Should You Trust a God Who Seems to Be Failing You?

Faith holds that God is present in our struggles but making sense of His presence is often complicated and confusing. Even the Scriptures can add to the confusion of our suffering. Can we continue to trust what seems to be failing us?

At times we torture ourselves, rolling through the list of what we did wrong to cause our situation. Then there are times when we feel like hopeless victims of a sinful world. And when the circumstances don’t change, we can start to believe that God has nothing to say except for biblical or church clichés. Is God trying to tell us to just pick ourselves up and carry on? Or try harder?

We are told to believe in 2 Timothy 3:16, that all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for our edification, encouragement, and to strengthen our faith. Still, we often use—or well-meaning people offer—passages of Scripture that have no interaction with our hearts. We are people of formulas. They make life easier. We do this and that, and everything will work better. God will not allow us to use formulas with Him, even when we include Scripture as part of the formula.

God is always interested in having a conversation with us, and He is always interested in engaging our hearts with Who He is. He wants us to know Him and, through the Holy Spirit, He engages us to be restored to the image we were created in.

God uses our most difficult situations, not so He can fix a single problem, but so that by them and through them, He brings our hearts into conversation with Him in a very personal and meaningful way. In that place, He will speak more personally and intimately about His love and care for you. It is there where life is transformed, and the restoration of our image-bearing happens.

This attitude can be hard to come by, though, because our circumstances can make us feel so badly and even instigate us to believe what is not true. Even a slightly skewed perspective provides fertile soil for lies to take root and grow. This is why counseling is so important.

Seeking counsel in the midst of your struggle is wise and good. We were never meant to navigate the struggles of life alone. Now, let me tell you how you can receive the most significant and longest-lasting benefit from counseling: come with a desire not just to find relief from a particular struggle but to find the strength and grace to live all of life differently.

You can come to counseling to fix a problem, but God loves you so much that He is going to invite you to so much more.