Trade The Weight of Your Troubles for The Weight of God's Glory



Cry out to, call upon, pray to, call on me, or call for help

Whenever you are in, in the day of, or in time of trouble.

I will deliver, help, and rescue you.

Then, you will or shall, honor me, glorify me, or give me glory.

-Psalm 50:15 (CEB, ESV, MSG, CEV, & NLT*)


God wants us to trade the weight of our troubles for the weight of His glory.  God loves to deliver his children over and over, again and again.  God wants his children to live in awe of Him, giving him glory and honor, daily.  

But we must do something.  We must cry out to God when troubles or adversities come into our lives.  Deliverance and giving glory to God on a daily basis are not automatic.  Joseph M. Scriven wrote about this in his famous hymn:
What a Friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.
Are you missing out on the peace of God?  Are you needlessly bearing pain that God has made provision in Jesus to deliver you from?  Carry it to God.  Cry out to God.

"Jesus paid it all", as another old song states, but I have to give God a call, in order to get relief from the encroaching, uncomfortable, troubling adversities that come my way.  You have not because you ask not

When we are in trouble, we are tempted to focus on it too much.  We are tempted to dwell on the trouble, talk about the trouble, maybe complain about the trouble, and live with it.  We might get bitter or embittered and even resent God for the trouble.  We might even build a theology of personal suffering around our adversity.  We are giving our troubles or adversities more weight than they are worth.  We're weighed down with them.  We're saturated with out troubles or sorrows.  We might even let our troubles define us.

In all this, we have forgotten to do something that God advises us to do.  We forget to cry out to God for deliverance.  The short prayer, "help, God", or "God, help", is a good prayer!  The shorter version is, "help".  We might pray once, call out one time and nothing changes; so we give up and accept the negative as our inheritance.   The word does not say that when you cry out, God will not deliver you and you will not honor God.  No, it says the opposite of that.  The word says that when you cry out, God will deliver you from trouble.  It comes down to, are you going to believe the word? 

There are delays sometimes.  Prayer is not magic.  We are admonished to pray in all circumstances and to live a life of worship and prayer before God.  Prayer and worship are not events or times and places, but your life as a child of God. As children of God, we cry out, call upon the Lord and trust Him as a lifestyle.  God delivers.  It's one of the things God does.  God may deliver you immediately or after some time.  

We are not self-sufficient.  Nor are we people whom God "sets and forgets".  We are and remain God's children and God is an active father who is involved in his children's lives.  We need to get that, before we move on to anything else.  Are you living a life that witnesses, "He loves me"?  Do you know you are loved?  Do you know that you are special to God and God cares about the smallest details of your life?

What is the most important event in the Old Testament?  The exodus, the deliverance from Egypt.  God's people cried out for a long time before he delivered them.  Sometimes there is a waiting and a continual crying out, with massive disappointment, but God hears your cries.  God's plan for deliverance and the answer to your prayers is massively beyond your imagination.  

When God delivers us and breaks the chains off us of our troubles and sets us free, the weight of his glory descends onto us and we worship him with out entire beings and give our lives to God on deeper and deeper levels, living a life of awe and thankfulness and obedience to God and intimacy with God, knowing in an experiential way, that God loves us.



Cry out to me   whenever you are in trouble.  I will deliver you     then you will honor me.
Call upon me    in the day of trouble.             I will deliver you    and you shall glorify me.
Call for help     when you're in trouble.          I'll help you           and you'll honor me.
Pray to me        in time of trouble.                  I will rescue you    and you will honor me.
Call on me        when you are in trouble.       I will rescue you    and you will give me glory.

Psalm 50:15 (CEB, ESV, MSG, CEV, & NLT)



-This post was originally written in 2012

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