What to do in a challenging situation

We’re talking about how to overcome difficult circumstances and challenges in our lives. It doesn’t matter how difficult your Business situation is, or how challenging your finances, relationships, health are, God wants to help you. And it doesn’t mean that suddenly everything is going to turn around and you’ll become a millionaire. What I am saying is that God wants to guide you out of the wilderness and into the promised land. With God things can improve and be better than you ever expected.

Sometimes businesses don’t work simply because it wasn’t a God idea; maybe it was your idea. Sometimes we might even feel like this is a God thing, but bad things just happen because we live in a fallen world and we have an enemy that doesn’t want us to succeed. We shouldn’t get introspective about why this didn’t happen or that happened, because the truth of the matter is that no matter what happens, God is good and He wants to help us out of every negative situation. Don’t get a nitpicky about “why did this happen?” “How did this happen?” The reality is that it happened and now you need to get out of it; now you need change in your situation. You want your health to improve. You want that relationship to turn around. You want your finances to increase. You want to help out of your business trouble. Whether that’s the business closing and you starting a better one or whether its your business turning around and just starting to make profits. Whatever your situation is, you want change, you want it to turn around. Psalm 34:8 says, “taste and see that the Lord is good”. We should be experiencing – tasting and seeing – the goodness of God. So how do we experience the goodness of God? How is it that we can experience the abundant life?

Firstly, you need to have a relationship with Jesus. And if you don’t have a relationship with Jesus, if you’ve never received him as your saviour and become a Christian, then I want to encourage you to contact me and I would love to minister to you to give you some information and pray with you and lead you to salvation. But for those of us who are born again, who are Christians, how do we get out of difficult situations? For a lot of us, we kind of just sit there and go, “okay, I wonder if God’s going to do anything about it.” Or, “So when is God going to come through?”

It’s like in Exodus where Moses was expecting God to do everything and God says to him, “stop crying out to me and lift up your staff and you divide the waters.” (Exodus 14:15) God has given us authority to overcome. So all we need to do is, overcome. The enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy, but Jesus comes to give life and life abundantly – God’s will for you is abundant life! Whenever there’s stealing, theft, if there’s destruction in your life, it’s not God, it’s the devil. And we need to realize that and start rejecting what the devil is trying to throw at us and we need to start accepting what God is offering to us. James 4:7 says, “submit yourself to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you.” There’s things that you need to submit to and there’s things that you need to resist. To submit to something means you accepted it. So, you need to accept what is from God and you need to accept God. Obviously, you need to submit and yield to him and his ways. And then we need to resist, which means to actively fight against, the devil.

Don’t just accept the financial troubles, business troubles, relationship troubles, health problems, and all that type of stuff. Don’t just accept it as God’s trying to teach you something (because that’s dodgy doctrine!). You need to actively fight against those things because they are not there to bless you. They are there to destroy you. And for some people, challenges and problems end up destroying them. Maybe they even end up taking their own life. And that’s not God’s will for you. He’s a good loving, heavenly father who wants to help you out of your challenging circumstances. But in order for that to happen, you’ve got to know, firstly, the Lord is good (taste and see that the Lord is good) and that God wants you to experience his goodness. He’s only got good things in store for you. And then, most of us need to change our perspective of God. Most of us wrongly believe that God is only giving us what we deserve but that’s not Christianity. God doesn’t give you what you deserve. Grace means that he treats you better than you deserve. Maybe you made some bad decisions in life which have gotten you to this point in your life where things are just going wrong and it’s just negative. Now you think, “well, case sera sera, whatever will be will be… I am just reaping what I’ve sown.” And yeah, there’s elements of truth in all of that, but very small shreds of truth covered up in a bunch of lies. God doesn’t give you what you deserve; he treats you in grace – better than you deserve!

Hebrews 4:16 says, “let us therefore come boldly”, not timidly, not sheepishly, but come boldly “unto the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in our time of need.” So in your time of need, at your lowest point, when you’re failing, when things are not working out, the scripture encourages you to come boldly to the throne of grace, not the throne of judgment where you get what you deserve, but the throne of grace where you get treated better than you deserve. And at that throne of grace, you may obtain mercy, which means you don’t get treated as you deserve, but you get grace (treated better than you deserve). Mercy is you don’t get what you deserve. So at the throne of grace, you’re not going to get what you deserve, but you’re going to find grace and empowering, much more than you deserve to help you in your time of need. Isn’t that powerful? At your lowest point with all your challenges, the best thing to do is just stop trying, look to God and say, “help God, I need you. Please show me what to do?” Trust him. Put your focus on him and not on your efforts and wisdom – just trust him. He can help you out of your situation if it’s negative, and if you’re in a good situation, he can help you get to an even better level.