Do’s and Don’ts of a Diagnosis

Don’ts: 

- Don’t forget what you know 

       The easiest thing to do will be to forget what you know to be true about God, His Word, and yourself. You’re a creature. He is the Creator. He has told us that all who call on Him are welcomed by Him. He cares uniquely for His own. Whatever these circumstances look like, those things doesn’t change. The basic truths are often the most comforting. Hebrews 11:6 provides a great example of this. Those who come to God must believe…in what? The most complex doctrinal formulations and be able to articulate them flawlessly? No. Must believe that God is and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. It’s basic but rich in comfort. 

- Don’t begin to imagine you know the outcomes

Because we have connection to an unfathomable amount of information through technology and our abilities to harness that technology to accomplish things, we can begin to believe we can tell the future. Whether that’s through statistics, our own fear bend, or just through simple speculation, our minds can run rampant with all sorts of possible futures, most of which (if not all) will never come to be. We’d do well to remember just how far we can tell the future and how much control we actually have in this life. 

- Don’t go to Google

This is more about control. We can be tempted to believe that if we just know enough about what’s going on we’ll ask just the right question, get just enough of a handle on things to engineer our outcomes, or we’ll at least be comforted because we won’t have so many questions: we’ll quiet our fears with knowledge and assure ourselves with confidence, right? But this isn’t true. We’ll never have enough knowledge to know the end from the beginning. That power belongs to God alone and He’s trustworthy with both the knowledge and the power over it. 

- Don’t become anxious 

We may be tempted to say, “but I can’t help but worry!” Remember, there is a command from the Living God to be anxious for nothing. That’s a tall order in moments like this. But it’s one that we’re strengthened to obey by the Spirit Who raised Christ from the dead. That means that we don’t get a pass for disobedience just because we really would like to for now. That means there are a few things we must do. 

Do’s:

- Pray

This is so much easier to think about doing or ask other people to do than to actually get to work doing. Pray remembering that the Spirit assists our prayers. Pray remembering that your Father cares for you. Pray remembering that the Father doesn’t give His hungry children scorpions when they ask for eggs and snakes when they ask for bread. Pray remembering that if He spared not His own Son He will with Him also freely give us all things. Pray remembering that our prayers are meant to bring us into conformity with Him not Him into conformity with us. That means that a significant portion of our prayer ought to sound like Jesus’, “nevertheless, not my will, but your will be done.”

- Actively take your thoughts captive

Our thoughts are to be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. That means that for all the “my thoughts just run wild” temptation, we’re to wrestle our minds into submission to the Lord by the power of the Spirit according to the Word. This is work. It’s hard. It’s against our flesh. We don’t walk by the flesh though. It profits us nothing. 

-  Remember what is true and not only what is possible

Our feelings will follow our thoughts. If we’re left thinking only abou all of the “what ifs” and possibilities, we will absolutely be unsettled. The answer is not to embrace denial on the one hand or foolhardy optimism on the other. It’s to get our thoughts on what is true. There are libraries not just volumes to be filled with what we don’t know. But there is a single book that definitely tells us what we do know. Our thoughts must continually be dwelling on the certainty of what God has said and not just on what could happen. This too is a command, that we set our minds on things above, that we think on things that are true (not merely possible), and that the meditations of our heart be pleasing in the sight of our Lord. 

-  Trust in the Lord and ask for more faith 

Trusting in the Lord means actively resting in Him. Active resting. That sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. Our hearts are, as we sing, prone to wander. We have to actively be settling down in the Lord and what He has said both about Himself, His rule, and our circumstances. We may have to doggedly fight the temptation to lash out in a sin temper-tantrum. We may have to scramble to find verses and texts that shore up our unsteady faith. We may need someone to tell us exactly what we already know just to calm our hearts and silence our flesh in the moment. This puts us back at the beginning of the “do” list: pray. This time though we ask for more faith. Not more faith because we’re running low or because He hasn’t given us enough but because the recognition of our need for faith has grown. This recognition casts us into a deeper knowledge of our need for His sufficiency. The good news is that He is all sufficient for every need. His strength is made perfect in our weakness. These circumstances just bring that neediness to the surface so we can lean on Him and He can be seen as all glorious in this process that He has ordained.