This may be the very reason we are losing so many people in church: inauthenticity. Yes, it is uncomfortable to speak and hear our mutual struggles. We do have a victorious Lord, but it is messy, not everyone gets healed or has their financial or relational issues resolved. Do we still love and trust? Part of being the Church is caring for each other, and if we don’t share our struggles with each other, how can we do that? So yes, 100% I agree.
Yes!!!! This! Beautiful and rich with grace. I recently told my sister as we talked about healings. My words were..,, what if Gods glory is revealed in the unanswerable. What if how we walk out our struggles with faith in God even in the unanswered is the testimony that speaks the loudest.
Thank you for sharing this beautiful and very valid message. I love and can relate to your thoughts captured. Stay strong in faith and don’t give up hope.
So much of my testimony is based on my Faith, trust and belief that God is in the fire with me. We always make it through the struggle. No the answer doesn't come like we would want it and a lot of times, not at all. Pain is real. Suffering happens every day. There are roadblocks in our walk but we press on. We press in. People don't share their wounds, their journeys because of the fear of what other people might think about them. It's when I am real with my testimony that people often draw close to Jesus. My messy, unkept life is what allows them to put their guards down and breathe. I'm just like them. Living in the same confusing, messy and often times, painful situations . It's there, in the muck and mire, they see that He walks with me in my story because even if the miracle hasn't happened, my faith in Him shows them, I won't give up. Thanks for sharing this. It is good. ❤️🤗
Love your ❤️ heart and your love for Jesus…. Always inspiring me to keep going. So many times, so many times, it's been tough. The struggle is real! But I have companions in women like you that motivate me to hang on to the thread on the Hem of Jesus’ garment, because if I can just touch Him, hang on to Him… I know I will be ok. ❤️
This is so important and thank you for addressing this. We learn so much in suffering, it is a necessary testimony in the crucible of such refining fires transforming our minds and hearts, we become unified aligning ourselves and joining in the fellowship of Jesus Christ's suffering and the unity in his death and then resurrection life.
That's the truth of our life as a new creation in Christ, the genuine authentic high calling and walk in Christ Jesus. You are going to suffer, & for Christ & it is meaningful & necessary and how to suffer well, without getting angry, blaming God, or self blame, falling into self pity, or woe is me etc. But if you suffer for doing good and endure it patiently, God is pleased with you. It becomes as a sweet savoury incense wafting up to heavens throne itself. Go through Jesus' own life and examine deeply his life & of the early disciples & Christians & the letters of Peter. The deeper we go with Christ the more the suffering. It is our eternal level of demonstration and display of Gods love.
To share in everything with Jesus to be unified with him in life & into eternity. There is no resurrection life without the crushing of Gethsemane agony & suffering, & with crucifixion of self.
There is much purpose in it. There are no short cuts to sanctification or to glorification. Sadly today the contemporary churches refuse to tell the truth of what it means to count the cost in living as Jesus' disciple and how normal & imperative it is to enter into the sufferings of Christ. So many sadly live in entitlement, we are NOT entitled to anything in this life, but privileged to full inheritance of relationship with Heavenly father and unity of fellowship immovable with Christ indeed entering in to his sufferings.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 states of the majority of Christians in the end times, this was written to and about Christians:
Cheap talk is a form of godliness without power. Words without deeds and of sufferings is cheap, many lives are devoid of any self sacrifice, gruelling effort, and suffering through endurance and perseverance and never learn to bear up under great trial and suffering and the willingness to suffer. The Laodicean delusion are so fat in their flesh but are poor blind and naked, yet believe they are in need of nothing!
We learn far more about ourselves God & Jesus who want to mould and shape our character to whom God wants us to confirm into the image of his Son, to depend far more on our father in heaven. There is power and purpose in affliction. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him. Ephesians 1:17 How do we think we ever get to know and having a knowing of our God?
Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Romans 18:17-18
We become also co-heirs in Jesus' sufferings.
Not only so, but we also *glory in our sufferings*, because we KNOW that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, *hope. And hope does not put us to shame*, because *God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us*. Romans 3:3-5
This is meant to be our hearts cry that we see everything is rubbish and dung compared to our illustrious riches of being unified in Christ Jesus. Knowing the hatred, the rejection, the slander, the betrayal, the isolation, the attacks, trials,testings, persecutions, the struggles against temptation & sin & through our sufferings being dead to sin, so that we too can share in his glory!
And to also suffer & self sacrifice for our fellow brothers and sisters. Not just in words but in deeds!! For their needs. And willing to die for them. Just as Jesus did for us- no greater love has one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. Do we pray asking our father 'I want to share in your beloved son & my beloved Christ's sufferings to comprehend it's purpose, grasping understanding him and so to become more like him?'
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, Philippians 3:8-10
"You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have."~Corrie Ten Boom
"Love will always manifest itself in the degree to which it is willing to suffer towards the object of its love." ~Corrie Ten Boom
How was Gods love manifest to all humanity? Through Jesus Christ's sacrificial crucified life death burial resurrection and ascension. So how do we then demonstrate & reflect His love back to Him and to others? It is sacrificial, it is crucifying, it is selfless, it costs us, and expense to ourselves, and it is made and exhibited in & through suffering or we are merely lovers of self.
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. 1 Peter 5:8-11
And we can also then help & comfort others in how we have been loved and comforted, how our father in heaven spoke to us such personal encouraging words of spirit and life and his love over us in abundance in our fruitful privileged suffering, it is not in vain.
(2 Corinthians 1:6-7, 8-11; Hebrews 10:32-39)
Jesus was a man of sorrows & acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not. Everyone's faith has to be proven to see the genuinesss of our faith. It's easy to serve God when everything is easy, it's when it gets very tough do we truly understand how to exercise our faith in God walking by the unseen as seen, and deepening our intimacy with Him. And learning to be led by the spirit of God not being led by our flesh, not going after selfish ambition,self validation and power, or dominionism, or self aggrandisement. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Romans 8:14
I love this Sarah. I have so many unresolved testimonies ... my family not yet accepting Jesus; my prayers that ended up in grief instead of healing; my family separations etc. YET I still pray and hope and have faith that He will turn these around. Perhaps not in my timing but His.
“And I want to hear them because, to me, they are still testimonies.” YES! I’ve been saying this to my friends as I’ve walked with many people who haven’t had their stories resolved, and now I’m one of them. But holding onto faith in the midst of that is pretty miraculous, and worth sharing.
I love this. Clinging to faith in spite of unanswered prayers, is a testimony. It might be a bigger testimony that the transformational testimony seen in the church.
Ican so relate. I've been laid off in 2018. Started working in 2022. Hubby still unemployed. I still have a huge shortfall on my salary. I have received so many promises and prophecies from different people about breakthroughs.Struggling with that why question. But still trusting (or trying to}
It is also essential (and a challenge for me as an introvert) to separate my faith from my feelings. I have to keep on reminding myself that faith is not a feeling, and just because I’m feeling low doesn’t mean that I don’t believe!
Oh my gosh! This! There are so many precious moments revealed in the waiting. My substack is Fed by Ravens because without those tidbits from the Lord, I would be undone. Think of all the biblical accounts of the waiting or the wilderness. David running from Saul. Sarah and Abraham waiting for the fulfillment of the promise. Elijah. Ruth. Moses in the wilderness and so many more! There is beauty in the crushing! What does it say? That our fragrance is the fragrance of Christ to the unbeliever. When does a flower most give its fragrance? When it is crushed. This has been part of my disillusionment with the church. There's so often the aspect of...your story isn't good enough. Your story isn't finished. But tell us how you are hanging on or Jesus has you and you are no longer holding on! My daughter is a fentanyl addict and every time I go to the street with her, I see Jesus there. And I feel bad for all those who attend church every week and sit in their pews and they never really see him in action. They never see him in the face of a drug addict who is killing his pain or the single mom who is faithfully raising her children and praying for her needs or the husband holding his wife's hand in a cancer ward and holding it together for his kids. We want a sanitized, socially distanced, anesthetized view of christianity served to us from a pulpit every week. Jesus walked among the least desirable. The most diseased, unclean, filthy, sinful humans on earth and he did it so lovingly. So compassionately. Thank you so much for these words, Sherry. We need to hear them. And you've inspired me!
Fundamentally, this post is about what is called, The Problem With Evil.” It sometimes takes on the form, “If God is so good, why does evil exist?”
The first and foremost thing anyone must do when confronted by this question in all of its iterations, is to discern if the asker is looking for an academic answer or is suffering from the effects of a sorrowful event in their own lives. If it is an academic answer, part of the “preparation of the Gospel of peace” we are to put on (Eph 6:15) is to have studied, practiced, and formulated the available good answers to prepare for the inevitable asking. If it is a personal tragedy, give them a hug and a prayer.
This may be the very reason we are losing so many people in church: inauthenticity. Yes, it is uncomfortable to speak and hear our mutual struggles. We do have a victorious Lord, but it is messy, not everyone gets healed or has their financial or relational issues resolved. Do we still love and trust? Part of being the Church is caring for each other, and if we don’t share our struggles with each other, how can we do that? So yes, 100% I agree.
Aww thank you so much ❤️ I agree with everything you just said! Blessings and I’m so glad you shared your heart x
I actually just read very interesting article about the future of churches:
https://medium.com/backyard-theology/eleven-bold-predictions-for-the-future-of-the-church-3018e2a6b33e
Yes!!!! This! Beautiful and rich with grace. I recently told my sister as we talked about healings. My words were..,, what if Gods glory is revealed in the unanswerable. What if how we walk out our struggles with faith in God even in the unanswered is the testimony that speaks the loudest.
Oh my goodness everything you just wrote went straight to my heart ❤️ thank you 🙏
Thank you for sharing this beautiful and very valid message. I love and can relate to your thoughts captured. Stay strong in faith and don’t give up hope.
Aww thank you so much ❤️❤️❤️ sometimes you have to be vulnerable and just put it out there x
Absolutely! I completely agree.
However, it takes greater strength to be vulnerable. I pray blessings over you. Trust that God’s timing is always perfect.
So much of my testimony is based on my Faith, trust and belief that God is in the fire with me. We always make it through the struggle. No the answer doesn't come like we would want it and a lot of times, not at all. Pain is real. Suffering happens every day. There are roadblocks in our walk but we press on. We press in. People don't share their wounds, their journeys because of the fear of what other people might think about them. It's when I am real with my testimony that people often draw close to Jesus. My messy, unkept life is what allows them to put their guards down and breathe. I'm just like them. Living in the same confusing, messy and often times, painful situations . It's there, in the muck and mire, they see that He walks with me in my story because even if the miracle hasn't happened, my faith in Him shows them, I won't give up. Thanks for sharing this. It is good. ❤️🤗
I love everything you just wrote. In the muck and mire ❤️❤️❤️ just beautiful!
Love your ❤️ heart and your love for Jesus…. Always inspiring me to keep going. So many times, so many times, it's been tough. The struggle is real! But I have companions in women like you that motivate me to hang on to the thread on the Hem of Jesus’ garment, because if I can just touch Him, hang on to Him… I know I will be ok. ❤️
This is so important and thank you for addressing this. We learn so much in suffering, it is a necessary testimony in the crucible of such refining fires transforming our minds and hearts, we become unified aligning ourselves and joining in the fellowship of Jesus Christ's suffering and the unity in his death and then resurrection life.
That's the truth of our life as a new creation in Christ, the genuine authentic high calling and walk in Christ Jesus. You are going to suffer, & for Christ & it is meaningful & necessary and how to suffer well, without getting angry, blaming God, or self blame, falling into self pity, or woe is me etc. But if you suffer for doing good and endure it patiently, God is pleased with you. It becomes as a sweet savoury incense wafting up to heavens throne itself. Go through Jesus' own life and examine deeply his life & of the early disciples & Christians & the letters of Peter. The deeper we go with Christ the more the suffering. It is our eternal level of demonstration and display of Gods love.
To share in everything with Jesus to be unified with him in life & into eternity. There is no resurrection life without the crushing of Gethsemane agony & suffering, & with crucifixion of self.
There is much purpose in it. There are no short cuts to sanctification or to glorification. Sadly today the contemporary churches refuse to tell the truth of what it means to count the cost in living as Jesus' disciple and how normal & imperative it is to enter into the sufferings of Christ. So many sadly live in entitlement, we are NOT entitled to anything in this life, but privileged to full inheritance of relationship with Heavenly father and unity of fellowship immovable with Christ indeed entering in to his sufferings.
2 Timothy 3:1-5 states of the majority of Christians in the end times, this was written to and about Christians:
Cheap talk is a form of godliness without power. Words without deeds and of sufferings is cheap, many lives are devoid of any self sacrifice, gruelling effort, and suffering through endurance and perseverance and never learn to bear up under great trial and suffering and the willingness to suffer. The Laodicean delusion are so fat in their flesh but are poor blind and naked, yet believe they are in need of nothing!
We learn far more about ourselves God & Jesus who want to mould and shape our character to whom God wants us to confirm into the image of his Son, to depend far more on our father in heaven. There is power and purpose in affliction. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him. Ephesians 1:17 How do we think we ever get to know and having a knowing of our God?
Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. Romans 18:17-18
We become also co-heirs in Jesus' sufferings.
Not only so, but we also *glory in our sufferings*, because we KNOW that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, *hope. And hope does not put us to shame*, because *God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us*. Romans 3:3-5
This is meant to be our hearts cry that we see everything is rubbish and dung compared to our illustrious riches of being unified in Christ Jesus. Knowing the hatred, the rejection, the slander, the betrayal, the isolation, the attacks, trials,testings, persecutions, the struggles against temptation & sin & through our sufferings being dead to sin, so that we too can share in his glory!
And to also suffer & self sacrifice for our fellow brothers and sisters. Not just in words but in deeds!! For their needs. And willing to die for them. Just as Jesus did for us- no greater love has one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. Do we pray asking our father 'I want to share in your beloved son & my beloved Christ's sufferings to comprehend it's purpose, grasping understanding him and so to become more like him?'
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, Philippians 3:8-10
"You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have."~Corrie Ten Boom
"Love will always manifest itself in the degree to which it is willing to suffer towards the object of its love." ~Corrie Ten Boom
How was Gods love manifest to all humanity? Through Jesus Christ's sacrificial crucified life death burial resurrection and ascension. So how do we then demonstrate & reflect His love back to Him and to others? It is sacrificial, it is crucifying, it is selfless, it costs us, and expense to ourselves, and it is made and exhibited in & through suffering or we are merely lovers of self.
Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you. 1 Peter 5:8-11
And we can also then help & comfort others in how we have been loved and comforted, how our father in heaven spoke to us such personal encouraging words of spirit and life and his love over us in abundance in our fruitful privileged suffering, it is not in vain.
(2 Corinthians 1:6-7, 8-11; Hebrews 10:32-39)
Jesus was a man of sorrows & acquainted with grief: and as one from whom men hide their face he was despised; and we esteemed him not. Everyone's faith has to be proven to see the genuinesss of our faith. It's easy to serve God when everything is easy, it's when it gets very tough do we truly understand how to exercise our faith in God walking by the unseen as seen, and deepening our intimacy with Him. And learning to be led by the spirit of God not being led by our flesh, not going after selfish ambition,self validation and power, or dominionism, or self aggrandisement. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. Romans 8:14
Thank you again! 💌💐
Wow 😮 this was fantastic! I agree this whole year for me has been finding my rythym in Jesus and focusing on His walk and steps ❤️
Sorry conform to the image of Christ not confirm. Typo!!
I love this Sarah. I have so many unresolved testimonies ... my family not yet accepting Jesus; my prayers that ended up in grief instead of healing; my family separations etc. YET I still pray and hope and have faith that He will turn these around. Perhaps not in my timing but His.
Absolutely 💯 and that’s what we need people to hear. The testimony that even in the what feels like unanswered, God is still good ❤️
“And I want to hear them because, to me, they are still testimonies.” YES! I’ve been saying this to my friends as I’ve walked with many people who haven’t had their stories resolved, and now I’m one of them. But holding onto faith in the midst of that is pretty miraculous, and worth sharing.
I could not agree more ❤️❤️❤️
I love this. Clinging to faith in spite of unanswered prayers, is a testimony. It might be a bigger testimony that the transformational testimony seen in the church.
I completely agree ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you. ❤️
🙏❤️
Ican so relate. I've been laid off in 2018. Started working in 2022. Hubby still unemployed. I still have a huge shortfall on my salary. I have received so many promises and prophecies from different people about breakthroughs.Struggling with that why question. But still trusting (or trying to}
Thanks for sharing ❤️ I always say if you’re still talking to God, you still have faith and trust in His plan ❤️❤️❤️
It is also essential (and a challenge for me as an introvert) to separate my faith from my feelings. I have to keep on reminding myself that faith is not a feeling, and just because I’m feeling low doesn’t mean that I don’t believe!
Oh my gosh! This! There are so many precious moments revealed in the waiting. My substack is Fed by Ravens because without those tidbits from the Lord, I would be undone. Think of all the biblical accounts of the waiting or the wilderness. David running from Saul. Sarah and Abraham waiting for the fulfillment of the promise. Elijah. Ruth. Moses in the wilderness and so many more! There is beauty in the crushing! What does it say? That our fragrance is the fragrance of Christ to the unbeliever. When does a flower most give its fragrance? When it is crushed. This has been part of my disillusionment with the church. There's so often the aspect of...your story isn't good enough. Your story isn't finished. But tell us how you are hanging on or Jesus has you and you are no longer holding on! My daughter is a fentanyl addict and every time I go to the street with her, I see Jesus there. And I feel bad for all those who attend church every week and sit in their pews and they never really see him in action. They never see him in the face of a drug addict who is killing his pain or the single mom who is faithfully raising her children and praying for her needs or the husband holding his wife's hand in a cancer ward and holding it together for his kids. We want a sanitized, socially distanced, anesthetized view of christianity served to us from a pulpit every week. Jesus walked among the least desirable. The most diseased, unclean, filthy, sinful humans on earth and he did it so lovingly. So compassionately. Thank you so much for these words, Sherry. We need to hear them. And you've inspired me!
Fundamentally, this post is about what is called, The Problem With Evil.” It sometimes takes on the form, “If God is so good, why does evil exist?”
The first and foremost thing anyone must do when confronted by this question in all of its iterations, is to discern if the asker is looking for an academic answer or is suffering from the effects of a sorrowful event in their own lives. If it is an academic answer, part of the “preparation of the Gospel of peace” we are to put on (Eph 6:15) is to have studied, practiced, and formulated the available good answers to prepare for the inevitable asking. If it is a personal tragedy, give them a hug and a prayer.
That touches my heart so much to hear ❤️ I’ll keep on writing ✍️