Don't Lose Heart By Jason MeyerSýnishorn

What to Do When You Feel Overwhelmed

We are going to view our first few days together like a trip to the optometrist to get our vision tested. Because discouragement is a fight for sight, we are going to look away from counterfeit hopes and fix our gaze on the greatness of God. Each day will ask us to check something different in our fight for sight. We all have a sense of how to frame our own reality, but is it accurate? Who gets to tell our story? We will see how the God who writes our story also gets to tell our story.

When we use the wrong scale of measure and take God out of the equation, we lose heart. Discouragement is only a half-truth; it sees the truth of a challenging situation, but it lies about God’s part in solving the issue. Yes, all the things stacked against us may feel very big, but they do not add up to the full picture.

We lose heart when we agree with the lie that our difficulties are bigger than God, and we lose the fight for sight when we fail to see God correctly. When perception and reality don’t align properly, we become overwhelmed. 

Stop thinking of God as small. Our hearts are easy prey when our problems seem bigger than God can handle. But as a telescope reveals the true size of the stars, Scripture gives us an accurate scale to resize our problems in light of the greatness of God.

Isaiah 40 shows us that God’s people were discouraged because they seemed so weak in comparison to the powerful nation that held them in captivity. The problem was that the Israelites were believing a half-truth. Yes, their captors were stronger—the Babylonians were not a small problem!—but the Israelites were using the wrong scale to evaluate the issue. They removed God from the equation and compared themselves to their captors instead of comparing their captors to their Savior.

The flip-side is true as well: we take small things and blow them out of proportion so that they become bigger than God. We take the greatness of God and shrink Him down to our human understanding, while at the same time blowing up and magnifying our problems to be greater than God. Discouragement grows when we shrink God down to our size.

In what ways do you minimize God’s greatness by the overwhelming nature of your circumstances?