When you can't do it anymore

Even the strongest people will have weak moments when all they want to do is give up. Pastor Steven Furtick from Elevation Church preaches a great message in this video about those moments in life when we have lost all hope and are ready to quit. Quit on a relationship. Quit on a ministry. Quit on our purpose. Quit on our kids, maybe even quit on life. How can we go on when we have no hope for the future? Sometimes it’s not after a failure that we want to give up but rather when we have reached success in our lives. Why? Success can often require a lot more strength out of us than the struggle prior to our success. Steven Furtick mentions four different factors that can make us want to give up in life:

Disappointment

Sometimes it’s not when our dreams don’t come true that we want to quit but rather after they come true. We tend to struggle with reconciling the picture we had in our imagination with what reality looks like. We grew up watching Hollywood films about love and now our marriage looks very different in reality than it did in our dream about marriage. We dreamed about having a baby but when the baby came being a parent ended up being a lot harder than we had imagined in our dreams.

Responsibility

We want God to bless us with a great career, with children, with a husband and when we receive all these blessings we want to quit. Why? It’s not easy to live a blessed life because the blessings come with responsibility. The responsibilities we have in our lives can be heavy to carry sometimes. Life was easier before our dreams came true. It’s a great privilege to get to see your dreams come true but oh how difficult it can be to live in the blessings of life sometimes. Now when our dreams have come true we have more work to do than before, more people to love and nurture and less time to sleep in on the weekends. When we want to quit in life it’s usually not because we don’t want to do it anymore but because we think we can’t. We say “I’ve had enough” because on the inside we believe that we aren’t enough. We feel like we have done everything we can and we don’t know what else to do.

Opposition

Certain battles we expect in life but what about when difficulty arises in an area we didn’t expect? One area we often don’t expect opposition in is in our inner being. We expect opposition from other people but what about when your greatest enemy lives inside of you? That voice on the inside that tells you that you aren’t going to make it through this struggle and that you aren’t enough. It’s a lot easier to fight off opposition from others than it is to fight the enemy within.

Position

“The reason you have collapsed is not because of your situation, it’s because of your position.”

Steven Furtick

When we find ourselves in a place in life where we want to give up chances are we aren’t finding ourselves very close to God in that moment. In the midst of our struggles God whispers to us to come back to him. God has the power to turn our situation around but we can’t do this all on our own. We need God to intervene in our lives. We weren’t meant to carry all the heavy burdens of this life on our own. What we need to be able to go on when we want to quit is not a change in our feelings, we need a change in our focus.