Suffering alone won't change your heart

The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands …

— Revelation 9:20 (NIV)

Read the full text: Revelation 8 · 9

Food fails, water turns bitter, security disappears - and people cling tighter to their idols, not looser, even as those same idols strip away every last shred of hope. Hardship alone has never been enough to change a human heart. Something else has to happen first: a willingness to actually look up.

That’s worth remembering the next time you assume a hard season will automatically make you, or someone you love, more open to God. It doesn’t work that way on its own - pressure reveals what you’re already holding onto more often than it loosens your grip.

It changes how you treat people in trouble. Waiting for someone’s crisis to do your work for you is a poor strategy and a cold way to love them; the illness, the redundancy, the divorce will not argue them into anything. What does reach people is usually smaller and slower: someone who stays, tells the truth, and does not use the bad news as leverage.

It also changes how you read your own hard seasons. The trumpets are warnings, not lessons - they are meant to be heeded, not decoded. If you are in one now, the useful question is not “what is God teaching me through this”, which can keep you busy for years, but “what am I holding onto that this has already exposed”.

And what the people in this chapter hold onto is worth noticing: not statues, but the works of their own hands. Things they made, and cannot stop trusting even as those things fail them. That is a more familiar idol than any carved image - the plan, the career, the savings, the person, the reputation that was supposed to keep you safe and has been quietly failing for a while now.

Looking up is the one move the chapter asks for. Not solving anything; just lifting your eyes from what is not working. Do it once this week, deliberately: name the thing you have kept trusting, admit out loud what it has not done for you, and ask God for what you were asking it to give.

Questions to reflect on

• Think of a hard season in your own life. Did it soften your grip on whatever you were relying on instead of God, or did you hold on tighter?
• Is there something right now you’d keep clinging to even if it kept failing you, simply because letting go feels scarier than the failure itself?
• Who are you quietly waiting to be broken enough to listen - and what would it look like to just stay with them instead?

Prayer

Lord, hardship alone does not change my heart; only you can. Show me what I keep clinging to even when it fails me, and give me the courage to let go and look up to you. Amen.