The Right Fight

I love this rainy pre-fall weather. It gives me hope that crisp cool mornings on the porch are just around the corner. Mmm, fall is the best time of year, hands down.

I recently prayed for a sweet woman who has faced many hard circumstances, which are so overwhelming for her! She was afraid and filled with anxiety over what her future may hold. Her cry for prayer was for the Lord to help her, but she felt responsible to stand up under the weight of pressure all by herself, and she felt weak and exhausted! Some of us may be able to relate.

During our prayer, one of the things the Lord put on my heart to pray for her is that this is not her fight, it’s God’s. Her only fight… the only thing she must be concerned with… is to believe God and take Him at His Word (Mark 5:36). He can be trusted to take care of everything that concerns her (Psalm 138:8). In those prayerful moments, I said to her, “You fight to believe God and He will take care of the rest.” I believe that is a truth from which we can all benefit.

Fight the good fight for the true faith. Hold tightly to the eternal life to which God has called you, which you have declared so well before many witnesses.

1 Timothy 6:12

What do we typically fight for? Right away, the first things I think of are more time and more money. I think that’s something we can all agree on! Having just a few more hours in each day seems like it would solve so many of life’s problems. And I can think of a list of needs I could spend extra money on right now!

We fight for our families. We work hard to provide for them, to oversee and protect them, and sometimes we worry and fear over what the future will look like.

In the natural world, we spend a lot of time fighting for our needs to be met, our feelings to be understood, our voices to be heard.

All too often, we fight for perfection. Perfect home, perfect car, perfect self, perfect children. Everything must be perfectly clean, updated, and organized. Compared to every other seemingly perfect person around us, we ourselves must also be perfect.

As a side note, I want to see what is hidden in the back closets of those perfect lives. That is where the real needs are. Those are the unspoken prayer requests silently crying out for answers. Because life demands to be imperfect, perfection in the natural world is a myth… and perfectionism is a hiding place for old wounds in need of healing.

When we pursue excellence, we’re determined to do something as well as possible within a given set of talents, resources, and time limits. But perfectionism is a pride- or fear-based compulsion that either fuels our obsessive fixation on doing something perfectly or paralyzes us from acting at all — both of which often result in the harmful neglect of other necessary or good things… Perfectionism nearly always has its roots in our desire for acceptance and fear of rejection.

Jon Bloom, Lay Aside the Weight of Perfection, DesiringGod.Org, 2017.

We fight to do right, be right, and have the right things. But what I so often find under the surface of all that “right” is a level of self-medicating, temporary bandaging, or outright ignoring wounds that just won’t heal.

There are so many Christians, like the sweet lady I mentioned earlier, who suffer for years and years because their focus is on the wrong fight.

Boy, have I been there and done that…

The Fight to Believe

Now all glory to God, who is able, through His mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think.  Glory to Him in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations forever and ever! Amen.

Ephesians 3:20-21

You know, life is hard. We go through so much from childhood to adulthood, and it can weigh us down. After taking hit after hit from life’s circumstances, the human spirit can begin to harden as we grow weary of the fight.

That is why it is so important to know where to focus our energies. Worry and fear will drain us and rob us of all peace. Standing alone under difficult circumstances as we keep fighting for our human sense of “right” will bring us down to the ground in heaviness and despair. No one wants to live that way!

However, when we determine to stand on Faith and Believing, and as we focus our fight on waiting on the Lord to act on our behalf, we will have renewed strength to stand and keep standing, no matter what our circumstances may be (Isaiah 40:31, Ephesians 6:13).

For my sweet friend in prayer, we prayed that God would help her to take her eyes off of every circumstance and place them on the Lord. As she looks up to Him… to the Mountains from where her help comes (Psalm 121:1-2)… He will storm down and command the enemy to flee in every direction on her behalf (Psalm 18).

Then He will give her His joy and His peace in exchange for worry, fear, and striving.

“…beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for heaviness; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified.”

Isaiah 61:3

My prayer for all of us today is that we hear God speaking renewed faith over us and in the center of our hearts, just between us and Him. He can do so much more than we know, but we must be the one to cast our cares upon Him.

That is the act of simply believing.

Trusting God to take our burdens is an action born only out of faith.

In some cases, heartache will still come, because that is life. Believing in God does not change the fact that we must live in this human world and experience very human things. However, it does mean that we do not have to go through them alone.

And much more than that, we are able to face them with a powerful God who turns everything around for our good (Romans 8:28).

Let Him carry the burden for you today? Fight the good fight of faith. Fight to remain faithful to Him. He will never leave you nor forsake you. He will help you if you will let Him.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful.

2 Timothy 4:7