True grace leads the heart to love God for who He is, not merely for what He gives. That is why God will sometimes take away what we have striven for revealing whether we love Him more than the thing we think we want. He knows that anything we place above Him will eventually break us. So He tears it down before it can finish its work. The tearing hurts and can cause deep disappointment in our affections, but the alternative would be far worse, a slow, peaceful journey away from the only One who can keep us in this life and eternity.
It does not mean He enjoys our tears. It means He is jealous for our deepest loyalty. God’s jealousy is not insecurity; it is holy protection over us.
When faced with loss, disappointments, and regret, how do we respond when the Spirit hems us in and blocks the way of our seeming source of happiness? No matter what we do to get around Him and go our own way, we are unable to remove the blockage(s).
The first temptation is to run into distraction, into sin, into busyness. We may try to find a cheaper comfort to drown out the disappointment. But running only delays the refinement the Lord would work into us; it does not cancel it.
The second temptation is to harden and put God at a distance in our hearts, to obey outwardly while quietly resenting Him. Yet that bitterness will poison our worship, darken our vision, and hinder our fellowship with Him.
The only path that leads to life is the hardest one: to bring our confusion, anger, and grief back to the very God who did not give us the outcome we wanted and to say, “I do not understand this, but I refuse to walk away.” “I do not understand, but I cling to you to refine me through this.” “I do not understand, but I forgive others and count it not against any who have sinned against me knowingly or unknowingly in this disappointment.” In this place something begins to change. We stop only asking God to give things back and start asking Him to change what we seek in the first place: “Not my will, but your Will be done.”
Our prayers shift from:
- “open this door” to “purify this desire”
- “give me what I lost” to “teach me why I cling to it so tightly”
- “pour out judgement on all those who wronged me” to “forgive them Father, for they know not what they do”
We begin to invite the Holy Spirit not just to comfort our pain, but to interpret it in the light of His truth. Instead of asking, “Why did you let this happen to me?” We ask Him with a new perspective of trust:
- “What were You saving me from?”
- “What in me are You confronting?”
- “What part of my heart are You trying to reclaim?”
These latter questions open us up to hope for transformation. Suffering without these trust filled questions only leaves festering scars of bitterness. Suffering with a heart of hope and trust produces wisdom. We become pliable clay in His hands to fashion us into His image. Remember, we are created in His image – not to mirror ourselves.
Slowly the Holy Spirit, the great Comforter, starts replacing panic with perspective. Consider Psalm 119:71: “It was good that I was afflicted, that I might learn Your statutes.” Some lessons cannot be learned in comfort. Even in the middle of heartbreak there are sins we become more cautious about, temptations that no longer attract us the same way, illusions about ourselves that have been shattered.
The very pain we begged God to remove is teaching us to walk more carefully, to love more deeply, to trust more honestly. This does not erase the ache, but it redeems it. We may still miss what was taken. We may still feel waves of sadness when we think about the life we thought we were going to have. But beneath that ache there is a new kind of reverence, a growing sense that God’s “no” has depths we do not yet see. We start to understand that His interruptions are not random blows, but carefully aimed strikes at the things that would have slowly killed our souls. And while we may not be ready to thank Him yet, we are closer to saying, “Stay with me in this and do not let me waste it.”
The Holy Spirit is not asking us to celebrate what we lost; He is inviting us to let Him reinterpret it in light of His truth of the “why”. If we allow Him, He will take the very places where we felt punished, rejected, or disappointed and turn them into altars of remembrance, places where one day we will look back and say, “Here is where He blocked and chastised me to heal me and set my feet on Holy ground.” “Here is where He blocked my happiness to keep me from being lost.”
There comes a moment, if we stay with God long enough in this place of an open heart willing to feel the pain of the circumstance, when something unexpected happens inside of us. We start to realize that the Holy Spirit is not only stopping us from being lost, but teaching us a different way to be happy. He is elevating us to walk on the heights with Him, above the ways of the world and fallen state of mankind. It is not the fragile happiness that depends on circumstances, people, followers, and fulfilled dreams, but a deeper joy that can survive even if those things are taken away. This is the shift from emotional comfort to spiritual wholeness. It is often born out of the very disappointments we once resented.
At first we only knew how to thank God when He agreed with us, such as when doors opened, when prayers were answered the way we expected, when the story matched our plans. But now the Spirit is inviting us into a different kind of worship and intimacy with the Almighty, the kind that rises not from satisfaction but from surrender. We still bring Him our questions, our tears, our unmet longings, but we begin to say, “Even here You are good,” “Even here I will trust You.” That confession is not cheap; it is forged in fire.
As this work continues, the grip of certain worldly desires starts to loosen. We realize that some of the things we were begging God to give us no longer hold the same power over our imagination or affections. We still feel their pull, but we are more suspicious of it now. We can look at something that once defined our idea of a good life and say, “If You, Oh Lord, withhold this, I will not collapse.” “If this be not Thy Will for me, then I do not want to pursue it.” That is not emotional numbness; it is the beginning of freedom. The Holy Spirit is not drying up our capacity for joy; He is freeing it from slavery.
~Inspired by the work of Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746).