Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3, says that there is a time for all things, a time to hate and a time to love, a time to mourn and a time to dance. If you have just lost a child, it is not a time to dance, it is a time to mourn. There are many times and many things that we need to grieve and/or that we will need to wrestle with. But we do need to realize that we can get stuck in our grieving/wrestling, in our pain, in our bitterness in our hopelessness, in our anger. There is a time to mourn and a time to grieve, a time to weep and a time to heal. A time to wrestle and a time to let go. A time to accept what we cannot change (see March 17) and a time to move on! But it is always the time to trust Him, and it is always the time to claim our inheritance.
It may take us a while to get to the place where we say “Satan has kept me bound for long enough, I want my inheritance – life in its abundance”. Satan is a thief, a robber and a destroyer, and he will rob you and me of our joy and your inheritance, if we let him (John 10:10). We may need to direct our anger at him rather than the persons or events he has manipulated to trip us up. We must not use the devil as an excuse for our own sin as in “The Devil made me do it”. But we do need to see that these things often lie behind a lot of what comes our way, and focusing on the persons and/or the circumstances he tweaks, can be counterproductive.
Scripture tells us “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual wickedness in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). Sure enough this one or that one hurt you, and as will we all, this one or that one will have to give an account, for there is a day of reckoning (Isaiah 61:2). But in the end, the real enemy, the one who plotted to hurt you is not the person or circumstances we tend to fixate on, no the real enemy is the one who uses them and their hurt and their pain and their emptiness to hurt you. As long as we direct our anger against “flesh and blood” we will be in prisons of our own making. To say this another way, as long as I believe that my happiness depends on another person changing, I am unlikely to achieve happiness. I have said it before and will need to say it again. It is not what happens to, us or what was done to us, that keeps us locked into the prisons of the past, it is our response to those things. When we are ready to move on, Paul in this wonderful book of Philippians, instructs us how to proceed. Is it a process, we will not achieve this in a day. I suspect that we need to get mad at the devil, and direct our natural stubbornness to making sure he has no foothold in our lives.
It is not for the feint of heart, and I don't believe that it can be done without Him, but it starts off with “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4). The first reaction to this may be “what”? I know mine was. At a very difficult time in my life, the Lord gave me new song based on Isaiah 61:10f. The first part went like this:
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord,
and my soul shall exult in my God;
For He has clothed me with the garments of salvation,
He has covered me with the robe of righteousness.
Some translations translate exult as 'be joyful'. It felt like a cruel joke at the time. All I could think was “Lord how do you expect me to rejoice at a time like this?” I have come to realize that not only was He not joking, but He was deadly serious. Isaiah probably had a hard time too. Paul certainly did, he wrote His letter to Philippians from Jail (1:16). But his letter is full of his joy in the Lord. He was not a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of guy. He and Silas were rejoicing and singing hymns at midnight the very day they were beaten with rods and thrown into prison (Acts 16:23-25). Paul makes the same point that the last two stanzas of the quotation above from Isaiah makes (covered in His righteousness), he says “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). Elsewhere he calls his sufferings light momentary afflictions (2 Corinthians 11:23-28; 4:17). The point is that when we set our minds and our hearts on the things which are above, it helps us to deal with the garbage down here (Colossians 3:1;1 Corinthians 2:9).
How do we do this? Well 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”. Philippians 4:4 is a command. We just need to do it. God does not command something He does not, with the command, give the wherewithal to perform (Philippians 2:13). It is as I say a process. I do not claim to have arrived. But I hear and seek to follows his example “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13,14). Part of this goal is the ability to rejoice in the Lord always. It's a powerful witness!
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