enemies are pounding on your door. But how often does anything God does make sense. God’s logic is not “man’s” logic.
That is when faith and trusting God is required.
Proverbs 3:5-6
“trust in the lord, with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways acknowledge him, and He will direct your steps. “
Jeremiah 29:11
tells us not to fear. “Have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous, for the Lord is with you”.
It’s the fear about our future that grabs our heart. To that God said.
Matthew 6:25-34 25
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.
Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.
If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you-you of little faith?
So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Ephesians 6:12
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
I hear a lot of criticisms about Joel Osteen, often by religious people and even pastors, but one thing I know is, Joel Osteen understands something most pastors I have encountered do not.
He understands that God uses difficult times, often insurmountable challenges to position us for what’s next.
You’ll hear the same from the “Cussing Christian”, as he calls himself. Steve Harvey the host of Family Feud, when he shares with his audience about how God brought him through homelessness, realizes that he is positioned in the entertainment field, only because he trusted God, and God positioned him through the insurmountable challenges he encountered, earlier in life.
When my mom passed away right before Christmas in 2019, an entirely unexpected event. As I helped a hospice nurse move my mother’s body, three hours after she was brought home to the house.
I was suddenly awaken to how much time we waste fearing and worrying about being abused, ripped off, cheated, betrayed, wronged, pleasing others.
My mom was an insomniac, she would be awake all night unable to sleep, worrying about who knows what. But there she was now, laying on a gerny, with myself and a nurse helping prepare her motionless body for the funeral limousine to arrive and take her body away.
She gained nothing from her years of worrying, other than just being tormented and discouraged. None of her worries came to pass, and if any of them did, none of them mattered anymore.
As someone who lost everything; years later I look back at what I was trying to hold onto, a reputation, a job for an employer who didn’t care about me, a dream. Yet thirteen years later, only now beginning to recover financially. I am 500% happier on the other side of it, despite the losses and pain I endured.
Not because it wasn’t the most challenging thing I had experienced so far, not because I’ve fully finacially recovered nor can recover those lost years, but because of freedom.
I have freedom. I have seen God bring me through it. I have freedom, because I can trust God in those areas of my life, that I used to worry about 24 hours a day.
That is not to say, all of my worries are gone. I have areas that my mind and heart tell me to be afraid, like being ripped off or cheated from something I had been promised or told to expect. But that occurs when my eyes are on the offenses, not on the God from which my provisions come from.
I become uptight, afraid, discouraged, frustrated and even silently grieved whenever I look at the offenses, instead of the God whose taken care of me through thirteen years of loss.
It’s times like that, I have to isolate myself from any and every source that speaks anything that stirs up disbelief, doubt, fear.
I surround myself with worship music, the word of God, and the second my flesh starts to worry, I put on a YouTube or Podcast of teachings that encourage me to trust God, to depend on God, to keep going.
I do this until my peace is restored. It’s only in the place of peace, that I can clearly hear and see how God is involved.
Historically, I’d run to pastors and church leaders for advice, prayer and counsel. I can say, I rarely found any long term relief doing that. In fact, many times I’d come away worse off, having received rather worldly kind of advice, or things they read in the bible but didn’t belive themselves.
Satan will do everything possible, use anyone available, to cast doubt again on God, to pull me back into the bondage of fear. Because fear is Satan’s domain. That is the same tactic Satan used in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. There were no people, so he used a serpent to cast doubt, to challenge what God had said.
Only surrounding myself in the presence of God, avoiding those who would pull me into doubt, putting on worship music and Godly teaching has ever brought me back into peace, sometimes taking weeks or months, depending on how big the battle is. I am unapologetic when it comes to avoiding those who would pull me into doubt or keep me in the place of doubt. The treasure of God, the Pearl of Great Value, is something I’ve gave my life to obtain, why would I surrender it for anything or anyone?
