It’s been a hard week. My bet is most of you are saying “Amen”. It would be so naïve and self- absorbed for me to think I, alone, was besieged in recent struggle and heartbreak. Fact is, so long as the devil roams our world, war will be waged against us all.
This week’s battles were piercingly unexpected and irreversibly decisive. My salty tears blurred the impact of outer superficiality while stinging the ulcerated core of reality. Unfortunately, all of you most likely are cringing now out of identity to such a defeat at some point in your lives. After all, we walk in an imperfect world, and the devil attacks us all.
Knowing that anger and blame would not help me (but would hurt others), I chose silence as my shield. It was in this choked up state that I dared to peer through a different looking glass. It was not my choice to be so hurt, but mine was the choice of where I would go in seeking release from my wound. Would my heart blame others, or would my soul wonder what is God doing? Heart blaming gives the devil a curtain call for authoring his tragedy that starred, and scarred, me. Wondering what is God doing credits our Heavenly Father with writing the script of Romans 8:28. “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.” (NIV)
The devil longs to control our heads and hearts whenever we encounter the short end of the stick. There’s no easier way for him to steal our souls than for hurt and hardship to make our sole focus blame and anger. The choice for this to happen does not belong to the devil but to us. Satan has no power over us. I repeat, the devil’s weapon in not his power but our weakness. Yes, our weakness to succumb to hurt and hardship with blame and anger takes us out of God’s hands and into the devil’s snare. The devil cannot snatch us from God. We have to choose to crawl to Satan in order for him to cage us in the slippery slope of striking out when life’s woes have closed in on us.
God does not cause, but allow, hurt and hardship to rain on us. His reign showers Romans 8:28. God works for good in all the bad (and good) that befalls us. He plants seeds of hope, not despair, into our lives, no matter what storms or SONshine we are experiencing. Never doubt this. What we need to wonder about is whether we let the devil feed into our weakness or God nourish our strength. A second thought worth pondering is the core of today’s message. When hurt and hardship strike us down, how do we get up? Do we feel an uprising of blame and anger in our hearts, or do our souls rise up wondering what is God doing, while knowing (or at least trusting) it is for our good?
Uplifted in a Broken Down World 