Discouragement and the Kingdom (Jason Helopoulos)

GUEST POST from Jason Helopoulos

(Hey, before you keep reading, note that this is a guest post.)

(Kevin did not write any of the words that follow. They are from Jason Helopoulos.)

(Just to be clear, this is a special post from someone other than me.)

Discouragement is a very real struggle in the Christian life. It is one that most of us know all too well. There are many possible causes for it, but there is one that I especially want to talk about today. It is one I know very well.

A few weeks ago I was driving between pastoral appointments and had about an hour. I made three phone calls in that hour, which resulted in three separate pastoral counseling situations. The counseling situations all involved wives struggling with huge sin issues in their marriage and life. It was not their particular sins, but the constant, relentless, and persistent sins of their spouses. And in each case it was not some minor sin, but a lifestyle sin that their unbelieving husbands had given into. They were all being afflicted in ways that seem to defy description.

In each case, we talked through their situation again, I sought to encourage them in the Lord, and then we prayed together. After an hour of counseling like this, I found myself crying out to God, “I just want to see the power of the cross and the glory of the Kingdom!” The fact that these women were continuing to suffer in these awful life-situations when we had been ministering to their husbands for months and even years grieved me. I just wanted to see these marriages redeemed and the grace of the Kingdom manifest in their homes. Frankly, I was discouraged.

It hit me the next day that I had “missed the boat.” I had seen the power of the cross and the glory of the Kingdom—I had just not recognized it. In all three of these conversations, the wives each said to me in their own way that they were willing to do whatever they had to do to honor God. They wanted to be faithful in the midst of their trial. I had missed it! I was looking for the grand redemption of a whole situation and missed that the power of the cross and the glory of the Kingdom were being manifest by these women in that very moment.

I don’t know if they had the same conviction hours later, but I do know that they had that conviction at the end of our conversations. At that moment, they desired nothing more than to live faithfully to the glory of God. That is the power of the cross and the glory of the Kingdom!

Are we to pray, hope, and labor for grand moments of redemption in the lives of those around us? Yes. But most of the Christian life and the Kingdom of God is manifest in the moment to moment living of Christians. If we had a better eye at recognizing those moment to moment manifestations of the power of the cross and the glory of the Kingdom then maybe one great cause of our discouragement would no longer be fed.