The Struggle is Real

Last Sunday morning, I was all around church as the service was happening. I ended up with my two little girls in the Family Room as Pastor Michael was nearing the end of the message, and what he said really caught my attention. I knew that I wanted to go home and listen to the rest of the sermon he preached on Psalm 51 and about David’s sin preceding his confession.

For years I have struggled with questioning my relationship with God.
“Am I really saved?” “Why do I keep committing the same sins over and over again?” I ask God for forgiveness and turn around and do the very thing I just confessed. During these past few years, anger is one of those things I have been struggling with the most. It’s something I was never really in touch with before. Most of my life (and even now), I have felt like I need to be happy all the time. If I am not, I feel like something is wrong with me. I’m not sure where that idea came from, but deep down I know it’s not true.

Through different resources like books, podcasts, and things my husband shared with me that related to anger, I realized that my anger was selfish. It wasn’t a God-honoring anger. The anger I felt when my oldest daughter fought bedtime for months…the anger I felt when I just wanted to make food and eat it without the ensuing chaos…the anger I felt when I needed or wanted help but didn’t ask for it…the anger I felt when I didn’t get my way—I knew that these moments of anger were selfish, but I kept (and still keep) going back to them.

Anger is just one example of the continual struggles in my flesh. As the struggles go on repeatedly, it is so easy to wonder if I’m really following God. If I’m following Jesus, why am I still continuing to struggle?
 
Back to the sermon from Sunday: Once I got the girls down for bed, I listened to the message, and it really spoke to me. I could relate to what he called “mulligan theology” , which he said was when some of us act and pray like our faith in Jesus gives us a “mulligan” , a “reset”, or a “do-over”. He said that this is bad theology because “...if the only thing Jesus gets you is a reset, you’ll screw it up again.” I also resonated with what he said about “...those who pray and feel shame when they say they are sorry—they feel like hypocrites because they did it again.” He said, “We are not hypocrites when we have the same struggle we had last week.” And to “...not think that we are hypocrites when we come before the Lord, confess the sin to Him, and then fail and have to confess it again.” He said that for most of us, “...we live our entire lives redirecting…we miss it and then we come back ...and for most of us we struggle with the same things for most of our lives.”

Hearing what he said encouraged me because these are things I have done! I have heard it so many times (but it seems to really be sinking in more recently), that being saved is only because of what Jesus did on the cross for me and for us all. We will all continue to struggle while we are here on Earth, but the difference for us who believe in Him is that we can continue to confess and bring our sins and struggles to Him. We can continue to draw closer to and be more like Him.
 
It has been hard for me to fully believe what God says about me or who I am in Him when I don’t really feel it a lot of times. But my feelings don’t always reflect what is true. I like this quote that Erin Childers shared with me from John Piper’s book “Finally Alive”:

“My feelings are not God. God is God. My feelings do not define truth. God’s word defines truth. My feelings are echoes and responses to what my mind perceives. And sometimes - many times - my feelings are out of sync with the truth. When that happens - and it happens every day in some measure - I try not to bend the truth to justify my imperfect feelings, but rather, I plead with God: Purify my perceptions of your truth and transform my feelings so that they are in sync with the truth.”

I am practicing choosing and believing that He saved me. I know that I can take my questions, doubts, anger, and feelings before Him, and He will remind me of what is true.