MY GOD, MY GOD WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?
How many times have you felt like this? How many times have you screamed this in the privacy of your spirit, beneath your public façade? When the chaos in your soul feels more like madness than just the symptoms of a bad day. Then you scream, GOD I NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU RIGHT NOW!...
Nothing, you hear nothing. If you love me why aren’t you talking to me? Maybe you’re in a place where you can scream out loud, so… you do!
IF YOU LOVE ME WHY AREN’T YOU ANSWERING ME!!!!!!
I have learned that it is in these moments that I rarely hear anything from God. Instead He offers me His peace. I can choose to keep bouncing off the walls and sometimes that’s what I do because I’m not getting what I want. But Jesus is teaching me that if I go for the peace, if I choose to allow Him to calm me down, I get the answer. Its usually not the answer I thought I wanted or the thing I wanted etc. But what I hear more times than not is;
“This is not worth getting all worked up about” i.e. “peace be still and know that I am God.”
Peace be still and know that I am God?
How many times have you and I heard this? Enough to make us want to throw up, right? You can be honest, admit it! Your sick and tired of hearing all the clichés and platitudes about how we should feel and what we should say, how we should be afraid of God and grovel in our misery because that’s what Jesus would do and BLA, BLA, BLA!
WRONG ANSWER!!
The bible says:
16Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 4:16 (NIV)
Do you know what confidence means in this context?
Confidence
noun
1 Trust, belief, faith, conviction.
2 Courage, boldness, mettle, nerve.
3 Intimacy.
In other words go ahead and let’er rip! Make your feelings known to God. He can take it! The Psalms are full of David’s ranting and self pity, his never ending why me prayers. But the interesting thing about the Psalms, they always end in peace. Why is that? From my own experience, its because I have opened a dialog or conversation with God. And that gives Him the opportunity to intervene in my emotional chaos. I may not get what I thought I wanted but I do have peace. And I’m thinking more clearly than I was when I started yelling at God.
Steven Adams © 2008
Hebrews 4:16 (NIV)
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