Our culture teaches us God doesn’t exist, we can create our own morality, we can do whatever we want as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else, and that isn’t true because our culture doesn’t know what to do with pain.

When we leave God out of the equation then we are just left with the pain in this world and we don’t know what to do with the lies, slander, gossip, pride, hate, rape, murder, natural disasters, and we don’t know what to do with the pain. How do we deal with the pain?

We either BEAT ourselves up or we BLOCK it out. We beat ourselves up with words of condemnation like “You’re a loser, you’re weak, you’re an embarrassment, and what were you thinking” to take the pain out on ourselves. Often times that spirals into isolation and depression where we separate ourselves from other people because of the pain. Sometimes that leads to abusing our bodies with food, alcohol, cutting, and eating disorders because we don’t know what else to do other than punish ourselves for the pain.

If we don’t beat ourselves up we tend to block it out. We just tell ourselves it didn’t happen. We go shopping, go drinking, get in another relationship, bury the pain, block it out, and move on. This makes it difficult to build lasting relationships because when pain occurs we don’t acknowledge it to God or others, we just ignore it. We will move, change friends, change jobs, change churches and we never experience healing.

Scripture teaches us we don’t have to carry the pain, but instead we take it to a Holy God and He takes responsibility of the pain. God never intended for us to take the pain and that is why He came to earth and walked among us so He could take the pain. He lived a life of perfection that is without pain and He takes our pain. He becomes our sacrifice on the cross and He experiences the consequences of all pain for all of eternity. He isn’t looking for us to carry that pain. He comes to us and takes that pain for us, He dies for that pain, and 3 days later He resurrects from the dead and He overcame the pain.

We don’t have to punish ourselves, Jesus has already taken the punishment We don’t have to try to bury the pain because Jesus took it to the grave and overcame it. He takes our pain and we receive His righteousness. That is the hope of the gospel.