I’ve always found the statements of “I want the Lord to do whatever He wants in my life to bring Him the most glory possible, even if it means bringing me pain” to be inspirational …
and a bit “off.”
When I was 21 (half my lifetime ago), I went to Papua New Guinea for a summer on a mission trip. And I told my mom that I picked PNG over any other place because it was so remote and primitive. I said that I wanted to have everything taken away to really challenge me, to grow my faith in new ways. And I meant it. I really did. My heart was in the right place.
But my mom said something wise, something that stuck. She said, “Don’t ask for that! Never ask for that! Because He could take away everything – your legs, your eyesight, your health, your home, etc.”
Wow! So true.
As I thought about it, I realized that I didn’t really want God to do “whatever.” I didn’t want Him to take away all my comforts, just the ones I could do without for a summer. I didn’t want to be broken into pieces, just smooth off a couple rough edges. I didn’t want to be tried like Job was; I just wanted a little adventure that would grow my faith in fun, exciting, safe ways.
(It seems that the people who say this kind of thing are those who have a lot or who have it rather easy. They have money and possessions and relationships and success, etc. A rather comfortable life.)
When I first heard this Christian say this, I bristled. It bothered me. I mean, it sounds so humble, so God-glorifying. So why would I have a problem with it? Isn’t that the kind of humble thing we are supposed to say? Isn’t it similar to what I said about PNG?
While I do think they mean it (like I did) and they really want God to be glorified in their lives and they know that money is of no eternal value, I think I finally figured out what bothers me about that kind of statement …
What bothers me is that they are overestimating themselves. There’s a certain level of self-confidence and self-ability, a subtle underlying belief of “I can handle it. My faith is strong enough. I won’t crack under the pressure and trials. I won’t be like the other people out there who despair and doubt and struggle with their faith when times get really hard. I’m stronger than that. No matter what happens to me, I’ll still be singing God’s praises.”
And they say this while their checking account is full of money and their refrigerator is full of food and their job is going well.
To me, this doesn’t really show a strong, unshakeable faith in God (usually because it’s said before crushing trials come) so much as it shows a faith in ourselves, in our ability to maintain a strong, unshakeable faith if trials happen someday in the future.
Our hearts can be in the right place, while our confidence is in the wrong place. And we can’t really know what’s in our hearts before painful trials expose the truth, the attitudes and fears and doubts that we didn’t know were there.
It’s so easy to say “Even if it was all taken away, I would still praise God” … until it’s all taken away.
It’s so easy to say, “I want Him to do whatever He wants in my life to bring Him glory, even if it means pain” … until He does whatever He wants and brings the pain and hides in the background and doesn’t answer your prayers the way you want and lets you come face-to-face with the fact that you grossly overestimated yourself when you said, “Whatever You want, Lord … as long as it brings You glory.”
It’s easy to assume that you’ll be able to keep your chin up and a compliant, Christianly smile on your face during the trials, instead of being brought to your knees and face in despair and exhaustion.
It’s easy to make naïve, untested, over-confident assumptions like that, especially when our hearts are in the right place.
It’s easy to say it … until God actually does it.
But I don’t think we really want Him to bring the trials. We don’t really want to lose everything, even if it does bring Him glory. We just want to say it because it sounds mature and faithful and God-glorifying to say it. And we do really want to please Him. (And maybe deep down we think that if we say it then He’ll be pleased with us and bless us more, that He’ll spare us the trials because we said the right thing and our hearts were in the right place. It’s the thought that counts, right?)
But what if?
What if He really does take us up on our challenge? What if He decides to show us what’s really in our hearts, to show us who we really are? (2 Chronicles 32:31: "... God left him to test him and to know everything that was in his heart.") What if He decides to expose just how much over-confidence we placed in ourselves and how we believed that if we did everything right and said all the right things then life would go the way we wanted and we would be blessed? What if He decided to teach us just how human we are, how un-self-sufficient and weak and scared and unwise we are, how much we desperately need Him because we can’t do it on our own anymore? What if Satan asks to tests us, like he tested Job?
What if?
We can’t know how we will handle “Job-sized” trials until we face Job-sized trials. And I think it is foolish to think we have the strength and ability to make it through unscathed, to think that we can handle what God dishes out (or allows Satan to dish out) and that our faith won’t waver or be stretched to the breaking point or be shattered into tiny pieces that we have to scoop up and place in the Lord’s hands so that He can put it back together again.
Crushing trials will bring out any trace of self-sufficiency or pride or love of comfort or need for control that we have deep inside. It will expose the over-self-confidence that made us think we were strong enough to face terrible trials with our chin up, a smile on our faces, and a pleasing “good Christian” attitude.
I was someone who grew up with faith, and I was confident in myself and my faith. Confident enough to say that I wanted to be stripped of every comfort because I knew it would help grow my faith.
I was confident about my faith … until too many trials broke me, finally coming to a head in 2016.
I never thought I’d be someone who broke so bad that - for three days - I couldn’t get out of bed or eat because lights and sounds hurt my head so much that I wanted to vomit every time I stood up. I never thought I’d be someone who was hiding in my house, deep in depression, staring out my backdoor window for most of the day, praying that Jesus would come back and end it all.
I was sitting on rock-bottom hopelessness and discouragement, when you want nothing more than to be free of the incredible stress and overwhelming feelings of pain and failure and suffocating entrapment. (It absolutely breaks my heart now whenever I hear about someone who committed suicide or who cuts themselves. I understand the place they were in when they did it. It's a horrible, horrible place to be in.)
Trials have a way of bringing us to that point. They have a way of destroying every bit of self-sufficiency, self-assurance, self-ability, self-strength, self-wisdom, and every bit of confidence that we have in anything that’s not God. They have a way of tearing us into shreds until we can’t do anything but fall down on our faces - broken, unable to pick ourselves up, pleading with God to make it all stop, wishing we could turn our backs on Him because we feel He turned His back on us yet knowing that there is no one else to go to because He alone has the words of Truth and Life.
When you are hit with the painful trials, the dashed dreams, the overwhelming obstacles, the echoing silence when it feels like God abandoned you, the unanswered prayers, etc., then - and only then – can you really know what’s in your heart and what you’ve really placed your faith on and how strong it is and how weak it is and how much you need the Lord to help you stand.
That's when you become little and He becomes big.
In those "dark nights of the soul" periods - when all confidence and joy and even hope is gone, when the future is dark and scary and you don't know if you can face even one more day, when you move from “Bring me pain for Your glory, Lord, because I can handle it" to “Make it stop, Lord. NO MORE! Help me, Lord, I’m breaking!" - that’s when genuine faith is born.
That's when, appropriately, your view of yourself is shrunken and your view of Him is expanded, when you begin to see you for who you really are and Him for who He really is. That's when your trust in Him is purified, when it’s simplified and yet made more complex. That's when God becomes more mysterious and more wild and too big to be controlled by us. Too big to fit into our little boxes and our meager understandings. Too big to be manipulated by our “right talk” and “right attitudes” and our proper “good Christian” performance, the things we say and do in the hopes that we can earn His favor and a smooth, comfortable life.
While I don't think those "Bring me pain if it brings You glory" prayers are wrong (I think God smiles at our naïve child-like offering, the way a mother might smile at a child who brings her a handful of dandelions and calls them "beautiful flowers"), I just think that God is more pleased by our heart-felt cries of hopelessness in our time of need. I think He's more touched with our genuine cries of helplessness and despair than He is with our over-confident assessment of how well we're doing (and will do) in the faith.
Sometimes, the most humble, genuine, God-pleasing prayers aren't the ones where we know just what to say and what sounds good, where we use all sorts of impressive, God-pleasing words ... but the ones where we don't even know what to pray anymore because the pain is so bad, where we are out of words and out of strength and out of hope, and where all we can do is fall before Him in despair and cry.
Sometimes, the best prayers we can offer God are the ones we pray with tears in our eyes and no words on our lips.
The ones where our heart screams "I need You, Lord. I'm broken" and "I still believe, Lord, but help my unbelief" and "To whom else shall I go, Lord, for You alone hold the words of eternal life".
It doesn't get more humble and pure than that!
Oh, how naïve we are to assume that we can handle it, that we can face the future with a “good Christian” response, that our faith will not be shaken to the core. May we never be too casual about our faith, may we never overestimate our own strength and capabilities while underestimating God’s ability to humble us and to make us see the truth about ourselves.
And may we never underestimate His ability to carry us through the trials. May we never underestimate our need for Him to carry us through the trials.
May we always remember from the start that we are too weak to do it all, too unwise to know it all, too broken to stand tall and proud through it all, too scared to face it all. Let us always remember that we always need Him to uphold us and guide us and provide for us, that we are fully dependent on His grace and mercy and love, every day!
We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future or how we'll handle it.
But we do know that we have today and that He can help us through today.
And maybe this is how we best show our faith. Not with predictions of how well we think we'll handle future trials, but by clinging to Him today. By being obedient and worshipful and trusting in the here-and-now. By pouring out whatever's in our hearts in the moment, placing it all in His hands, asking Him to help carry the things we are too weak to carry and to help us stand when we are too weak to stand. And then by waking up and doing it all over again.
That's how faith is best lived: One day at a time!
Because today is all we've can be sure of. And today is all we need to worry about.
Matthew 6:34: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."
Lamentations 3:22-26: "Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.... The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord."
Proverbs 3:5-6: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight."
Songs I love for the hard times:
Better Than A Hallelujah by Amy Grant
Your Hands by J.J. Heller
Love, Heal Me by The City Harmonic
Fell Apart by The City Harmonic
Praise The Lord by The City Harmonic
Oh, What Love by The City Harmonic
I AM by Crowder
By Your Side by Tenth Avenue North
Manifesto by The City Harmonic (because there's a time to stop crying and to start praising God for who He is)
And one more, just because: Confession by The City Harmonic
