How God Turns Setbacks Into ComebacksSample

God Can Handle Your Honesty

You’ve just had an awful setback. You’ve lost a job. You’ve ended a relationship. You’ve failed in some way.

What do you do next?

The first thing you do: Tell God how you feel. Unload your pain. When you’re honest with God about your emotions, it’s an act of worship.

Job gives us a great example of this. Job lost everything—his family, his livestock, his home, and his wealth.

But the Bible doesn’t sugarcoat his response. “Job stood up and tore his robe in grief. Then he shaved his head and fell to the ground to worship” (Job 1:20 NLT).

Job expressed his grief, tearing his robe and shaving his head. But then he worshiped God.

Anytime you experience loss in your life, you’ll face four emotions:

● Anger: Why did this happen to me?

● Grief: What have I lost?

● Shock: What’s going on here?

● Fear: What’s going to happen next?

When you experience a setback, you need to express every one of those emotions. God can handle them because he is the one who gave them to you.

The only reason you have emotions is because you are made in the image of God. It’s what makes humans unique among God’s creation. God can handle your anger, your grief, your shock, and your fear.

Job was brutally honest with God, and you can be, too. Job said, “I cannot keep from speaking. 

I must express my anguish. My bitter soul must complain” (Job 7:11 NLT).

The right response to a setback isn’t to fake a positive, feel-good reaction. God never wants you to fake an emotion.

In one of the most difficult setbacks in the entire Bible, after Jerusalem had been looted and destroyed, and the Israelites faced death or enslavement and exile, the prophet Jeremiah writes this: “Rise during the night and cry out. Pour out your hearts like water to the Lord” (Lamentations 2:19 NLT).

With God, honesty is always the best policy.

Talk It Over

Do you find it difficult to be honest with God about your emotions? Why or why not?

Has there been an experience in your life when your honesty drew you closer to God?

Which particular emotions do you find most difficult to discuss with God or with other people? Why?

This devotional © 2019 by Rick Warren. All rights reserved. Used by permission.