It is no secret that God seems to allow us to experience times when we are up and other times when we are down.  This applies whether we are thinking of our own physical health and well-being, how we are doing mentally and emotionally, how we are doing financially, how we are doing relationally with others around us, or most important of all, how we are doing spiritually

One of the challenges of living the Christian life is learning how to trust God in all these varying circumstances. 

Sometimes feeling up seems easy.  Certainly, it resonates with our own natural desires for comfort and ease of life.  Yet there are spiritual dangers here as well.  Often it is when we are most comfortable physically that we are apt to become lazy and complacent and most susceptible to temptation.  So even ease and comfort can be times of spiritual temptation that God allows to test us and show us what is really in our hearts.

There are certainly right ways to respond to God during times of His blessings, especially being thankful and praising Him.  We can also share with others how God has blessed us and use how God has blessed us to encourage them as well.  Think of the shepherd who found his lost sheep in Luke 15—or the parallel story of a woman in that same chapter who lost one of her coins.  Both immediately and intuitively responded by sharing their joy with those around them.  Here we can also think of Paul’s experiences of discovering God’s sufficiency during times of trials and difficulties in his own life and how he deliberately sought to remind the Corinthians of how God is to be praised and others encouraged with the same comfort and blessings he himself had experienced:

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

But what about when we are down?  How do we respond then?  Recently I felt almost overwhelmed by circumstances.  As I started to reflect on what was happening to me, I was reminded of Job and how he experienced four major life catastrophes at virtually the same time.  It is significant that the second, third and fourth of these catastrophes are all introduced by the same words in Job 1, “while he [that is, the previous messenger] was yet speaking,” there was some new devastating problem to make things even worse.)  Clearly, this timing alone indicates that there was something supernatural happening here.

I felt at least a little like that the other night.  To begin with I was discouraged about a long-standing project I had been working that had hit what seemed to be an insurmountable wall—and I didn’t know what to do about it.  At the same time, I was feeling physically unwell.  (Nothing serious, and something that has since remedied itself.  But still I was physically “under the weather,” as the expression goes.)  Then I tried to shift gears and use my iPad to look something up, but that the battery was too dead to use, and I couldn’t seem to get my cell phone to do what I wanted it to do either.  And since all this took place toward the end of the day, I was already tired out physically and didn’t have much mental alertness or other emotional reserves.  (For me at least, the older I get, the less reserves I have as the day goes by.)  When problems compound like this, I can only conclude that God is trying to get my attention.  Here I am reminded of a statement Charles Spurgeon once made about times when he experienced unusual trials and difficulties in his own life: he usually discovered that God allowed trials in his own life to prepare him to have the right words and message to share with someone God would bring into his life within the next couple days.  That gave me hope.

How did I respond the other night?  Here is one benefit of developing good habits.  One practice I have developed over the years is to read something spiritually encouraging before I go to sleep.  More recently it has been a book by the Puritan John Owen, so I didn’t have to go looking for a book—I already had one that I was reading.  That night I read a section where Owen quoted Psalm 16:8-11.  (Read these verses for yourself to get the full effect.)  The one verse that stood out to me was the first verse in this passage, verse 8, “I have set the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.”  The part about “setting the Lord before us” made me think about how God simply wanted me to focus my mind and my heart on Him.  I couldn’t change any of my other circumstances, especially late at night when I had so little energy, but I could at least try to focus my mind on God.  Then after I was in bed with the lights out, I also reminded myself of how God the Father holds us in His hand, as Jesus told us in the Gospels.  The next morning, I looked up this verse and it was Jesus’ words in John 10:29, “My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.”

God, for His own reasons, often allows us to experience the ups and downs of life.  The question we need to ask ourselves when they do come is always, how will we respond?