“Life is not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”  I love the scene in Rocky Balboa when Sylvester Stallone, as Rocky, tells his son that.

Problems, Problems

Whether you agree with his statement or not, you will probably agree that life and the devil hit us pretty hard sometimes.  There may be problems with our finances, our marriage, our kids, our health… Everyone faces some kind of problems, and that’s nothing new.  While we may have similar problems, we have unique ways of handling them.  Some people go through the fire and come out refined on the other side of them.  Some of us make it a practice to find temporary ways around our problems – to ease the immediate pain we’re feeling – but we are only postponing the problems.

How should we handle it when life hits hard and does not ease up?  When the pressure builds to the point that we don’t feel we can take much more and then it builds some more?  What about when we breathe a sigh of relief that our problem has finally met a solution and things have finally smoothed out – only to have a bigger and more chronic crisis hit us smack-dab in the face the next day?

Spiritually Mature Response to Problems…Or Sometimes Not

It can be disheartening.  I know how it feels.  Some Christians seem to gain victory, keep their peace, and overcome their situations more readily than others.  I’ll confess that my natural tendency is to be in the “than others” category.  Sometimes I just get DOWN.  Everything weighs on me.  I get the “I know better than this, I’ve heard the sermons, I’ve bought the t-shirts, I’ve memorized the Bible verses, but I CAN”T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!” syndrome.  I know… I know… not a very spiritually mature response.  If you are like me and struggle like this at times, then how can we keep moving forward in our Christian lives instead of giving up, giving in, and just believing the devil’s lies or our own negative thoughts?

6 Ways to Keep Moving Forward:

1. Make a decision not to quit no matter what happens.  Even if we get “down” for a time, we keep going.  We make a decision ahead of time -when things are going well- that when troubles come we will cling to God.  We will take life one day at a time (or even one minute at a time), we will trust that somehow and someday (in His time) He will bring us through each situation.

2. Keep praying and spending time alone with God.  This is always the key step in everything – but we probably cannot hear it too many times. Even if we feel we have no strength to read and no words to pray, we can go sit alone with our Bibles open and just ask Him to be there with us.  He is our best friend.  Romans 8:26 says, “… the [Holy] Spirit also helps our weaknesses, for we don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which can’t be uttered.”  Maybe we won’t feel any different that day or for many days, but we need to keep getting alone with Him anyway.  If we never have any time to get alone (moms with small children face this sometimes) grab “moments” alone with Him – in the shower, when we close our eyes at night, driving to work in the car, etc…

3. Ask God to encourage us.  I have mentioned Joyce Meyer before… I heard her talking about this, and it got my attention.  I guess I had never thought about asking Him to encourage me.  After all, He knows when we need encouragement, but when we ask Him to encourage us, we are acknowledging our need and activating our faith in Him to supply it.

4. Remember that God is with us.  The Bible says we need to rejoice and be thankful always (Phil 4:4, Eph 5:20).  Paul did, Jesus did, and if we’re spiritual we will too – right?  Well… rejoicing and being thankful do not always show up at the top of my “to-do” list when I feel discouraged.  There is a reason we can always rejoice and be thankful though, no matter what we are going through.  If we have surrendered our lives to Jesus and trusted Him as our Savior, then God has promised He will never leave us (Josh 1:5, Heb 13:5).  We never go through anything alone again.

5. Remember that God loves us.  When we get disheartened in the middle of life’s hard hits, we may feel that God is not happy with us or that He is disappointed in us.  There are many things in us, including our attitudes sometimes, that God is in the process of changing, but He is always loving us.  For me personally, this is something I am still learning even though I know it is true.  If we surrender our lives to God, through Jesus, our lives will not be easy, but His love for us is far greater than all the hits we take in this life.

6. Remember Jesus understands what we go through.  “For we don’t have a high priest who can’t be touched with the feeling of our infirmities… (Heb 4:15).  Jesus suffered more than we can imagine, and He completely understands our feelings and sufferings.  No one else may care or know what we are feeling on the inside, but He does.

Christian Kindred, don’t quit the journey.

God loves you.