“To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.’ And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return’” (Genesis 3:16-19).
Life is going to be hard. There will be good times, and happy times, of course. But there will also be times of pain, of sadness, times where we are relatively well off and times where we can barely get by. Ecclesiastes 3:1-22 will elaborate on that for you.
God tells us that this life, the one we’re engaged in now, is not about making you or me, happy. Does that mean that He does not care about our happiness? No. Psalm 37:4: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
But we do need to be truly honest with ourselves in that, sometimes life is not going to be perfect. It certainly won’t be how we script it in our heads when we go to bed at night. Accepting this truth that we will sometimes have to live in a state of “unhappiness” – whether that means we are dealing with physical pain, emotional heartache, frustration, even anxiety.
The good news is that God is doing us a huge favor in Genesis. He is telling us what we are going to have to deal with in life. He is giving us a road map for what we can expect. Granted, the physical sets of circumstances that we all deal with are going to be different because we are all living separate individual lives. But, we can all expect to deal with relatively the same things. Good and evil, love and hate, happiness and sadness, physical pain and emotional heartache, laughing and crying. These are basic experiences of humanity.
Knowing that we will live in a state of “displeasure” and a state of “pain” and “unhappiness”, is a pretty powerful tool. But it’s not easy to do. So, what are some practical steps that we can take from the Bible to use to respond appropriately when we are stuck in a situation when we need to just grin and bear it a bit?
The first piece of advice: Stop caring about some things: “Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
“Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
“But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:25-34).
But do we really understand what these verses mean for our daily lives? Most people probably know exactly what this scripture says: “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25).
Do we truly appreciate the ramifications of that statement and the following question? Because it goes to the heart of society. It’s man’s most fundamental question. Why are we here? What is my purpose? Is it the clothes that I wear, is it the car that I drive, is it the job that I have, is it the vacation that I can take? Is it how much money I can get in my 401K [retirement fund] before I retire?
“Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” Christ is saying what our life is not to be about and then spends the rest of His life showing us what it is to be about. In fact, the statement Christ makes is about life in general. Don’t be anxious.
He goes on and compares us to birds, lilies and even grass. “O you of little faith”, He admonishes us: “Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 6:30).
So what do you care about? What do you put your time and effort into thinking about? Working toward? I’m writing to tell you to care about the Kingdom. To care about righteousness.
What the world wants you to care about is absolutely, completely and utterly useless in the Kingdom of God. Our ultimate personal test in seeing what we care and don’t care about is to see if we can truly envision that world tomorrow, that Kingdom of God, in our lives today and to set our sights on it and live our lives in a way that represents the Kingdom now. The challenge is to own where we focus our time and energy.
My second point: Know what not to be afraid of. This ties in with the first point because once you choose not to care about something, you can’t be afraid of the consequences of it. But there is an appropriate fear. “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul,” (Deuteronomy 10:12).
My point in talking about fear is to acknowledge that there are a lot of physical things out there that we have to look at and deal with and face. That can and does debilitate us. They prevent us from doing something. I’m not talking about the fear of heights, the fear of spiders or the fear of the dark. Those are real and I’m not downplaying them. I’m talking more of some of the more debilitating fears in terms of our personal lives. The fear of failure, the fear of rejection, fear of the unknown. Fear of the future. Fear of the past.
At its core, fear is the mother of inaction, and it empowers faithlessness. Fear empowers faithlessness, don’t let fear, whatever it is in our physical lives, prevent us from being the kind of people that our Father expects us to be now.
The Bible is filled with examples of men and women taking incredible action because they know who to fear and what not to fear. They were not all perfect, but God believed they were noteworthy and had them recorded. If you read the book of Judges, you will find many parallels to the time we live in now.
Take note of how many times someone acted in a situation that would have freaked us out, when we would have been paralyzed with fear. Examples of people unafraid of physical barriers that stood in their way, whether technologically advanced armies, or the political establishment of the time, public sentiment, or popular opinion. Those people stood up and took action based on godly fear and faith in God that He will fight their battles for them.
“It is the LORD who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8). That was Moses’ advice to Joshua.
My last point: Get your sleep. It may sound ridiculous but get your sleep. We are physical beings with physical limitations. There are certain aspects of our physical existence that are critical for optimal performance. My first two points about figuring out what you care and don’t care about and knowing what to fear and what not to fear, is not some intellectual exercise. The rubber meets the road every second of every minute of every day that we are awake. How we choose what to say; how we choose what not to say. What we put in an email; what we don’t put in an email. What we choose to eat; what we don’t choose to eat. What we choose to watch and not watch. Because focusing on what truly matters in life, taking the fears that can overcome us in life out of the equation altogether, requires incredible focus. Requires incredible time and effort. It’s a personal engagement throughout a lifelong process.
Things are going to change in our life and require us to re-analyze everything I just talked about: What you fear, what you don’t. What you care about and what you don’t. That’s why God equates our body to a temple. Buildings and temples don’t just stay clean. They don’t just stay nice. They need maintenance. Our lives need maintenance. In fact, sleep is something He gives us to refresh and enliven us. It’s a critical component of what we do.
“It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Psalm 127:2). He gives it to us. It’s a gift. We can’t be the people we need to be to attain the level of godly character that God intends if we are becoming exhausted. It’s not possible. There are times in our lives when sleep is most elusive. Maybe having a baby is one of those, or finals week. A big project at work, a good friend’s wedding. There are always times in life when we are going to get a little less sleep than we would have wanted. It’s about the habits that we create in our life. It’s about the self-control that we place on yourselves. God gives us sleep as a way of rejuvenating and re-engaging our psyche and our physical bodies.
Not amazingly, go figure, science confirms and proves the importance of sleep in our lives. The science behind sleep and its importance to our performance cannot be understated. When we are young, little children, we do most of our physical growth during sleep. Throughout our lives, regardless of how old you are, you do your best healing when you sleep. Sleep is an incredibly powerful and critical physical component of our lives. It is so important that some industries have invested so much money in the science of it that Fatigue Risk Management Systems are in and of itself their own cottage industry. In some industries you have entire businesses dedicated to managing a staff’s sleep, because it is so critical to the safety of the operation. So, get your sleep. Preferably eight hours a night.
The worldly perspective of happiness and its never-ending pursuit of it, its talk of “Do whatever makes you happy”; is a ridiculous notion. It’s not realistic. It has no basis in any life that anyone has ever lived since the dawn of man. Do whatever makes you happy, that’s ridiculous. Anyone who tells you that is lying. And it totally goes against what God and the life that He wants us to live is about.
We will endure times of displeasure and unhappiness. Knowing that we will experience those times, knowing how we can approach those portions of our lives, and understanding the role they play in the bigger picture, means everything. It means that we should be some of the happiest people around.
Because when we are going through something that is not fun, that we don’t enjoy, we can still say, “Yeah, there’s a big important reason for that.” I know exactly what that is and I know why, in the bigger picture I am having to go through it. We may not know why you’re going through it now. But we know for the whole purpose, for the end of time, why we are having to deal with something. That’s a massive, massive perspective about which 99% of the population has no idea.
God is an amazing and formidable Creator. There is a role for each one of us in His house in His Kingdom. He has given us this beautiful life to develop us, to build us into a family that will inherit a world with no more crying, no more sorrow, no more war. There will be a time when that is the case. And the entire process, the process of becoming heirs of that Kingdom, is an individual walk with God throughout our lives.
We should and we can empathize with each other because we don’t go through this life alone. We experience it with our family, with our friends, with our Church family, our work colleagues. We can and should empathize, confide in, and share our life experiences with one another. Because that also helps us to deal with the difficult and sad times. We should also share the good ones.
So, let’s live this life with passion and vigor for the things that matter most. Step out boldly, confidently and without fear in your personal, educational, and professional lives. We know who that God goes “before” us. And at the end of the day, get your sleep. It’s God’s admonition backed up by science if you needed science to convince you. And oh, it’s what your mother would want.
Ryan Andrews