What are You Thinking?

Psalm 73:1 “Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart! But as for me, my feet came close to stumbling”.

Today I am sharing some thoughts and wisdom from an encouraging and timely devotional I read this morning. It was written by Tony Evans. Pieces and parts are my words intermingled among his.

There will be days when you find that you just don’t feel like worshiping God. Perhaps the temptation to compare yourself to someone else has caused you to feel down and even depressed. Driving home from work on Friday, you tell yourself you are glad the week is over because it has been a rough one. As you lament over how tired you feel, satan blindsides you with the thought that your coworkers do not really appreciate you.

By the time you open the front door of your home, your eyes have narrowed and your forehead has tightened. You decide your family doesn’t know or appreciate all you do for them either. You are frustrated and ready to give up. Still, you do not pray and ask God for His perspective. You just keep repeatedly thinking through the day and rehearsing your negative feelings and look for something, anything to numb you to your reality. Saturday morning you get up feeling haunted by the same emotions. You start to resent all the things you need to at home, too. The demands just keep piling up! By Sunday you force yourself to drive to church, but you certainly don’t feel like singing or praising God.

Asaph, the author of Psalm 73, would understand your plight. He allowed discouragement to grow in his life to the point where he was deeply disturbed. The key word in the last sentence is ‘allowed’.

Whenever we take our eyes off of God and His faithfulness, and begin to compare our lives with those around us, we either end up feeling defeated or prideful. God has created each one of us for a unique purpose, which includes worshiping Him.

Psalm 73 is a rambling account of what Asaph was feeling, but by the end, he realizes the truth and puts an end to his negativity. “As for me, the nearness of God is my good; I have made the Lord God my refuge, that I may tell of all (of) Your works” (v. 28).

Sometimes God seems so far away that you can’t talk to anyone else but Him—because nobody else will understand what in the world you are talking about. The closer you are to God, the less likely the enemy will have a shot at your emotions. Stay focused on what God has for you to do. You are His beloved child, and He has an amazing plan for your life. Will you praise Him for this?

Joshua 24:15  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors (work*) served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods (the flesh*) of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

*Italics - I added

Swamps of Life

Psalms 107:2-6 Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; And gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south. They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them out of their distresses.

I found this encouraging; I hope you do as well.

In his book, Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan has written one of the most beautiful allegories about the journey we all travel as believers.  The book describes the hero, Christian, and his journey from the City of Destruction to his heavenly destination, the Celestial City.

At one point during their travels, Christian and his companion suddenly find themselves in the Swamp of Despondency. Still bearing his burden, Christian, begins to sink in the mire.  His traveling companion manages to get out, but returns to the City of Destruction without giving aid to Christian.  Christian is left all alone and sinking even deeper in the mire, until Help, the allegorical figure for the Holy Spirit pulls him free from the swamp.

Christian then asks Help why this dangerous plot of land has not been mended so that poor travelers might go safely to the Celestial City. Help replies, "This miry slough is such a place that cannot be mended."

How true it is in real life!  As hard as we try to avoid them, whether young in the Lord, or spiritually mature…swamps of despondency seem inevitable, and we must struggle through them.

Charles Spurgeon once wrote to his students in the book, Lectures to my Students, "Fits of depression come over most of us.  Usually cheerful as we may be, we must at intervals be cast down.  The strong are not always vigorous, the wise not always ready, the brave not always courageous, and the joyous not always happy.  There may be here and there men of iron…but surely the rust frets even these."

There are times in our lives when we will struggle through the swamps of despondency — but praise God that He has provided us a helper for those times of need!  We need to press through, seeking and trusting the power of the Holy Spirit to pull us out of those nasty swamps, and set our feet back upon the Rock of our salvation.  Let's also look around us to see our brethren who may be struggling in the swamps of despondency; so rather than abandoning them, we might give them a hand on their journey to the celestial city!

Four Letter Words

Long ago in a far away land and what seems like another lifetime I had struggled and battled depression. Depression, as the TV commercial says, hurts everywhere and everyone whose life is touched by it. I’m not here to debate depression but to share a life lesson that came from my time of struggle. I’m here to talk about four letter words.

Without boring you with detail, I entered into group counseling for the depression. The counselor was an impressive woman of God, Sister Mary. If you have visions of sweet little novice nuns flying thru the air or skipping and singing on mountain tops, you are not accurately envisioning Sister Mary. Her well known and profoundly descriptive nickname around the counseling center was Sister Mary Chainsaw. She could chew you up and spit you out in tiny mangled pieces without blinking an eye. Not being Catholic, I had no previous experience or exposure to nuns; this came as a shock to me. I, too, had the visions of flying guitar playing nanny nuns. It just occurred to me that Sister Mary Chainsaw was, in and of herself, a form of shock therapy!

Sister Mary Chainsaw had what we now call Zero Tolerance for self pity or denial of facts. No one was exempt from her steely gaze under which your resolve to hide or try to redirect attention to someone else (and their issues) failed miserably. I found myself the focus of a Sister Mary Chainsaw smack-down more times than I care to count. And some of you think I’m blunt and to the point…I’ve got nothing on her!

What I took away from that season of my life was her disgust with the misuse of the word ‘should’. She said ‘should’ was no better than a foul four letter word because of the damage it could cause. People beaten down under the weight of all the ‘should’ other people load on their backs are carrying a burden of man, not God. Depression, consequently, is a man-made issue. That stuck with me.

There are many people out there that will gladly tell you what you should have done; armchair quarterbacks of your life. They can clearly see the error of your ways and present you with a laundry list of better options…in retrospect…after the fact…with 20/20 hindsight. They also frequently use words like ‘always’ and ‘never’. Not only can these words be inflammatory, they are most often inaccurate.

In conclusion let me simply say we should carefully choose the words we use and always be on guard so that we never lay our burden of weighty foul four letter words (regardless of the actual letter count) on others. See, the words should, always and never do not have to be foul four letter words….but too often they are used as tools to cripple, control and manipulate. We’ve all had people in our lives we might like to lock in a room with Sister Mary Chainsaw for a couple of rounds but my charge to us all today is that we diligently work to insure we are NOT guilty of being one of them in the life of someone else! A little Sister Mary Chainsaw goes a long way and still impacts my world today. What a blessing on my life she was! Wish I could tell her but I bet she already knows; Sister Mary knew everything!