Let’s open this with a quick question. Are you ready? Have you ever been discouraged? Have you ever done something or gone through something where you just feel like you can’t win? I certainly have. How about this question, do you know that being discouraged is a choice? There is a man who comes to my mind every time the cloud of discouragement looms overhead. That man is Job. See Job had every right to be discouraged, he had every right to feel alone and he certainly had every right to lose hope; or did he? If you remember the story of Job everything that could go wrong did go wrong. He lost his family, his wealth, and his livelihood, yet he never cursed God, nor did he blame Him for anything that was happening to him. Was he upset? Probably. Was he sad? Probably. But he never lost faith that God was good. He never turned his back on God, not even when his own wife was telling him to do so. See I think he was on to something, if we were honest with ourselves when we feel the cloud of discouragement over us we typically blame God for it. We wish it would just go away so we can resume what we were doing. But I think there’s more. See we have the choice to be discouraged. We have the choice on how to react when discouragement comes our way. There are a number of things we tend to do when we feel discouraged. We throw a pity party for ourselves and cry out “WHY ME!” We get angry and even the smallest thing can set us off, or we begin to harden our hearts. It seems like we use discouragement (and really anything we are going through) as an excuse to sin. But we must remember that God is in the midst of it all. That no matter how much we are hurting and how lost we feel, God is still good. He is still sovereign and He is still moving. Choose to see what God is trying to reveal to you in times of discouragement instead of wishing it never happened. Don’t use the hard times as an excuse to sin, use them to glorify God.
