8 The Discouragement Trap
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I couldn’t keep myself out of the hospital, and I’ve discovered that it’s very discouraging to face a new surgery before recovering from the one before. I’ve been discouraged to have no control over things going on inside my body. I’ve been discouraged that I am unable to do what I’ve been called and gifted to do and, in healthy circumstances, am excited to do. It is discouraging to get up in the morning already exhausted before I’ve done anything. It is discouraging to cancel ministry event after ministry event. It is discouraging to be confused about what God is doing and why he is doing it. It has all been very discouraging.
In one way or another, at one time or another, discouragement is the experience of every sufferer. It is one of the burdens added to the burden of what’s already being suffered. Beneath the suffering of physical sickness, loss, betrayal, or whatever other dark thing has entered the door is something way more powerful and dangerous. It is the spiritual war that rages in the heart of every sufferer. This is what I have been describing for you in the last several chapters. This war is a battle for the control of your heart, and whatever functionally rules your heart will then shape the way you see life and your desires, and it will control your words and behavior.
Let me say it this way: it’s natural in suffering to have moments of fear, but it’s dangerous and damaging when fear rules your heart. It’s quite normal to struggle with doubt when unexpected, unwanted, or difficult things enter your door, but it is very dangerous to let doubt of God begin to rule your heart and set the agenda for your life. When you’re suffering, it’s natural to look over the fence and wish that your life could be as easy as your neighbor’s. It’s altogether different to live with a heart that’s eaten by envy. So it is with discouragement. Of course, suffering is discouraging, but in the midst of your discouragement, it’s vital to understand that discouragement is a major aspect of the spiritual war that lives in the heart of every sufferer.
The question is not just whether you are discouraged; the question is what you are doing with your discouragement. The question is whether discouragement is progressively taking control of the way you see yourself, God, others, your present, your potential, your future, God’s promises and provisions, etc.
Jolene dragged herself to my office. As I walked behind her, it hit me that she even walked like a completely defeated person. It looked like every step took effort, as if she was pulling herself down the hall. She fell into my couch, and it was not so much that she had bad posture but that she had no posture at all. It was as if there was this lump of humanity in the corner of the couch. Of course, her head was down, and I think her eyes were closed, although it was hard to see her eyes. She hadn’t greeted me when I went to get her and bring her to my office, and she barely responded to my questions. She was as discouraged as I’ve ever seen a human being.
As Jolene sat there and quietly and haltingly answered my questions, she didn’t cry. She was way beyond tears, too discouraged to even cry anymore. She had no hope that talking to me would do any good. She was only there to quiet the people who had harangued her into my office. She had no hope that getting out of bed and doing anything would change her life, so she’d quit getting out of bed. Coming to my office forced her to put on real clothes for the first time in a long time. She had lost a lot of weight because she ate only when her husband or a close friend coerced her. When Jolene looked at God, she saw nothing to put her hope in. She had long ago quit going to church, reading her Bible, attending her small group, or even whispering a prayer here and there. Discouragement had cause Jolene to totally retreat within herself, and I wondered if I could ever get her to come out again.
Now, you may be far from where Jolene was when I first met her, but her story is important. Jolene is a picture of the damage that happens when discouragement begins to rule your heart and shape the way you see everything in your life. Left unchecked, discouragement will become your eyes and ears, determining what you see and hear and how you see and hear it. Unchecked, it will become the master of your emotions and the ruler of your choices and actions. Unchecked, discouragement will rob you of your hope and motivation. It will steal your reason for doing good things. It will rob you of your ability to trust. It will make you closed, self-protective, and easily overwhelmed. Discouragement will sap you of your strength and courage. It will cause you to see negative where nothing is negative and miss the positive that is right in front of you. If given room, discouragement will tell you lies that have the power to destroy your life. Discouragement is natural for someone who is suffering, but it makes a very, very bad master.
I want to unpack the dangerous power of discouragement by taking you to a discouragement story in the Old Testament:
Then we set out from Horeb and went through all that great and terrifying wilderness that you saw, on the way to the hill country of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us. And we came to Kadesh-barnea. And I said to you, “You have come to the hill country of the Amorites, which the Lord our God is giving us. See, the Lord your God has set the land before you. Go up, take possession, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has told you. Do not fear or be dismayed.” Then all of you came near me and said, “Let us send men before us, that they may explore the land for us and bring us word again of the way by which we must go up and the cities into which we shall come.” The thing seemed good to me, and I took twelve men from you, one man from each tribe. And they turned and went up into the hill country, and came to the Valley of Eshcol and spied it out. And they took in their hands some of the fruit of the land and brought it down to us, and brought us word again and said, “It is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us.”
Yet you would not go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. And you murmured in your tents and said, “Because the Lord hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us. Where are we going up? Our brothers have made our hearts melt, saying, ‘The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and fortified up to heaven. And besides, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.’” Then I said to you, “Do not be in dread or afraid of them. The Lord your God who goes before you will himself fight for you, just as he did for you in Egypt before your eyes, and in the wilderness, where you have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.” Yet in spite of this word you did not believe the Lord your God, who went before you in the way to seek you out a place to pitch your tents, in fire by night and in the cloud by day, to show you by what way you should go. (Deut. 1:19–33)
This story is placed for us in the Bible as a caution and a warning. Remember, God caused these stories to be written and retained for our example and instruction because these were people just like you and me. So that you’ll get the full import of this historical moment, it’s important to know the background of this story. After arduous years of trekking through the wilderness, the people of Israel were camped across from the rich and fruitful land that God had promised would be their permanent home. The report came back that the land was a very good land, but it was dotted with fortified cities and populated by people who were “bigger and taller” than the Israelites. And even though Moses reminded them of how God had carried them, protected them, and provided for them in the wilderness, the people of Israel were completely discouraged.
Why had God led them this far only to lead them into the hands of these powerful people? Why wasn’t the Promised Land empty and ready for their move in? Why hadn’t they been warned before? What were they supposed to do now? All the alternatives seemed bad. They could push forward, fight, and be slaughtered or turn back toward the wilderness and wander some more. It was very discouraging. Now, note that it isn’t sin to be discouraged. We will all be called to deal with difficult surprises because God’s plans for us are often very different from the plans we have for ourselves. We will all face “enemies” that are bigger in size and ability than we are. We will all be tempted to wonder why a good God would bring things into our lives that don’t seem good at all. But it’s important to understand that although it isn’t a sin to be discouraged, what you do with your discouragement is deeply spiritually important.
You cannot choose to ignore the call to fight discouragement. In moments of confusion and weakness, it’s tempting to give way to discouragement. It’s tempting to follow the trail of its thoughts and desires. It’s tempting to let it become the lens through which you view life. But every sufferer needs to fight those temptations. Discouragement is natural, but you need to know it’s not your friend and that it always makes a very bad master.
I want to draw your attention to two of the most damaging results of allowing discouragement to take root in your heart in the midst of suffering. I want to use these as a way of unpacking the trap of discouragement and the spiritual war that lives in the heart of every discouraged sufferer.
1. Discouragement: Vertical Complaint
Let me begin with the bottom line here: discouragement opens your heart to a lifestyle of complaint, and complaint opens your heart to accusations against God. I have already said this, but I want to frame this discussion with saying it again: discouragement, for all of us, will be a normal part of the ardors of life between our birth and our homegoing. There will be moments when life seems impossibly hard. There will be moments when God confuses you. There will be moments of profound personal mystery. You will be discouraged, but how you face and deal with your discouragement will shape how you live your life.
When discouragement sets in and becomes the lens through which you see life, when it forms your assumptions about your life, and when it begins to shape your functional theology, you tend to complain. Chronically discouraged people find more things wrong than right. They tend to see more darkness than light, more trouble than mercy, more injustice than justice, more hate than love, and more rejection than acceptance. Although you’re convinced that you’re seeing life accurately, discouragement has distorted your perspective, and your assumptions about life have caused you to see one thing more than the other.
It’s like when you buy a new Volkswagen. Suddenly it seems that there are more VWs on the street than ever before. You say to your spouse, “Honey, when we bought this car, I had no idea how popular VWs were.” In reality, there aren’t more VWs on the road; it’s just that your ownership of a VW has opened your eyes to other VWs on the road with you. So it is with discouragement; it quickly becomes a lens on life. It predisposes you to see more brokenness than blessing, and it gives you ample reason for complaint. It won’t be long, if unchecked, that complaint will become your default language.
What’s the danger of a lifestyle of complaint? If you believe that God is not only in control of the grand movements of human history, but also in control of the particular details of your life, and if you believe that what is out of your control is under his control, then it is important to understand that there’s no such things as a purely horizontal complaint. If I am complaining about the insensitivity of my physician, the lack of attention I am getting from my pastor, and the fact that my friends lack sympathy and understanding, I’m not just complaining about those people but also about the God who ordained all of them to be in my life. And the more I am comfortable with complaint being the normal language of my life, the more likely that lifestyle of complaint will morph into direct accusation against God. In the story of Deuteronomy 1 it didn’t take long for that to happen.
When it happens, we’ve gotten beyond simply saying that life stinks; complaint has carried us farther down the road, where we say, “My life stinks because God isn’t good.” The God Jolene talked about was not the God of the Bible, but some distant, unresponsive, and uncaring being. And as I listened to her making accusations against the character of God, I understood why she quit going to him for help. “Because the Lord hated us he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to give us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us” (Deut. 1:27). What a critique of the character and purpose of God, but, also, what a completely distorted sense of reality!
If you are suffering, and suffering has left you discouraged and more given to complaint than praise, it’s very important that you don’t assume the accuracy and logic of your perspectives on life. If complaint has the power to focus your vision, it can also twist and bend your perception of reality and the God who rules it. In this way, every sufferer needs to have their assumptions about life lovingly challenged, both by the clarifying truths of Scripture and the loving corrections of the body of Christ. Maybe you don’t see things clearly, maybe your assumptions aren’t accurate, and maybe God is not who you’ve come to think he is.
I know it’s hard, because everything I am describing has been my struggle too, but you and I need to be open and approachable in the midst of our discouragement. We’ll never get the help we need if we first demand that people sign on to our view of things before we are willing to open up to them and listen to what they have to say to us. The Israelites were wrong; discouragement had distorted their view, and it was about to control the way they would respond to their leaders and to God. When discouragement has morphed into a lifestyle of vertical complaint, your responses tend to add another layer of trouble to the trouble that suffering has already brought into your life.
I plead with you to let down your defenses and open your heart. Could it be that in the middle of your suffering, there are ways in which you no longer see life, others, or God as clearly as you think you do?
2. Discouragement: Moral Paralysis
There is another subtle but practically powerful result of discouragement. First, it’s important that we humbly admit that it is easier to complain than to praise. It is easier to notice all the things that are wrong or missing in our life than to recognize and celebrate all the ways we have been and are being blessed. Part of why we do this is sin—as long as sin still lives in us, we will continue to struggle with selfishness. The selfishness and self-righteousness of sin tend to make us think we are entitled and deserving. This selfishness tends to make life all about us—our happiness, our comfort, and getting our own way. We tend to dislike obstacles or living without something we want. I know I tend to want my desires indulged and my plans followed. I don’t like to be disagreed with or told no.
Because our complaints are rooted not just in horizontal dissatisfaction (with people and situations), but also in vertical disappointment (with God), discouragement has the potential to become spiritually debilitating. We don’t sufficiently consider the effect that complaint has on us and the way we think about and respond to our relationship with God.
Our willingness to do the good things God has called us to do is not first based on the promises he has made to us or the rewards he has promised us. Every good and godly thing we do is based on one thing: our trust in God’s existence and his character. We only ever keep God’s commands and follow his wisdom because we believe that he’s good. If you don’t believe that God is holy, righteous, just, loving, and merciful, you won’t trust his promises or believe that he will deliver his rewards. A life of courageous obedience, no matter what, is always rooted in a heart that trusts God.
Discouragement that has become a way of seeing and has produced a lifestyle of complaint has the power to weaken or even destroy your motivation for obeying God. It has the power to rob you of the one thing, trust, that will enable you to continue to do good and spiritually healthy things, even difficult things. Complaint, because it tends to question God’s goodness, faithfulness, wisdom, and love, assaults your trust in him. This is exactly what happened in the hearts and lives of the Israelites. Because they no longer trusted God’s goodness (“Because the Lord hated us . . .”), they saw no reason to entrust themselves to him or follow his commands. So they took their lives into their own hands and rebelled against the One who had lovingly redeemed them out of Egypt and protected and provided for them in the wilderness.
If discouragement becomes a lifestyle of complaint, it can throw us into a state of moral paralysis. When that happens, we are stuck not only with our suffering but also with finding little reason in the middle of it to do the good things that God calls all his children to do. God calls us to do certain things that keep us spiritually healthy, wise, and strong. Sadly, I have heard it again and again as I have sat with sufferers, and I have felt the temptation myself:
“What difference does it make if I _______?”
“What good will it do if I _______?”
“It’s hard to read the Bible when in your heart you’re not sure that God cares for you.”
“It’s hard to go to church and sing those hymns and songs when they seem so far from what I am dealing with in my life.”
“I can’t stand going to my small group and hearing how wonderful those people’s lives are.”
“I don’t pray much anymore because it hasn’t seemed to make a difference, and I’m not sure God is actually listening.”
“I know I’m supposed to be thankful, but I just don’t find much in my life to be thankful for.”
“If I had what they had, I would find it easy to worship too.”
“I’m tired of hearing how good God is when every day I’m dealing with stuff that no one would ever call good.”
“If God really loved me, why would he ever ________?”
“Every day I get up and I think, ‘Where are God’s promises now?’”
None of these people woke up one day and decided to quit following God. None made the conscious decision to reject what the Bible says about who God is. None said one day out of the blue, “I am going to take my life out of God’s hands and put it in my hands and only do what makes sense to me.” Their defenses were worn down by the burden of suffering, discouragement began to grow, complaint increasingly replaced gratitude, and before long they were left with little reason to continue to follow God in daily acts of devotion and obedience. As a result, they suffered not just the original difficulty but also the damaging results of no longer doing the good things that God has called them to do because he loves them.
What about you? Has suffering led you to a place where your trust has weakened and your obedience has waned? Are there things you once did with joy and confidence that you no longer do? Are there things you once did that you no longer do precisely because you no longer trust the One who called you to do them? Have you quit being motivated by God’s promises? Have you stopped being emboldened by his presence? Are you no longer encouraged by his grace? Do you find it difficult to read his Word and pray? Is there evidence that the discouragement of suffering has weakened your resolve to do what God says is good even in times of disappointment, pain, and confusion?
Before we leave this examination of the danger of discouragement and its potential to leave a dark legacy in our hearts and lives, I want to make two important observations. I pray that these will encourage and motivate you to continue even when life is very hard. First, God is not shocked or surprised that you are discouraged. He doesn’t wring his hands, wondering what to do next. He knows every struggle of discouragement in your heart. He knows your cries before you cry. He knew that you and I would be weak; that’s why he promised to be our strength. He has promised never to give up the battle for our hearts until that battle is finally won forever. This means he fights for us even when we have given up the fight. Our desire to follow him may weaken, but he will never give up or turn his back on us. He knows us because he made us, which is why he sent his Son to be for us what we could not be for ourselves and to do for us what we could not do on our own.
Rather than judging you in your struggle, Jesus bore all our judgment so that in these moments we would be greeted with understanding mercy and just the help we need. And don’t forget that it’s impossible for you to be alone in your discouragement. Your Lord isn’t just near; he actually lives inside you, and not only is his heart tender toward you, but also he has the power to enable you to do things that you could never do without him.
But there’s one more thing. It is important to remember that the way to defeat the dangerous potential of complaint is not by silence but by praise. The more you commit yourself to counting your blessings, the more you will have eyes to see specific blessings in your life. The more you require yourself to rehearse the many gifts God has given you in the past, the more you will have eyes to recognize his gifts in the present. Pray that God would give you eyes to see evidences of his presence, power, love, and provision in your life right here, right now. Take time to think through all the good things you have in the midst of hard things. Get a journal and every few days write down things for which you can be thankful, that you could never produce on your own. The more your heart is filled with gratitude, the less room there is for complaint. The more you are given to worshiping God, the less you’ll be tempted to accuse him. I have learned that no matter how hard a day is, there are beautiful things in that day that I should be thankful for, and there are reasons to celebrate the love of the One who gives them to me.
As you face discouraging and disheartening circumstances, may God give you eyes to see his hand of goodness, and may seeing give you reason to trust him and to follow his loving call.
Review and Reflect
1. How does slowly progressing, unchecked discouragement take control in your life?
2. Discouragement leads directly to complaining and can become your default language. How does that appear in your life?
3. Where in your life is there evidence that the discouragement of suffering has weakened your resolve to do what God says is good?
4. Paul Tripp reminds us that “the way to defeat the dangerous potential of complaint is not by silence but by praise”. What are ways you can focus on praising God instead of remaining silent?
5. Prayerfully consider how discouragement may be impacting you spiritually.
Heart Reset
Deuteronomy 1:19–33; 7:7–8
Joshua 1:9