A Shattered Life: Victor Vs. VictimÀpẹrẹ

Victory in Scriptures

After limping through my shattered life, I had to rectify my feelings about the scriptures. So many of the Bible promises that once gave me comfort didn’t line up with how I felt about my life. 

You will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. I don’t feel very protected from trouble God! 

Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. That may be true for some people, but it must not be for me. I don’t feel like he cares for me! 

I wrestled and struggled with these feelings, but had experienced God enough to know His Word was true even if I didn’t always feel it. How then could I read about Him being a loving God—One who gives me refuge and peace—and still account for my pain? 

Why do the same old “Christian” sayings and answers just not penetrate our hurts?

Maybe we don’t truly understand the scriptures and the application of those words. Maybe love isn’t always soft and cuddly, but can be fierce. Maybe protection is allowing things to happen that make me so dependent on Him; maybe He’s protecting me from my own sin. Is it possible His care for me is pushing me from comfort to purpose? Maybe peace is really a verb that means a fight for peacemaking. Patience, while a good character trait, can hurt in the process of learning to live it.

Why is it that the Bible says the battle has been won, but it doesn’t feel like any winning is happening in life? This doesn’t even make sense! We’re still fighting. I’ve got the open wounds to prove it! 

What God showed me in this area is that yes, the battle has already been won, but we are in boundary wars. The whole message of The Word is of the battle being fought and won. He has already conquered death and the grave. We are victorious! Our job is to hold the boundaries, and not fall back into being conquered as a victim. 

So what is the boundary? The boundary is your heart. Many times you can’t help your circumstances, your past, or what may happen to you in the future, but you can arm up and defend the boundaries that have already been gained for you—the salvation of your heart. You’re not in charge of the battle. That’s God’s job. You’re just the soldier holding the line.

So what could this mean for you? It may mean staying in that hard marriage and continually allowing God to love through you, realizing the “hard” is exactly what is doing its work in you. 

It may mean showing up at that dead-end job with those hardened people day after day and having a good attitude no matter what is thrown at you. 

It may mean paving a new pathway of purpose for your life and not letting generational curses keep you trapped in the same old ways of doing things. 

It may mean getting up every day and reading The Word and pouring out your heart to God over and over, even when you don’t feel like it or don’t feel like it’s doing any good. 

It may mean accepting that you can’t change the past, but you can use the pain to catapult you to a great purpose in life.

Spend some time today praying and asking God what boundaries in your heart He is asking you to keep, to hold the line victoriously. Write those thoughts down and continually circle back to them and be open to re-asking as new battles may arise.