Stripped: Trusting God When He Allows Others to Hurt Youಮಾದರಿ

I never grow tired of this story! After years of worrying about his future, God had huge blessings prepared for Joseph. From a jail cell to adventures traveling across Egypt, watching the fulfillment of Pharaoh’s dreams unfold before his eyes. Those seven years yielded such abundance that he eventually stopped keeping records because it was beyond measure. Not only that, he married and started his own family. He was living in his sweet spot, and in these verses, we have a postcard from heaven with wonderful lessons. There are three distinct alterations that, when applied, are powerful catalysts for transformation.

I call them the Three Fs:

• Forget
• Fructify
• Forgive

FORGET

Although it’s possible to suffer memory loss after a traumatic event, whether physical or psychological, when Joseph names his first son the equivalent of “God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household,” he is not talking about memory loss and not being able to recall what happened. What Joseph is referencing in the name of his child, Manasseh, is not this type of memory loss. He talks about the ability to “forget the trouble” as a turning point where the trouble no longer hurts as though it just happened or is happening to you.

I remember there was a specific moment when I stopped talking about my situation as a present, ongoing issue. Instead, I began talking about what I went through in the past tense. There is no formula for this process, it happens at different moments for each of us. For some, it takes days or months, while in other cases it can take years to move from “what is happening” to “what happened.”

Joseph’s journey through the pit, the desert, the meantime, the unexpected, and the highs and lows, exemplifies that trusting God through each season results in the ability to one day turn the page and forget all the trouble and suffering.

The certainty of where your hope resides prepares you to embrace the blessings of the new chapter. Jesus is the immutable source of love that removes brokenness and restores us to a place of healing and contentment. He dissipates our pain and gives us joy amidst the heartache.

Do you need the Lord to intervene in this area? Maybe you’ve built a comfortable house for painful memories that you revisit frequently. We continue talking about an event that happened years ago, reliving it like it happened the day before. Our anger rises and bitterness finds a place to sink its roots into. Instead of giving our broken pieces to God, we essentially keep picking at our scab, rather than letting the wound heal.

As Christians, we’ve been given power and tools to deal with these issues. The Holy Spirit living in us empowers us to overcome, but only if we give Him space to work by submitting all that we are (including our pain) under His authority. It’s in this surrendering of ourselves that we find unchaining freedom and hope.

THE RENEWING

What does this look like in practical terms? Learning to let go of the past and stop replaying events is one of the hardest things to do, especially when everything in your new normal reminds you that it’s all a by-product of the stripping you endured.

For me, it means looking to God daily. Every hour. Every second. As long as I kept my focus on the situation, it was a downward spiral. When I shifted my gaze to Jesus, His promises, and how He endured suffering for my sake, I was able to make it through the day. And slowly but surely, the verb tense of ‘suffer’ changed from present to past.

In his second letter to the believers in Corinth, Paul wrote that “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5, CSB).

When our thoughts want to drag us into dark places, we need to demolish them and bring them captive with the truth of God’s Word. However many times it takes. We defeat the power of lies and sorrow permanently with truth and freedom. Nothing in this world compares to the power of the Word of God. It is living, active, and has the power to turn a valley of bones into a living army. Our damaging thoughts cannot remain in control when we bring them captive to obedience in Christ.

We must train ourselves to speak confidently over the mental storms that threaten and frighten us, literally ordering our thoughts to be calm in the name of Jesus. We take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.

I desire bold and breakthrough faith like Joshua’s to command my thoughts into submission by the power of Christ. I won’t always get this right, not even the disciples did. But I persist, declaring the Word over the amalgam of thoughts that are part of the human condition. The Holy Spirit dwells in us, the power that rose Christ from the dead dwells in us too (Ephesians 1:19). Therefore, we speak to our thoughts in the name of Jesus Christ until the waves and wind in our minds are completely calm.

Another tool God gives us to forget is to remember. Say what? Isn’t that a contradicting statement? I’m glad you asked. We’ll pick it up tomorrow.