When God’s Plans Make You Weep

There are things about your life that are true, even though you wish they were not. Things that cause you sorrow and pain. Things you never asked for and definitely never wanted. And they happened anyway.

What does it mean when you’ve given your life to God and you still end up hurting? You’ve been a faithful follower and you still get cancer. You still lose your job, your house, your family. What do you do when God’s plans make you weep?

You are not alone in your tears.  Look to Christ. See Jesus weeping before the grave of His friend, Lazarus (John 11:35), over all the pain, sorrow, and loss that death has unleashed since it entered the world. See Jesus weeping as He enters Jerusalem on a donkey (Luke 19:41), knowing judgment and destruction were coming. See Jesus in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44) in anticipation of what was to come – His betrayal, arrest, abandonment, persecution, and execution.

This is Jesus. He followed the will of the Father perfectly and it led him to the cross.

How do we keep following God when He leads us to places that break our hearts?

We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterward.    Hebrews 12:2

Joy?  Are we supposed to believe that Jesus looked forward to, even welcomed, the cross? No! We clearly see Jesus’ agony in the face of the suffering He knew He was about to endure. But He surrendered His will to God, saying “Yet I want your will, not mine” (Luke 22:42). Then He was able to get up and face what came next. To endure through to the joy.

Were His circumstances changed? Not one bit. If anything, they got worse. So what was different? His thoughts. He looked past the pain to the joy of knowing that He was fulfilling God’s plan to rescue what was lost, to redeem what had been stolen. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus stood the test that Adam and Eve failed in the Garden of Eden. What Eve brought into the world by her distrust and disobedience, Christ defeated by His trust and obedience.

For I have come down from heaven to do the will of God who sent me, not to do what I want.         John 6:38

My nourishment comes from doing the will of God, who sent me, and from finishing his work.               John 4:34

Jesus shouts from a cross that God’s plans are good, even when they make us weep. Not because every moment feels good, but because God is good. Certainly the cross wasn’t the source of Jesus’ joy. And whatever painful circumstances you face aren’t intended to be the source of your joy either. They are an invitation to stand the test, to declare that God is fundamentally, at His very essence, good and therefore His plans for us are better than any we could make for ourselves.

So we don’t look at the troubles we can see right now; rather, we look forward to what we have not yet seen. For the troubles we see will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever.      2 Corinthians 4:18