A friend of mine once told me, “I feel highly rejected and I think that God and I are going to take a break for a while.” My friend served on the worship team at his church. But at this point in his life, he had been evicted from his home and was having difficulty securing work. He had been diligently praying for help but it didn’t seem to him at the time that God was listening or that perhaps he was being punished. And so he decided that he was gonna take a break from worshiping God.
Of course, God was not punishing him. We live in a fallen world where calamity is a daily occurrence and naturally, difficult situations will befall us many times throughout our lives. No one is immune to calamity. We must not deceive ourselves into believing that worship of Christ is a means of protecting ourselves from such things.
Worship is a discipline. We don’t worship Christ because he does stuff for us, we worship Him because He and only He is worthy. He doesn’t promise us temporal success. He promises eternal salvation. If we must have a reason to worship, that alone is enough. We are saved from the eternal consequence of our sins which is eternal death, but not from the temporal consequences of our actions or even the actions of others which may have consequences for us in this life.
But despite how it may feel sometimes, God does not abandon us here. He tells us to bring our cares to Him. Peter said, “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” (1 Peter 5:7). Keep in mind that these are the words of someone who had suffered greatly and eventually was to be crucified upside down. Yes God cares for us, but that doesn’t always mean He is going to pay our bills. There have been far too many Christians who have died homeless and penniless for that to be the intent of this verse.
Psalm 55:22 adds clarity. “Give all your cares to the Lord and He will give you strength. He will never let those who are right with Him be shaken.” God will empower us to endure the hardships that we inevitably face when we bring our concerns to Him. He doesn’t promise to fix it (though He may sometimes), but He does promise to sustain us.
“Even though the fig trees have no blossoms, and there are no grapes on the vines; even though the olive crop fails, and the fields lie empty and barren; even though the flocks die in the fields, and the cattle barns are empty, yet I will rejoice in the Lord! I will be joyful in the God of my salvation!” — (Habakkuk 3:17-18)