Satan: What you see is what you get.
God: What you see is not what you get.

Scripture shows that suffering is a normal part of the Christian life.

It also encourages us by telling us the trials and tribulations of this life will be left behind for all eternity. The suffering we endure on earth does not indicate our future in the kingdom of God. Because of this, we must live by faith and believe that what we now see is not what we will get in eternity.

Satan wants to use our suffering to defeat us, but God uses our suffering to discipline us. When we actually start to feel the heat from the fiery trials, too often we shrink back. We live by sight and not by faith as opposed to living by faith and not by sight. Does the stress and the pain pull us off into despondency or push us toward dependence on Christ? It will be difficult to see past the suffering of this world unless we have spiritual eyes and are connected to the One Who holds all things in His hands.

When the going gets tough, are we listening to the promises of God or the lies of the enemy? A good barometer of that is our prayer life. Oftentimes, our prayer life indicates who we are believing. And Lord forgive us for those moments and those seasons when we are prayerless Christians.

Prayerlessness shows an ungrateful, selfish, unbelieving heart. If prayer is the language of faith and we are struggling in prayer, we need to look for a faith problem.

Put another way, one old time theologian put it like this: Think of prayer as a train. Faith is the engine of prayer, God’s promises are the fuel, and discipline is the rails. Prayerlessness is almost always due to a stalled engine. For prayer to get going again, we first need to fire up our faith engine again with fuel from God’s promises.

God’s promises are the fuel that fires the engine of faith. So we need to reject and discard the lies of Satan and replace them with the promises of God through faithful study of Scripture. Filter our thoughts, ideas, emotions through the filter of Scripture and discard what is not from God.

Prayerlessness is something we battle at times in our Christian walk and it is a problem plaguing the church today. That is one thing that I love about the Haitian people, they are quick to pray. A lesson I am humbled to continue to learn as those who lean deeply into the Lord and pray like they actually, literally, totally depend on Him.

That is the way all His children should live, no matter how independent and self-sufficient we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are. Whenever I find myself reluctant to go to the Lord in prayer because of my increasingly hardening heart, I meditate on this quote:

“…because your heart is cold and prayerless, get into the presence of the loving Father. Do not be thinking of how little you have to bring God, but of how much He wants to give to you. Just tell Him how sinful and cold and dark it all is. It is the Father’s loving heart that will give light and warmth to you.” -Andrew Murray

Light and warmth. We so often desperately need both. And where else can we turn to find it except to Christ.

Suffering is necessary and temporary, but glory lasts forever. For those of us who believe, our earthly suffering is only temporary, but our heavenly glory is eternal.

“Therefore we do not lost heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day, for momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison, while we look not at the things which are seen but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” -2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Our affliction rarely seems light. It seems most of the time more than we can endure. But notice how Paul describes it here, momentary light affliction vs eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. May we have spiritual eyes and fix them on eternal things. May our hearts have courage to believe the promises of God rather that the lies of the enemy. May our faith, though tested by fire, be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.