Poison Ivy
With her permission, I am sharing a recap that Melissa Schneider wrote of Pastor Joseph’s sermon last Sunday. Several weeks ago, I severely sprained my wrist and I am still unable to type or write, so any prayers would be appreciated.
We have all heard the saying, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” Guess what? Nowhere, in God’s Word, does it say that. What it does say is that God will give you things HE can handle. (My input…God will never give us a life that makes Him unnecessary. If He only gave us what WE could handle, we wouldn’t need Him.) You see, God wants us to come to a place where we rely on Him to provide our every need. A place where we realize that we cannot “fix” things on our own, and that we are truly overcomers when we give our worries, our burdens, and struggles to God to help us overcome them.
Pastor Joseph preached a great message about discouragement. He used the analogy of discouragement being like poison ivy. If you get a little poison ivy on you, it can spread, get under your skin, and fester into sores. Discouragement can do the same. When you stay discouraged about circumstances and situations in life, especially those out of your control, discouragement can fester and become poison under your skin and in your heart.
What causes us to become discouraged in life? Fatigue, frustration, failure, and fear. All negative things. And how do we combat discouragement? First of all, get some rest. Then reset. Remember God is in control. And resist the urge to stay in your discouragement. When you change your mind, you also have the ability to change your heart.
God will allow hard things to happen to us. And bad things happen because we live in a sinful, broken world. But with God, you can handle, and overcome, anything that He allows to happen in your life. We live in a messy world. As believers, we can be confident that we also have a loving, kind, gentle God who loves us so very much.
2 Corinthians 1:8-9 “For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction…that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life; indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead.”
2 Corinthians 4:16-18 “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”