Is God Ignoring Your Struggles?
“Yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. GOD, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.” Habakkuk 3:18-19 (ESV)
If our pediatric dental clinic keeps a Top 10 list of challenging patients, I bet my daughter is near the top. She can’t stand lying flat on her back while a stranger cleans her teeth with noisy tools. It doesn’t matter if Frozen is playing on the ceiling or if we promise her all the bouncy balls in the world. My girl hates going to the dentist.
Prior to one of these semiannual visits, my daughter repeatedly asked me to pray for her. We prayed over and over again for God’s help and peace, right up until the moment the hygienist prepared her instruments.
Then the cleaning started. My daughter realized that despite all her prayers, the experience was just as terrible as she feared.
That’s when she started screaming, “God isn’t helping me! God isn’t helping meeeeee!”
My daughter has something in common with the author of today’s key verse. Before Habakkuk’s declaration of trust in chapter 3, he questioned the Lord’s plans. Evil rulers oppressed God’s people, and Habakkuk wondered why God hadn’t intervened to rescue them.
“O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2, ESV)
Do these questions sound familiar? Do you feel abandoned in your suffering, like my daughter and Habakkuk? Have you cried out for relief from your struggles with your work, relationships, parenting or sin?
Maybe you’re weary from waiting for the Lord to intervene. You see suffering in this world and in your life and say with Habakkuk, “How long will you keep ignoring my struggle, Lord?”
In response to these questions, God reminds Habakkuk of two important truths: The Lord still reigns on the throne, and He is at work in ways we can’t comprehend.
God tells him, “I am doing a work in your days that you would not believe if told” (Habakkuk 1:5b, ESV).
This truth calms Habakkuk’s questioning heart. He stops wrestling with his unchanged circumstances and starts resting in God’s unchanging character. He trusts his uncertain future to his reigning Heavenly Father.
Although Habakkuk realizes life won’t be easy, but harder, he comes to a beautiful declaration of trust: “Yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:18).
Habakkuk rejoiced in his suffering because of the salvation promised by the Lord.
Good for Habakkuk, you might be thinking, but how can I rejoice in my struggles? I can’t seem to muster any joy in my circumstances.
We find our answer in Habakkuk 3:19: “ GOD, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on my high places.”
