Hope In Suffering 4.12.2024
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”-Psalms 34:18 NLT
I had one of the most sleepless and miserable nights of my life last night, and honestly didn’t handle it well. So I’m extra motivated to share this in case it’s helpful for anyone going through a hard time, thinking of many friends with lots of different backgrounds who are going through various challenges right now, some even very life-threatening. This is a large collection of my most go-to prayers, reminders of God’s promises, verses, and ideas I cling to and remind myself of when I’m searching for peace and trying to keep my focus on Jesus, especially through difficult times. I pray it blesses anyone it can as these things have blessed me.
God, You desire for us to have intimate and authentic relationships with You. You promise Your children that You will forgive us giving us the gift of salvation that cannot be earned or lost… You will bless us, help us, heal us (if not fully in this life, than fully in the next with unimaginably perfect indestructible and everlasting new bodies)… You will lead us, comfort us, strengthen us, delight in us, sing over us, calm all of our fears with Your love, pour Your Spirit out on us, cause every evil act to backfire- working all things together for our benefit, and giving us more than victory over every battle, for Your glory, answering every prayer according to Your perfect timing, process, and will.
Jesus you went through unimaginable suffering that we each would have rightly deserved when You were beaten and crucified and experienced the full wrath of God in our place, instead of us, because of Your passionate love for us, though You were and are perfect and completely innocent, which means our flaws are much worse than we realize, because few people if any of us think of our flaws as that bad, warranting that severe of punishment… But we trust this is the case because it’s what Jesus taught, and we trust that Jesus died in our place in order to forgive us and offer us salvation through the gift of faith in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection from the dead, rescuing us from Hell, and giving us the free gift of eternal life only a perfect life like Jesus’s deserves. So we trust that Jesus earned for us what we could never have earned for ourselves, and gives it to us as a free, though costly, gift, and exactly how anyone receives this gift is a mystery. But it’s a gift we cannot take credit for. And this all means that we are no better or worse than anyone in all history, despite appearances, each of us being capable of any evil or even worse evils than anyone has known, a truth that should humble us more and more against looking down on anyone always, and make us more and more grateful for the gift of faith we’ve received.
Lord please help us to trust You sincerely from our hearts about everything and give us wisdom for what that looks like. Help us to rely on Your strength over our own and again give us wisdom for what that looks like. Let Your strength be made perfect in our weaknesses. Help us to be in awe and wonder of Your beauty, even in the midst of any trouble, loving You more and more, and infinitely beyond anything or anyone else all the time.
Help us to turn away from all thoughts, feelings, and actions that do not please You, motivated in all things more and more by gratitude for all You’ve done for us already. Laying down more and more any striving in vain to find our worth and purpose in our accomplishments, our performance, pleasure, power, relationships, money, or anything other than Your love for us. Loving others as You have loved us, full of humility, though imperfectly, and caring for the world You have given us responsibility over, deeply rooted and connected with Your family, our brothers and sisters You’ve given us in the Body of Christ, as Your beloved children with You as our Perfect Heavenly Father, as Your flock with You as our Great Shepherd, like clusters of grapes closely connected with each other and completely dependent on You our Vine… in Your Royal Family with You our King, The King of all Kings, as Your Citizens of Heaven, and as the Bride of Christ with You as our Ultimate and Perfect Spouse. One with each other even as You are mysteriously one, Father, Son, and Spirit in order to help more and more people believe in You because of our unity as Jesus said they would, and for the joy of being so united.
Help us to follow the wisdom in Your Holy Scriptures that says our plans succeed with counsel from a multitude of mature believers and fail without such counsel. And help us to follow the command You gave us to yield to healthy leadership within Your church not forsaking gathering together as some do, for our benefit and everyone’s benefit. And help us to connect to You and to be nourished by Your Holy Scriptures regularly, remembering that we don’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from You.
Lord fulfill Your promise to give us all we need as we seek first Your Kingdom and Your righteousness. Help us to be unhurried, unworried, and unafraid, and to bring our hearts to You honestly and humbly. Guard our hearts and guard our minds with the peace that surpasses all understanding, as we rejoice in You always, bringing You all our requests, and thanking You in advance for what You are doing right this moment that we can’t yet perceive and for what You’ve already done in the past, and what You are already planning to do in the future.
In Jesus’s name. Amen
Heaven will be infinitely better than the best Heaven anyone could imagine.
If we can imagine only and ever increasing joy for all eternity, every relationship perfect and peaceful, all wrongs undone and made right, everything brand new, and all sad things untrue (like waking up from the worst nightmare that didn’t actually happen), every evil act reversed and backfiring to make things somehow even better having happened rather than not (all this my best yet imagining)… the truth is that Heaven will be infinitely better and greater than that, however it actually is, and please Lord give us the tastes of Heaven available to us now.
Father, Son, and Spirit You are with us, closer than anything or anyone always, in our greatest joys and our worst suffering and everything else, and able to bring us deep joy even in the midst of any suffering, You are heartbroken along side us when we are, even more than we are, even if it doesn’t feel like it, and You have a perfect plan to make it right. You can stop or prevent any pain with one word, but have perfect and good reasons for allowing these things, though Your reasons are far beyond our ability to fully understand… and things like that aren’t always helpful to hear when we’re in pain. So help us to be present with others as You are present with us, silent when it’s best to be silent, always quick to listen and slow to speak, not making things worse by rushing to “fix” things for others, or saying things that aren’t helpful, however true our words may be, when someone just needs quiet company, a hug, or even space, with wisdom for healthy boundaries in all aspects of our lives and helping us to not affirm or enable any harmful behaviors in others’ lives, again with all humility. Giving us the ability to comfort others with the same comfort You have given us, as You promise us we will, remembering that while our troubles are often the result of our own doing (at least to an extent), sometimes our troubles are not at all our fault. Appearances can be very deceiving, and there is a very real spiritual battle happening that we are not usually able to see. Yet help us to become aware of and take responsibility for any fault of our own, and to turn things around in Your strength, remembering that we will never be perfect this side of Heaven, but helping us to continue growing more and more into Your likeness all the time.
“O Lord, how long will You forget me? Forever? How long will You look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God! Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, “We have defeated him!” Don’t let them rejoice at my downfall. But I trust in Your unfailing love. I will rejoice because You have rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because He is good to me.”
Psalms 13:1-6 NLT
