God promises to bring us comfort beyond anything we have ever known as we learn to trust Him. If we reach for other things (or people) to bring us comfort while struggling to believe that God is our true Source of Comfort, this will reveal to us where we have a stronghold in our mind that is causing us to doubt that God can truly comfort us the way we need it. Instead, we reach for other coping mechanisms, missing out on a powerful experience of lasting comfort straight from the Comforter Himself.
I have experienced several seasons in my life where I was in so much emotional pain, I wanted out. I wanted something that would come in and help me forget or give me relief. The pain was intense. I was lonely and broken. There were so many times I tried to call someone from my church or a friend, and more often than not, they weren’t available. I cried myself to sleep most nights and felt like I was going through my days as an out-of-body experience.
I was barely surviving.
To be completely honest, I really wanted a man’s arms around me. I wanted to feel that strong protection and comfort because being a single mom with four kids was scary at times, and painful. I knew I needed to fight past that fleshly desire and not seek out temporary comfort; I turned and reached out to God. And there I was, lying on the hardwood floor in my own puddle of tears, when a comfort beyond anything I had ever known before began to envelop me. In that moment, I didn’t give myself a way out or fill my need with anything or anyone else; I turned to Him, and right there in my living room was Jesus. He held me in His arms as I cried. My tears went from excruciating pain and loneliness to relief with His embrace.
This is a powerful testimony of a very big, real, and powerful God that is who He says He is. Too many false comforts come between us and God, causing us to miss out on His comfort and healing power. In order to experience this incredible facet of God, we need to believe and turn to Him in our painful moments with our WHOLE heart and not allow anything else to come into His place.
When we pray and ask for God’s help, we need to seek Him with our whole heart and believe that He will meet us. If there are any parts of our mind that doubt God can fulfill the need we have or help us in these painful moments, we will not be seeking Him with all our heart . . . we naturally withhold parts of ourselves. If our whole hearts aren’t seeking Him, we will struggle to find Him for comfort in the hard moments of life.
Oftentimes our belief system says God can’t bring us the comfort we think we need and we don’t turn to Him.
This is because we’ve fixated our idea for comfort from another source only to find we continually get tossed by life.
We can say we trust God, and we may very well trust Him in some areas; but our lifestyle, coping choices, and our thought-life reveal to us where our trust is actually rooted. This is the cycle of a stronghold that is set up against the knowledge of God so that we don’t fully, wholeheartedly, trust Him and run to Him with everything. If we don’t trust Him with our whole heart because of strongholds (belief systems) that contradict what’s available through Jesus, we don’t go to Him first and seek His Kingdom so that He can give us all we need in all situations at all times.
God-fearing, lovers of Jesus still struggle with trusting and believing God at His Word and are often bound by a belief system through deception, trauma, and pain from life with an unhealed mind, forming who they are today.
If you were to take the time to trace back and see clearly where strongholds have rooted in your mind and where your belief system contradicts the Word of God, you will see behind every opposing thought is doubt or fear . . . doubt that God can, and/or fears that most likely came from a wound or past trauma that has not been fully met by our Healer, Jesus.
If you look deeper, behind every fear we can have an idol that we’ve made our automatic go-to for comfort. An idol is anything we have placed in our lives that we turn to for comfort rather than seeking God as our Comforter.
This can be anything from:
- spending money
- mindlessly scrolling through social media TV and various entertainment outlets to avoid facing real life
- obsession with fitness or careers
- a codependent relationship with a high need for comfort from a person, food, drugs, alcohol . . . including spouses, our children, church communities, therapists, and BFFS can become idols.
We can be completely connected with our communities of support, but totally disconnected from God and without realizing it, we’ve replaced Him with people.
This includes a high need for comfort from our children or spouse to fill a need in us that we should be getting from God.
Anything can become an idol from an obviously bad thing or a subtle, seemingly good thing. An idol is anything that we turn to as a coping mechanism that makes us feel good in the moment.
Through Jesus, we have received the Holy Spirit who is our true Comfort, and with Him, it is lasting and complete. But if He is not the One we turn to, we will not experience Him this way. Oftentimes we run to our spouse, our pastor, our small group leader, our Christian community group, our best friend, our mentor, etc., which are all good people, but if they are our only go-to and we do not go to God, we are still going to struggle and not get the comfort directly from the true Source of Comfort.
I’m challenging you to take inventory of your responses when you are hurting, struggling, and uncomfortable to see who or what you’re putting in God’s place for a sense of relief. As you check in with your automatic source of comfort, or what you feel you need in those moments of struggle, you will discover the strongholds in your mind that have formed a belief that God can’t really meet that particular need and why those idols have taken His place. From there, cast down the stronghold that says God can’t and stand firm in the Truth that in Him, you have everything you need and turn to Him with your whole heart.
When false comforts and belief systems are no longer in place, you will begin to experience God’s comfort and strength beyond measure.
He is faithful to His Word — put your full trust in Him.
Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father, who loved us and by His grace gave us eternal comfort and a wonderful hope, comfort you and strengthen you in every good thing you do and say.
-2 Thessalonians 2:16-17 (NLT)
