Recently I shared a live video after chatting with a girl in my DM’s. Her situation looked hopeless and she doubted that God cared or even existed. I sent her some videos and ended up sharing the tips I gave her in an InstaLive. The response was insane so I wanted to share these three tips with y’all so you can reference them if or when you need to.
I basically gave three tips that she could take action on now. It is easy to sit in our doubt and wait for our feelings to change but we need to make a move and not let the devil gently steer us further away from God. I hope these tips will fill you with hope today!
1. Do not let someone else’s actions shake your faith in God.
People are messed up. Can I just say that? Many times our loss of faith in the Lord is a result of seeing human beings perform terrible acts. How could God exist and let this happen? This year, God really helped me understand this question that seems to haunt so many of us.
God’s love is seen in the way he gave us free will. He did not force our hand to choose him. Does anyone remember Aladdin? We watched it recently and Jafar used some sort of power to make Jasmine bow down to him. It was coerced and anything but love. That loving choice means that some people will choose God and the result will be amazing. We can see this across the globe if we look for it! (It’s not normally on regular news.) But we also see people who choose wrong. And that doesn’t mean God stopped loving us. In 99.9% of cases, God doesn’t smite a bad person the second they sin and zap the pain away. Can you imagine if he did that to us for the sins we committed against someone before coming to know him as Savior? That’s grace y’all.
What God does is redeem our stories. God takes the hard and uses it to make us stronger. God takes our hard and uses it to comfort others. God walks with us through our story and IS the comfort and the strength we need to get through.
2. Pray for God to redeem your situation.
Don’t just talk to everybody else. We have to talk to God. You might not want to go to him and complain or question or express doubts but having those thoughts and taking them to everyone else or keeping them inside is foolish. He knows our hearts so you not telling him isn’t hiding anything from him. What it expresses is a lack of trust that he is SAFE to TRUST with your feelings. I always use David as such a good example of someone who lamented and expressed so much frustration with God. And this is the man God calls the “man after God’s own heart”!! Him taking those frustrations to God show he was following hard after God. He wanted to figure out his feelings. He wanted to understand. Pray that God will take your seemingly screwed up situation and redeem it.
3. Ask for redemption stories.
Ok, after you go to God first, you can talk to others. 😉 Ask other believers for how God has worked in their hardest trials. When we are in the thick of a really dark place, it’s easy to feel like it will either never end or there is just no way out. When we hear stories of other people’s darkest moments and get to see how God took them from that point to one of hope and redemption, we are able to catch the vision for what God can do in our lives. We are able to find hope to take the next step forward.
At the end of the InstaLive, I prayed for everyone and cried as I did because I believe God is who he says he is and STILL struggle to pray. To know that so many people struggle with believing in God in the first place, I just can’t imagine the struggle it is to try to connect with him.
I want you to know, if that is you, FIGHTING FOR YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD IS WORTH IT. The world wants you to feel hurt and abandoned but God is literally right there saying, I’m here, turn to me.
If you need more encouragement to create a solid foundation for prayer, grab our Fresh Start Journal. It’s 31 days of short devotionals that cover so many things about prayer that hold us back.
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