Cast Your Cares by Abide Christian Meditation

Author:Abide Christian Meditation
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

JOURNAL PROMPT: How can you remind yourself to pray about everything instead of worrying? Journal about your most urgent requests and humbly bring them to the Lord.

Trusting God in Divorce

Reflect on God’s Word

About twenty years ago on a bitterly cold midnight in Minnesota, a county park ranger knocked loudly on the window of a young pastor’s van. Fresh from a broken marriage, with nowhere to go, the pastor was trying to sleep in his van that was parked just north of Minneapolis in this county park.

The park ranger said, “I’m sorry, this park is closed. You’ll need to go somewhere else.”

The pastor found himself driving around this large city searching for a quiet, safe spot to rest his eyes, if only for a few hours. Finally settling behind an office park, he curled up with a blanket and slept.

The next morning, he went to a YMCA to take a shower and get some coffee. This was his new normal, wandering in the desert, alone, in pain and desperate for a word from the Lord. He was a long, long way from the flock he had shepherded as a pastor. He was in serious need of a shepherd himself.

That was one of the worst seasons of this pastor’s life. He was flooded with feelings of anger, fear, loneliness, and shame. As Christians who promised to be faithful “’til death do us part,” it’s devastating to be one of those Christian divorce statistics.

Maybe that’s where you are now. You are brokenhearted, tired, hurt, angry, bitter, and confused.

It seems hard to believe that there can be joy through this devastating experience. Yet Jesus can bring joy alive during this time. The young pastor’s strength to get through this divorce was rooted in the joy that comes from the Holy Spirit. While God can’t take away the experience and disappointment of a divorce, through Jesus, the sting of it will eventually diminish in the presence of the kind of joy that only comes from him.

While each story of divorce is different, God knows your pain.

Divorce breaks the marriage covenant, a promise between you and your spouse and God. There’s a reason God hates divorce: It’s a broken promise, a rebellion against him. The Bible calls this sin.

When Christians talk about divorce, we often miss an important distinction: God hates divorce, not the divorced. God hates sin, not sinners. Jesus died for us in God’s greatest act of love to his children while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8).

Churches and parishes usually do not know what to do with Christians going through divorce because they don’t want to appear to endorse divorce.

Perhaps you desperately want and need the Lord, but church is the last place you want to be. Many there simply don’t know how to meet you in your darkest hour.

Churches often shy away from, or even shun, the Christians in their own congregations who need Christian divorce recovery advice. The Bible tells us that God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Psalm 147:3), but many churches ignore those who are brokenhearted because of divorce.

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