i don’t know about you, but sometimes…sometimes i am just so very tired of struggling. Oh and how often it just seems my days are filled with one little struggle after another….. just tedious …. so many things in a row are “almost but not quite” and it’s so very irritating. It’s like whenever i’m in a hurry the world around me goes into slow motion….. maybe i’ve got to duck into a store to quickly get something, and it feels like everyone is taking forever to decide even the smallest decisions…. if they are going to get this brand or that brand all the while their cart is blocking the isle and you’re thinking to yourself, “They are all virtually the SAME! Just pick one!” But we can’t do that, so we smile and just practice our virtue of patience, all the while we are broiling inside.
We are “the strugglers”. i fully believe where there is no struggle, there is no progress, and there is no strength; where there is no struggle there is no maturity, no learning to endure and persist which are two very important functions if we plan on continuing to breathe air. i believe most people who never have to struggle with life and everything is handed to them are typically very immature ….without struggle in life there would be no empathy, we couldn’t relate to other people’s trials, their rejection, abandonment, or not being loved.
i hope you will all take to heart some of what is shared … sometimes all we need is a little place to set our feet against in order to make course adjustments for important changes over the long run.
The topic is struggling and those in the Kingdom of God who struggle forward, whom i’ve dubbed “The Strugglers” for their valiance and passion to find some way to wrap their fingers and hands in the robes of God Himself. We struggle to get up a hill and not fall backward, and then we struggle to get down the same hill trying to not fall forward. Even so, the value of struggle is immeasurable and valuable.
Psalm 95:8, “Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion, As in the day of trial in the wilderness,” …..a more literal translation of the words “harden your hearts” is a picture of a yoke with teeth that is heavy and oppressive biting into the very core of Israel’s heart… there was an argument between them and the Lord….it was a struggle of epic proportions while wandering in the wilderness. To harden your heart would mean to refuse to hear and see…. and if you did hear and see, you would refuse to do the wisdom….all born out of the poison of bitterness and iniquity while resenting God for the struggle.
Having wisdom and doing wisdom are often very, very different things. i think to myself sometimes about how often the Lord extends me wisdom and i don’t listen…i have no idea why i don’t listen…i really don’t know …. even so, my unbelief that God is speaking to me or my rejection of His wisdom always complicates my daily struggle. HA! You’d think i’d know better by now, you know? God extends us wisdom to relive some of our struggles, not only that but He often simply clears the path in front of us providing us times of easy progress for a bit. In fact, for all we do NOT see and hear, there is no telling the obstacles the Lord removes from our path which we don’t know about. In His kindness, He helps us through our struggles.
The Bible is chock full of strugglers…. those who made, in one fashion or another, forceful or violent efforts to get free of restraint or constriction. It would be easy to point out general things like war because everyone in every war is obviously struggling over something. But i’d like to be a bit more focused on significant individuals whose struggles made an eternal impact on our lives today.
Elijah always struck me as this incredible tower of courage, exercising such confidence in God. In 1 Kings 18, he acted with such certainty…..it’s as if he knew exactly what to do, where to do it, and with whom…..he seemed to have such assurance as to how everything was going to work out, going forward like a man who was so sure of his steps….it was downright majestic.
In 1 Kings 18, he did that whole thing with the prophets of Baal….it was like, no problem, he was the perfect God’s-man in the moment. But, when the prophets of Baal were all dead, and he heard that Jezebel had decreed that he would be dead by the next day, it says in 1 Kings 19:3-4, “….Elijah was afraid and fled for his life. He went to Beersheba, a town in Judah, and he left his servant there. 4 Then he went on alone into the wilderness, traveling all day. He sat down under a solitary broom tree and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life…”
There was a terrific struggle going on inside him. On one hand, he was determined to accomplish the intent of God’s heart, but on the other hand, he was gripped by fear and ran away to the wilderness and lay crying under a tree for God to kill him. Elijah was one of the strugglers, just like you and me.
By and by, the Lord sent an angel to get him up and give him food…. in his struggle, the Lord made a way. Elijah was strengthened and found the courage to rise again and continue on. “Continue on” is the key phrase.
Douglas MacArthur said, “The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.”
The path of least resistance is one of the greatest lies we will ever believe. We live in a world that makes so many things easy for us, that we begin to live as though the easy way is the best….always. If i’m sitting in a coffee shop with a cup of caffeine, a computer, and a cell phone, and can access any information or contacts I need without moving, i think i’m happy. I can listen to any music in the world that I want to with just a few clicks, see what any person or organization is up to with just a few more, order anything I might need online, or watch whatever I want to watch.
In a world where so much is so easy, the deciding factor in what I do becomes what I WANT. And let’s be honest if given the choice between doing what I want and what I don’t want, I’m always going to lean towards what I want.
What I have come to realize though (sometimes quite painfully), is that what I WANT is usually not the same as what i NEED. In fact way too often, what i NEED is exactly what I do NOT WANT. So what becomes one of the most regular and life-defining choices is the choice between taking the easy path to what I want versus the difficult path to what I need. Struggle becomes an active choice rather than a life necessity. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes disaster hits and we are thrown into struggle without any say in the matter, but day-to-day, struggle is usually something we have to choose.
i realize that you, like myself, get so, so tired of struggling with everything it seems. For example, i have to go to Walmart, and i have to park so very far away, and it’s so hot and my feet hurt and i’ve got a headache, and, and, and…. just choosing to get up and walk to the store is a struggle. Once i get inside it seems it’s a day of all days when everyone seemed to need to return stuff, get their prescription filled, or had to bring the entire family to the store….as if the entire city came to THAT store at THAT moment….just incredible; some people stand in the aisles as though they are the only people shopping on the planet, their kids are screaming, and it seems everyone has a bad attitude, not to mention the old guy on a little go-cart who is running into people on purpose because they are in his way. It is nothing short of a struggle just to be there. Sometimes i think it would be easier to go deer hunting with nothing but a short rope than to struggle with people.
BUT! Without struggle, it is impossible to grow. Muscles do not grow or strengthen without stress and without being pushed to their limits, and neither do people. We need struggle … as bad as we don’t want it, we neeeeeed struggle in order to become stronger … without it, we slowly deteriorate….we literally have dystrophy.
i think to myself occasionally, “But Lord why oh why do i have to struggle THIS much and for so long it seems?” In the middle of struggle, it seems time slows down to a torturous tick for someone’s delicious thrill of watching us struggle. Of course that isn’t true, but when in the middle of struggle, our conflicts just seem amplified.
Mark 4:36-38, “Now when they had left the multitude, they took Him along in the boat as He was. And other little boats were also with Him. 37 And a great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling. 38 But He was in the stern, asleep on a pillow. And they awoke Him and said to Him, “We are going to die here! Don’t you even care?”
Those guys were in such a struggle, trying to be considerate and not to wake the Lord up while simultaneously trying not to die at sea. And don’t you know they struggled against their thoughts of asking for help or not. Obviously, they believed Jesus could rectify the situation, but the panic in them…” Don’t you even care?” indicates a terrific internal struggle. The Lord is aware of our struggles and just because we don’t necessarily see or hear it, He is moving mountains and shifting the Heavens on our behalf.
i believe Herman Melville was correct when he said, “Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, demonstrating its everlastingness.” Jesus was the real deal. He was, is, and will be the standard of authenticity, and everyone who met Jesus met with their own incredible internal struggle, thinking, “Who IS this guy?”, “When He’s around it just upsets my little world.”, or “Why is He here? Who does He think He is?” John 7:11-12, “Then the Jews sought Him at the feast, and said, “Where is He?” And there was much complaining among the people concerning Him. Some said, “He is good”; others said, “No, on the contrary, He deceives the people.” They were people who struggled with who Jesus was and what He represented. His straight-up honesty and authenticity was unnerving to those who lived an inauthentic life, spoke non-credible words, and were unconvincing in their actions. He was authentic, real, honest, trustworthy, and lived with His entire heart committed to the purposes and values of the Father.
i read somewhere that authenticity has a high price. It could cost your career. It definitely costs you the path of least resistance. Authenticity dooms you to a life of struggle; to a life of risk; to a life of uncertainty, rejection, and danger. It takes the spoon full of sugar away from the medicine so that you have to taste the bitterness of what you need when it goes down. It takes the disguises away so that you see the monsters in the darkness around you as well as the ones in your own mind. It feels the sting of trial and the bloody sweat of conflict rather than the comfort of the cushioned facade, and it makes you stare failure in the face rather than avoid it.
So as painful as it is, being authentic and real brings struggle, and struggle brings growth. When life is easy, growth is a struggle, but when life is a struggle, growth is easy. You may be in a place where life is smooth sailing, or you may be in a place where life is incredibly difficult for reasons outside of your control.
Yet, even so, we the people, are the strugglers. We struggle to be convincing in a very unconvincing world. We struggle to be credible in a very non-credible world with a very non-credible government, doing very non-credible business. We struggle with illness and go to doctors who often see us as dollars rather than people who are ill. We go to schools where the entire facility is often no more than a business and when they tell us they care, we struggle, because we, so often, find them very not believable.
i can assure you, the Lord is the most authentic and genuine person in the universe. He is trustable, believable, and faithful light years above anyone or anything on this mud ball we call Earth. Where there was no way, God has made a way. When we were bound, slaves to sin, chained in darkness, Jesus made a way. Without struggle, the little chicken would never live past the breaking out of its shell, without struggle we would have no heroes or champions. Without struggle, we would just be cruisers and posers with no character content. Friends, God has given us the courage to struggle and win. We, the strugglers, who believe in Christ as Savior, are more than conquerors, and to be a conqueror requires struggle.
Listen for the struggle in this scripture: 2 Corinthians 6:4-10, “But in all things, we commend ourselves as ministers of God: in much patience, in tribulations, in needs, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labors, in sleeplessness, in fastings; by purity, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Spirit, by sincere love, by the word of truth, by the power of God, by the armor of righteousness on the right hand and on the left, by honor and dishonor, by evil report and good report; as deceivers, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”
Do you hear the struggle places, the places of conflict and the victory? How often do we, like Paul, find ourselves in situations where we are pressed to have patience? Constantly. When Paul was in heartache, in grief, in desperation for food and shelter, when he was beaten and incarcerated he struggled with life and people, yet he was more than a conqueror. Through God’s gift to us of strength, wisdom, and perseverance, instead of responding like a spoiled little kid who had never faced adversity, Paul exhibited not bitterness and wrongness of character but as it says in Galatians 5:22-23, he lived out the life of a righteous example, “….the fruit of the Spirit….love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
2 Cor 12:7-10, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” Then Paul writes, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong”
Friends, we are the strugglers, living through a life that sometimes is so very trying. And oh isn’t it easy to say that if we didn’t struggle we wouldn’t be strong, but then how much more difficult it is to actually get strong because we struggle. We all have days where everything seems just tedious.
Enduring and persisting in the face of struggle are crucial to learning, because learning is a hard and messy business.
Consider the story of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914, wow, now that’s got to be one of the most heroic survival stories of all time.
Have we wept over our sin? Do we cry over the sinner? Where am i willing to go if God requests it of me? Am i willing to yield my self-indulgence to God in order to gain Christ? Those are all points of choosing and struggle. A man assured me, vehemently, not too long ago that it is not God’s desire that i be poor, and in fact, God wanted me to be wealthy and if i was poor it was my miserable lack of faith that made it so. Oh my, what a lie! What a struggle because, often, most of us don’t find ourselves being filthy rich and are living regular lives. We are not the focus. God’s point is HIS SON and that the Lamb would have the reward of His suffering….and this bloodsucking, vampiristic doctrine of prosperity breeds listless complacency born on the wings of fatness to take up an issue against God when our agenda doesn’t happen…even to the point that a pastor of a large church told me, “you can’t go to church if you don’t have any money, and if you don’t have any money, you might as well just not go.” and he was serious, all jesting aside. What a struggle in us those words can cause. This is not good! i have been witness to hearing another pastor stand up and rebuke the spirit of indebtedness on his congregation, city, state, and nation and then 10 minutes later inform everyone that the church was “now able to put your tithes and offerings on your credit card if you’d like.” What??!! This is incredible! i was thinking “am i really hearing this?!” While people were struggling against being slaves to debt, they were being called back to enter into debt. Even so, we struggle against all odds to be the people of God, never-the-less.
There were men of God many years ago who left their homes to go with God where ever He would lead. Many got on a ship to a destination in April of one year only to arrive at their destination in May of the next year… and that was only just getting there. (would i do that? Probably not. Am i even willing to hear it?) They didn’t have any books written, no support base of people pledging money, no tape or CD ministry, no booking agent, no advertisements no posters or schedule of meetings for when the “great man of God who holds many titles” would arrive. They didn’t have a marketing committee to promote them. Many were rejected by the local board of deacons, many had no “mission board” endorsements, no one knew them in the place of their destination most of the time, many times they didn’t even speak the language, and they suffered cannibals, disease, insect hordes, bad and poison water, repetitive rejection, slavery, imprisonment for no reason that made sense many times, they were burned out, burned down, beaten, whipped, and even thrown into holes under the city which were then closed up and they were forgotten, and that’s just a start. But yet these early examples of the carriers of the gospel message pressed on with the call of God on their lives. They struggled forward and today we call them heroes of the faith…and for me, they truly were. Yet, standing out as THE reason among many reasons, they considered that Jesus Christ was more important than they were…they knew we don’t deserve Christ but He deserves us, and they went forward that the Lamb who was slain from the foundations of the world would have the reward of His suffering. Amen.
i am proud of my struggle for the Gospel to go forward with the call of God on my life. And you? Where are you in this? Stand up church, it’s time to stop feeling sorry about your struggles and stand up in the name of Jesus. Be strong and courageous!
Friends, In the middle of all our struggles let us not lose heart. i’ve said before that i believe that one of the biggest difficulties in America is loss of heart.
2 Corinthians 4:15-18, “For all things are for your benefit, that grace, having spread through the many, may cause thanksgiving to abound to the glory of God. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God. Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary struggles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
We are the strugglers, those who endure and persist in the Lord regardless of the struggles and conflicts. Don’t lose heart, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and remember, strength will rise when we wait upon the Lord. Wanna be strong?… then you’ll have to learn to wait, but while you’re waiting you’re getting stronger and stronger.
Breathe man, breathe, after all, you are in the grip of His grace. Drive carefully and watch out for your neighbor. i’ll talk to you next time. Amen.