Jesus never said life with him would be easy. He never promised that every moment would be sweeter than the next. In fact, if you look at the lives of his closest followers in the Bible you will see that almost all of them where consistently overwhelmed with physical, spiritual, and emotional situations. The good news? He is with you everywhere you go. You may be in an extremely overwhelming situation and you are thinking, “Why would God let me go through this? Why won’t he just take it away?”, when in actuality he is the one who led you to it. When I think about my salvation story, I realize that it took an overwhelming situation to bring me to Jesus. The thing about overwhelming situations in your life is that Jesus either allowed it to happen, or caused it to happen…which means he is in full control. The great thing about overwhelming situations is that it’s not a sin to feel overwhelmed…even when the church tells you it is.
Unfortunately, many people in the church will tell you that if you are feeling overwhelmed, you must have done something against God to get there. Take Job for instance…he lost everything in his life (kids, money, house, etc.) except his wife. After that, his three friends came up to him to comfort him, only to eventually tell him that he must’ve sinned against God for all of this to happen. For years the church has done a really good job of telling Christians that it’s not ok to be overwhelmed. You’ve probably heard this before: “Oh you are feeling overwhelmed and stressed out eh? You must not be reading your Bible because if you were closer to God you wouldn’t be experiencing this trial.” The problem with this statement is Jesus…he was/is closer to God than anyone else in history, yet he cried out an overwhelming plea to God when he had to take on all of our sin and be separated from God. People will tell you that you must not be close to God to be feeling overwhelmed, when you are actually closer to God because he is putting you in an overwhelming situation. Look at Paul, he was extremely close to Jesus, but he almost died every time he spoke about him. Feeling overwhelmed is not a sin…it’s how we handle it that matters. Look at every overwhelming situation as an opportunity to learn something and grow from and it will dramatically shift your perspective on it.
Are you feeling overwhelmed? Good, because it means you are headed towards a breakthrough in your life and Jesus is about to turn the temperature up in your devotion to him.
