The Psalms: A Roadmap to ResilienceSample

Resilience and Hope

We’re closing out this Plan with the most well-known of the psalms—Psalm 23. This famous picture of God as a Good Shepherd who leads and guides us through even the darkest valleys offers a perspective hack that can change the game when it comes to building resilience.

Surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will live in the house of the Lord forever. Psalm 23:6 NLT

Perspective: Your circumstances may be painful, but they are not permanent.

Undoubtedly, you will experience and walk through situations that are painful and require resilience. A hard breakup. Grief over losing someone close to you. Conflict within your home. Those things are absolutely painful. But there’s hope in your pain, because no matter how all-consuming that situation feels right now, it will not last forever.

What lasts forever is God’s Word and His promises for you. There’s no circumstance, no matter how bad or painful, that can undo the finished work of Jesus that brought us back to God.

Because of Jesus, we have the promise of getting to be with God, in His presence, now and forever. When we are in Christ, our past is paid for and our future is secure.

Therefore, in every situation we have hope.

And hope is the seed that grows up and produces resilience in our lives. Without it, we will not withstand or recover from difficulty.

The author of Hebrews describes the hope we have in Jesus as a sure and steadfast anchor for our souls. Take the image literally for a moment. In strong currents, the thing that keeps a vessel from dramatically drifting off course and becoming lost is its anchor.

Hope is so much more than wishful thinking about a desired future. Hope is having confidence that God is who He says He is, which brings forth expectation that He will do what he says He will do.

That’s why hope breeds resilience. Because the start line and the finish line of resilience is the character of God and the ceiling of your capacity to deal with setbacks and screwups is the lies and limiting beliefs you hold about God.

Said another way, your ability to build resilience is directly related to where your anchor is.

Stop and consider:What is serving as the anchor of your soul? Is it something sure and steadfast that can pull you back to center? Or not?

With the right anchor, we adopt a different perspective when it comes to problems and pain. A perspective that produces resilience, because it’s anchored in our eternal, living Hope.

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love. —Paul, Romans 5:3-5 NLT

Don’t stop here. To discover more about the character of God and dig the truth of who He is deeper into your heart, check out the Plan,The Character of God, from BibleProject.