What’s your perspective on pain? If you’ve ever faced a painful situation or season of struggle in your life - and you knew God could do something about it - you may have been left confused or questioning your faith. But as Christians, when we wrestle with trusting God when life is hard, it's part of a process of developing a new perspective on pain. In the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament of the Bible, we learn that when you lean into Christ during waiting seasons or dips of doubt, your crisis of belief can create new spiritual momentum that leads you into an even deeper trust in God.
THE PURPOSE OF PAIN
Throughout Habakkuk's journey he struggled with the injustice and violence he saw in the world around Him. Like Habakkuk, Americans in 2020 find themselves waiting on many things: Waiting for racial justice and change to come in the wake of the violent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. Waiting for economic turmoil to cease. Waiting for a cure to a worldwide pandemic…
We, like Habakkuk, are in God's waiting room. But in Chapter 3, we see the minor prophet chose to trust God through the dip of doubt. In fact, in verses 17-19, God brought Habakkuk to a place where he could praise God and trust Him no matter how steep the drop! Likewise, when you trust God in the midst of trouble, you may find yourself worshiping Him more deeply and passionately than ever before. When we wrestle with God in seasons of waiting, we can come to a place where we worship God in spite of our circumstances just like Habakkuk did.
While your world may look like it's falling apart right now, you can have a supernatural PEACE like it's falling into place. This is a next-level spiritual maturity that God wants to bring all of us to! In fact, there are 3 things we can learn from Habakkuk's powerful prayer in chapter 3:
- Trust God in the midst of TROUBLES
- Trade your WORRIES for WORSHIP and God will give you...
- STRENGTH to SCALE the HEIGHTS.
You may have experienced "mountaintop" experiences in your faith journey before: Where everything was blessed and you felt like God was right there with you. But, right now, we're all on edge. Many of us are fearful as America experiences this double-dip of a global pandemic and racial turmoil. Is your faith strong enough to trust God no matter what? The truth is, life is hard. God never promises a life of uninterrupted health, wealth, and victory in the Christian journey. The real God of the Bible allows suffering and loss. In fact, every believer will face moments of grief that make us shake our heads and wonder, "God, where are you? What are you doing? When will this end?"
Truly, when we praise God that through dark and difficult circumstances, He builds up our faith in the process. This is how he gives us a new perspective on pain. On the other side of the dip of doubt is true worship of a God who can be trusted in human suffering - because He entered it! On the Cross, Jesus absorbed all the world's sin and all the wrath of God. He paid for our sin to reconcile us to God for eternity. So, we can take heart in this: Any suffering we now experience is temporary. God can do more spiritually in the dip than he does on the mountaintop!
So, are you going to be a sippycup Christian drinking Jesus Juice for the rest of your faith journey? Or will you trust God to develop a next-level spiritual maturity in you through the dips of doubt? Let Him give you a new perspective on pain. Know that God may or may not change your circumstances right away, but He will always change YOU in the process!
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
To continue learning how to develop a new perspective on pain, loss, suffering and doubt, we encourage you to check out Liquid Church's message series "Surviving The Dip". You may view each part of this message series by clicking the links below: