Being a Christian is not easy. The hoards for the enemies of God are against you and their main aim is to bring you down, not your soul, but your thoughts and feelings. Your life is hide with Christ on high, beyond the reach of harm. Nothing can take away the Christians safety and certainty in the household of faith, and no one can take Gods people from him. He has paid the ultimate price for their lives and will keep us, according to his promises, until the end.

Our thoughts and feelings can somehow cause us much trouble, and doubts can easily invade our minds and cause us to forget to lay hold of the sure and certain promises in Christ. We can feel physical symptoms of stress, pain, sickness, but all of these can never remove us from our status in heaven. We are physical beings and as humans, we feel these difficulties strongly, but all gloomy thoughts, all anxious cares and feelings do not take our lives out of our Saviours protecting hands.

Even though we bring our woes to him, we can still feel that it is too much for us. It is. We must give him his true place in our lives and cast ourselves upon his mercy and grace. It is safe to do this, as his mercy is boundless and his grace is unmeasurable. As we face each task of the day we carry them out in the strength of God. He promises strength for the day, and no more. Some of our problems arise when we become anxious about days in the future that we feel we could not face today. That’s fine – you don’t have to do these things today. When the time comes God will graciously give you what you need.

We think of provision as mainly physical, but the reality is that our mental, emotional and spiritual strength comes from the one who controls all things. Indeed these parts of our character are the key to our wellbeing, and the physical follows from this.

Trusting in God is always the key. However, we must also make sure that we are thinking and doing the right things. If we are entertaining faithless thoughts, it will be difficult for us to overcome our faulty thinking. We need to have the word of God before us and we need to be able to think of scriptures or even hymns, that will give us ammutition in the fight against the negativity.

The longer you wrestle with these kinds of difficulties

, the more adept you will become at handling the weapons. Read your bible every day, pray every day, not just for your self and your family, but for God’s people everywhere, who also struggle. Learn verses or passages of the bible by heart so that when the thougts come, the scripture will spring into your mind as a remedy or antidote against the poison.

I know that I would not have survived mind illness, without God’s word. It is the one thing I can rely on and that absolutely works in this internal fight. I also love many of the hymns that I have learned inadvertently through singing them in church. If God has blessed you with a good memory, use it to glorify him when you are troubled. If you are not good at remembering, there are ways to enhance your ability. Learning a short scripture verse every day, is a good place to start.

As I write this, I am also speaking to myself. If you are troubled with mental illness, the quicker you learn to bring it to God, the better. Life is full of troubles of all sorts, and it can bring you down with the constant blame and guilt. I know he has kept me all these years so far, and he will keep me to the end. Then he will take me home, where I will never be troubled again.

To walk this life with him, is the greatest thing any person can experience. My prayer is to walk here in such a way, that when I cross the threshold of eternity, I will hardly notice…