How to Deal with Challenges in Your Relationship with God

In every relationship, there comes a time when things go a bit wonky and out of alignment. It doesn’t have to be anyone’s fault. Sometimes, people simply miss each other, whether because someone misspoke, because of fatigue and inattention, or because one or both of you are under stress and a little bit on edge. In those situations, you might be a little inconsiderate or miss cues you’d otherwise pick up on and respond to.

A person’s relationship with God is similar, in many ways, to their relationship with other people. There is communication, there are intentions and expressed purposes and desires, and there can also be challenges. What’s different is that one is dealing with an infinitely wise, kind, compassionate, gracious, truthful, and loving God who doesn’t get things wrong and who knows what the best course of action is in every situation.

One’s relationship with God has challenges of its own, but most if not all these stem from where we are in the process of growth and maturity. We can get frustrated with God because we don’t understand Him and how He does things in our lives and the world. We can feel abandoned by God and attribute motives to Him that may simply be the figments of our imagination. And we can feel His love more deeply than anything we’ve ever experienced.

Some examples of challenges in the relationship with God

When you have a perfect God interacting with imperfect people, there are bound to be problems. In our imperfections, there are some things that we can struggle to deal with about who God is and how He chooses to operate in the world. Some examples of the challenges one may have in their relationship with God include the following.

Understanding Him in Scripture

One of the many issues that were under discussion during the movement that came to be known as the 16th-century Protestant Reformation was the question of whether one needed other people such as priests to understand the Bible. In short, what the leaders of that movement concluded was that the Bible was sufficiently clear on its own to convey what each person needed to know to be saved and live a godly life.

While there is a place for people who spend time studying the ins and outs of the Bible, one doesn’t need to be a Bible scholar to understand the overall message and direction of the Bible story.

Those Bible scholars can provide additional insights into thorny issues, and they can provide insights that can help the average person read the Bible better, but the Bible is clear enough that you can get its gist and core message without a working knowledge of ancient Greek or Hebrew.

So, while it can be difficult to read certain parts of the Bible because they feel so foreign to us in our 21st-century North American context, we can get the general tenor of what Scripture is teaching by putting our heads down and working at it. And where we get stuck, there are many resources available such as study Bibles, sermons and books by wise teachers such as Tim Keller, or Bible reading plans from organizations like The Bible Project.

Understanding God’s ways in the world

One of the main challenges when it comes to understanding God might not be understanding what He’s saying to us in Scripture, but more in how all that relates to our everyday lives and the things we see around us. For instance, when we encounter rampant injustice that seems to go unpunished, it’s hard to square that with what we understand about who God is.

At times, it can seem as though God doesn’t care about what is happening in the world. So much is going wrong in our world, and it seems like it’s going to keep happening and nothing is stopping it. This is where the rubber of one’s faith and trust in God hits the hard road of reality as we experience it. The question of suffering and what God thinks and is doing about it is one of the biggest challenges in a person’s relationship with God.

Understanding God’s ways with us

Another arena where we can encounter challenges in our relationship with God is in how He relates to us. We can feel hard done by God if we think that we’ve been obedient to Him and yet our lives don’t seem to have improved. We may struggle to relate to God as a loving heavenly Father because of our own experiences with our earthly fathers. Or we may feel God doesn’t love us because we have sinned in some way.

Our relationship with God may be marred by our cognitive distortions, or by us attributing to God what is essentially human behavior. We can think of God as uncaring because that’s how the people around us are. Or we can think of God as a harsh taskmaster because that’s how other authority figures around us are. We can also feel we need to be perfect before we come to God because that’s how we’ve experienced our other relationships with people.

In other cases, we may feel like God doesn’t see or care about us because of a situation we are in that can’t seem to find relief. If you’re feeling ill, abandoned by friends, being taken advantage of, not seeing job or life prospects on the horizon, in a challenging relationship, or struggling with mental or physical health issues, it can feel as though God is uncaring because He hasn’t changed the situation for the better.

We may also be wrestling with our own sin, and that can bring complications of its own. We can feel ashamed and unworthy of God’s love, and that untruth can make us stay away from God as we try to earn our way back into His grace. That, or we can feel like there’s no turning back and we plunge ourselves deeper into the things that we know displease God.

These are just some of the challenges that can enter our lives and into the relationship we have with God. They can be significant; significant enough to feel like we need to make our own way in the world and to leave God behind as we do so. However, there are glimmers of hope and things we can all hold onto as we try to deal with these challenges to our relationship with God.

Dealing with challenges in relating with God

One thing that this article hasn’t done and will not do is suggest that one’s relationship with God is simple or easy. It can be full of joy, love, and deep peace beyond description and enough to confound even our imagination. It will have its seasons of simplicity and sometimes even predictability in its routines. Throughout a life, however, a relationship with God will have its ups and downs, and it will rarely be simple or easy.

Some of the ways of dealing with challenges in one’s relationship with God include the following:

Don’t move off

Instead of moving off to look for answers elsewhere, we should continue clinging to God. God isn’t always easy to understand, and what He has to say to us isn’t always palatable because His ideas of what’s right and good can often offend our sensibilities. Yes, God can offend us because what we think is true doesn’t line up with His ideas, and what we think is life-giving might actually be killing us.

After a particularly hard teaching by Jesus, people started leaving Him because they didn’t like what He was saying. He looked at His closest disciples and said, “You do not want to leave too, do you?” (John 6:67, NIV).

Though they were confused and were likely contemplating leaving, they took a bold step and their leader Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68, NIV).

They may have been in a moment of confusion; they were likely as offended as their compatriots, but they recognized the important truth that there wasn’t anywhere else they could go to receive true and eternal life.

One of the most challenging steps for anyone to take is to trust that God is God and that we are not. God can see what we do not, and though we can feel in our bones that we’re right, we should trust Him over that feeling (Isaiah 55:8-9).

It can take time for God’s wisdom to become apparent to us, but we need to fill that gap with faith that sees God’s track record and believes that what we know to be true is true.

Learn from Scripture

One of the best places to learn how to respond when we encounter challenges is Scripture itself. Other people have struggled with how God runs the world, and they have struggled with their own sins and how God is at work in their own lives and situations. The Psalms of lament show us that God is big enough to hear our complaints, whether about other people or God Himself.

Walk with others

Your journey doesn’t have to be a solitary one. You can walk with other people who have asked questions similar to yours. There are many books out there written by faithful doubters – people who have held onto God even amid their doubts, or who may have even lost their faith for a season but found that God was faithful and had held onto them.

Other people can remind us of the many truths of Scripture, telling us of God’s grace and how we can’t earn God’s favor or outgive God (Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 3). Whether with a friend or a Christian counselor, you can learn more about who God is, and learn to identify unhelpful and untrue ideas about yourself and God, replacing these with a truthful and healthy understanding.

Would you benefit from the help of a Christian counselor to deal with the challenges in your walk with God? The Biblically-based counselors and therapists in our offices would love to lead you into a closer relationship with God. Contact our offices to set up an appointment today.