Discouraged In Heart

 

The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

 

Psalm 34:18

 

 

Sometimes despair waits at the bottom of a deep valley, or in the middle of a parched journey through the desert. And still it may just hide at the top of a glorious sun-washed mountain, ready to ambush you when you reach the summit.

 

Elijah must have felt a sense of discouragement, as he challenged the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and believed God would keep His promise to bring rain to a dry and famine-wracked land.

 

The prophets were crushed.

 

The rains came.

 

And what was Elijah's reward for courageous faith and obedience?

 

A death sentence from Queen Jezebel.

 

Elijah ran in terror to Beersheba, collapsed under a tree and prayed to die. "I have had enough, Lord," he said. "Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors" (I Kings 19:4).

 

Every servant who seeks to follow the Master will experience such trials, but that does not mean that God is suddenly absent or indifferent. "Master, Master, we're going to drown!" the disciples cried, shaking awake a sleeping Jesus as the waves swamped their storm-tossed boat (Luke 8:24).

 

God cares and more so than we can ever know—He will calm the storm—but He works on His own timetable, not ours. And the world, the flesh and the devil will resist His work by any means necessary.

 

"There was a long season where the ground was so hard," wrote a missionary. "We covered the land with prayer that fell like sweet rain to soften the ground. Next, there was a season for tilling and readying the land, and then a season for planting. We feel that now we are in the season where the shoots have begun to come up from the ground. These shoots are tender and delicate, and must be treated carefully. It's not the great harvest yet, but we feel the harvest is soon to come. In this new season, as the plants are beginning to grow, we have found our enemy is frantic to stop what [God] is doing."

 

The enemy's most effective weapon: discouragement.

 

We need to continue to seek God when we find ourselves at the point of despair, heartache, and discouragement despite what our feelings are dictating. During these times we will find that the soil of our heart is being tilled, in order to weed out those things which have choked out the harvest from thriving and producing fruit in our lives.