Author: Phil Rehberg

In order to cooperate with God’s work in us we will need to be very intentional about choosing faith. This means not struggling against the darkness but rather embracing it and trusting God. This means learning a new way to “do” faith. It will be raw, deep, and unassisted by feelings or circumstances. This also means letting go of one’s old way of trusting God which is usually very difficult. It will probably help to develop one or two images that your mind can rely on in order to train it in deep faith. One image that combines fear and deep faith is the experience of walking on a footbridge over a small chasm. Perhaps you have been on a hike where others have already walked over a footbridge that you were not confident in. You felt fear, but you proceeded in faith because others had already crossed the bridge. Continue Reading →

The hardest type of suffering is prolonged deep suffering. This presents greater challenges to our faith since the pain is constant. Examples include the death of a loved one that leaves you lonely, a long debilitating illness, the loss of one’s social network, or working in a hostile environment. One-time tragedies are easier to recover from when they don’t have a drastic lasting impact. Prolonged deep suffering wears away at us like the ocean wears away at boulders. We may not notice how it gradually affects our mindset so we need to watch that it doesn’t make us into negative or dysfunctional people. And we need to keep prolonged deep suffering from damaging our confidence in God’s Scripture. With prolonged suffering you need to adopt a long-term coping strategy and focus your mind and energy on learning how to get through each day, day after day. You need to strengthen Continue Reading →