Worrying With God
By Steve Backlund
In the 1980s, our church was cursed by a group of witches. They drew a pentagram on the church wall and released a curse over the church. We thought, “If we don’t do something to cancel the effects of this curse, bad things are going to happen.” We had great faith in the power of a curse.
However, at the same time, if our pastor blessed us at the end of the church service, we would not have any expectation of good things coming to us. We did not think, “Uh oh, we were just blessed. If we don’t cancel the effects of this blessing, we are going to be overtaken with good things happening in our lives.”
In my book, Let’s Just Laugh at That, I use the spiritual weapon of laughter to disempower lies that restrict us in our emotions and in our experience. One of the lies I address in this devotional book is: “A Curse is More Powerful Than a Blessing.” This is indeed laughable. Concerning this lie, I share the following laughable assumptions:
Darkness is more powerful than light
Though Satan is defeated, his curses are still victorious
Generational curses are more powerful than generational blessings
If we are cursed, we should worry about bad things coming to us; but if we are blessed, we should not expect outrageously good things to come to us
A spoken blessing isn't really powerful; it’s just a courtesy gesture when someone sneezes
Christ's work on the cross is easily overturned by a curse
Even though these falsehoods seem absurd, Wendy and I had subtly begun to believe them. We asked ourselves the question, “Why do we have more faith in the power of a curse than in the power of a blessing?” We realized it was because we had a tendency of getting our beliefs from our past experiences, rather than from Scripture. This is a habit we are called to overcome.
We are not to challenge the Word of God with our experience, but we are to challenge our experience with the Word of God.
Negative worry is imagining your future with God not showing up. Positive worry is seeing your future as if God fully shows up. God did not create the imagination to be the devil’s playground, so let’s use it as the womb of faith for the “impossible things” God has planned for us.
A University of Cincinnati study discovered that 85% of what we worry about in the negative never happens, and most people find a successful way to navigate through the 15% that does.
In order to change our default worry settings, Wendy and I invented the Worry With God game, and this is how it goes. If we were blessed by someone, one of us would turn to the other and say, “Oh no, we just got blessed. What if because of this blessing, the following happens:
We get so much energy that we forget to go to sleep
Hospitals will forbid us to drive by them because every time we do, all their patients get well and leave
Our faces start to shine like Moses’ and people will demand we wear a veil
Our church grows so fast that we need to have ten services a weekend
Some would say, “This is ridiculous. You need to be more realistic.” No, God has not called us to be realistic; He has called us to be supernatural. Even if 85% of what we worry about in the positive never happens, we had much more fun worrying than remaining in our negativity.
What can you worry about with God today? Whatever you can think of, He can do more. “Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us” (Ephesians 3:20). Let’s give our imagination to God and start seeing goodness overtake us. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:6).
For more on this, listen to my podcast here.