Pressed Under Pressure (Part I)

To our shock, pressure has a way of squeezing what is inside of us! God doesn’t expose it to humiliate us, but in His mercy allows us to see it, so we can surrender it to Him.

Sometimes we expect an unbeliever or a new believer to be open and vulnerable with their issues, but we don’t want our weaknesses or issues to be exposed. The Bible never paints a rosy picture in an attempt to create a perfect or untouchable image of His people. Here are some of the stories from the Biblical characters and how they handled pressure.

Fear led to lying

Now there was a famine in the and, and Abram went down to Egypt to dwell there, for the famine was severe in the land.  And it came to pass, when he was close to entering Egypt, that he said to Sarai his wife, “Indeed I know that you are a woman of beautiful countenance.  Therefore it will happen, when the Egyptians see you, that they will say, ‘This is his wife’; and they will kill me, but they will let you live.  Please say you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that I may live because of you.” Genesis 12:10-13

If Abraham had focused on God’s promises, he would have remembered that God was going to make him a great nation. Since he didn’t have any children at that time, he couldn’t die yet!  He didn’t have to rely on lying about his relationship with his wife. Unfortunately, out of self-preservation, he manipulated Sara and asked her to lie for him. A person in panic mode is like someone drowning in a lake, they hold on tightly to whoever is close, potentially endangering the lives of others. Abraham involved his wife in a lie out of fear of being killed.

God corrected the situation through a faithless Pharaoh to save the Father of faith! He also allowed it to be recorded, in order for us to learn from it. Regardless of our previous successes and obedience to the Lord, we can panic at times and take the matters in our own hands and even compromise truth!

Lack led to complaining

In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Exodus 16:2-3

The Israelites had seen God’s mighty hand in their lives. If God really wanted them to die, he could have left them in Egypt to suffer and die. They forgot how God had miraculously brought them out of a 400 year ordeal, and separated the waters in order for them to walk on dry land! A few months of wilderness was nothing to the one who had taken them out of the hands of a tyrant!

Remembering where God has brought us from, could be a matter of life and death in a given situation! The Israelites blamed Moses for bringing them out of Egypt into the wilderness to die there. They ended up having a self-fulfilling prophesy because their complaint and unbelief kept them from entering the Promised Land; they did die in the wilderness!

I will continue with this subject in the next devotional.