Yesterday, I went to the monthly Prayer and Worship night at church, and a guy came for (what I think was) the first time. As someone finished praising God for our ability to come to Him as we are, with our raw brokenness, this guy spoke up. He spoke about his recent, almost daily, thoughts of suicide, despite how successful the world saw him to be. Instinctively we surrounded him in a prayer pit, encouraging him that God will use this darkness in his life for good, and that it is simply “okay to not be okay”.
Quite honestly, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. How wrong is it that as Christians we often act like we always have everything together and as if because we have God’s joy, there is no such thing as deserts or seasons of darkness. It is such a lie.
Our God is a God that loves when we wrestle with Him, because it’s those times when we truly know what it is like to encounter the Lord and learn how to love Him. In Genesis 31, we learn that Jacob had EVERYTHING, and yet when he wrestled with God, he asked for His blessing, because he learned the true meaning of despair: to have everything and have it not be enough.
I long for this man to know that God. The God that leads us into deserts because it’s through those deserts that we learn how much we need God’s presence in our lives and that absolutely nothing will fulfill that void in our souls like He can. The God that uses every darkness to glorify Himself and reshape us to be more like Him. The God that sees us for who we can be…for our truest potential, rather than for our brokenness…for how we are.
But instead, like Mark Batterson says in his book If, “we define ourselves by what we’ve done wrong instead of defining ourselves by what Christ has done right. Or we define ourselves by the hurtful things done to us, instead of what Christ has done for us” (30).
We are always seeing ourselves as either broken or as victims. But God does not see us that way! He sees us as ambassadors, as priests, as intercessors, and as His beloved children. He sees past what the world is determined to see in all of us, and no matter what, He NEVER gives up on us. Why? Because the price was already paid. It’s done! We need to stop seeing Jesus as if He is still on the cross and start seeing Him as a resurrected king sitting on His throne, while it is our sins and brokenness that is now held here in His place.
I know that God was very intentional about getting that man there that night. I know that it was providence for him to be there the night we prayed about how it is okay to not be okay. He needed to know that. He needed to know that whatever he was dealing with, God had a use for it; that God does not allow us to suffer without a purpose. He needed to know that something good was going to come out of it, but that right now, it is okay that it totally sucks. Because God loves it when we come to Him with rawness and honesty. God does not see us as victims. He looks at each of us and says, ” you are more than a conqueror, And with Christ’s help, there is nothing you cannot do, nothing you cannot become” (Mark Batterson, 214).
conquerorsforchrist 