7 Powerful Ways to Strengthen Your Faith During Hard Times
Figuring out how to strengthen your faith during hard times is something most believers only start asking when they are already in the middle of a season that is pressing on everything they thought they believed.
When everything goes wrong, you’ll know the truth about your faith. Not to punish you but to find out what is really under the surface when the pressure is on. When a doctor presents a hard report, when a relationship you depended upon breaks down, when the finances that felt pretty secure suddenly come crashing down, the faith that held up in comfortable times can feel vulnerable.
You don’t have to think that your faith was never genuine. The fact that it is open to the possibility of growing in depth is a sign of it. That deepening is actually accessible to every believer, who is willing to seek it out, not just when things are easier but in the midst of the struggle.
Why Hard Times Can Actually Strengthen Faith
It is important to spend some time at the beginning to explore the relationship between difficulty and faith in the Scriptures before turning to some practical suggestions on how to strengthen faith during difficult periods.
Believers are not promised comfort in the Bible. It promises presence, provision, and purpose in the middle of real difficulty. James 1:3 says that the testing of your faith produces patience, and patience produces something complete and mature. That’s not a cliché. It is a description of a mechanism. There’s a spiritual maturity that can only be achieved by difficulty, when done with the right spirit and attitude.
It’s not as if hard times are easy and it’s not as if it’s a bad thing to wish them to be over. It involves the realization that what you need most during one season, is the same season that also has the greatest potential for real spiritual growth. Those who actively seek God in the midst of a difficult season are those who exit that season almost always with greater faith than they entered it, and they all do.
7 Ways to Strengthen Your Faith During Hard Times
Here are some practical and useful ways to deepen your faith through difficult times that aren’t just platitudes.
1. Stop Performing Faith and Start Being Honest With God
The first and most important thing is also the one most people resist. In hard times, many Christians default to spiritual performance. They keep showing up, saying the right things, performing the expected posture of trust, while internally they are in genuine distress and they have never told God so.
God is not served by your performance. He is reached by your honesty. The Psalms are full of believers crying out in language that would embarrass most Sunday morning services. Where are You? Why have You forgotten me? How long will this last? That kind of honest prayer is not faithlessness. It is a deeper form of faith than the polished version, because it is actually reaching toward God rather than performing for an audience.
2. Go Back to What You Know, Not How You Feel
Hard seasons are notorious for producing emotions that feel like truth. Fear feels like evidence that things will not work out. Grief feels like evidence that God has abandoned you. Confusion feels like evidence that there is no plan.
None of those feelings are evidence of anything except that you are human and you are in pain. One of the lessons a believer should learn is to return to what is known and not what is felt; this is one important lesson in the spiritual life of the believer. What do you know to be true about God’s character in spite of your experience? Work your way there and upward each day.
3. Work toward a Narrower and More Honest Prayer Practice
Prayer during rough weather times may be different from prayer in nice times. When you have real weight, the wide general prayer of a comfortable season might not be sufficient. What is more effective is a more focused, sincere, specific prayer practice.
Rather than mention everything in general terms, select one or two things to bring to God at a particular day. Let those things remain in your mind for long enough that it is indeed a prayer and not just a laundry list.
4. Identify one person to be honest with you
One of these is the most reliable characteristic of hard times, and one of the most spiritually dangerous. When times are tough, you begin to have a line of thinking in your mind around your circumstance, what it means, where it’s going, and that line of thinking is almost always going to have to be confirmed by another point of view before you put your faith in it.
Look for one person, not a mob, but one person you can trust, a person who will sit with you and be truly honest. Not to fix you. Not to give quick assurances. But to be with you in the real and to pray from the heart. A friend loveth at all times; and a brother is born for adversity, Proverbs 17:17. The verse talks about a particular kind of relationship that’s good to seek out and to be in.
5. Keep Your Spiritual Habits Even When They Feel Empty
One of the most paradoxical tips for tough times is to continue doing what seems to be ineffective. Read Scripture even when it feels flat. Pray even when the silence feels thick. Go to church even when you are not sure why.
The reason this matters is not that spiritual activity produces a feeling. It is that spiritual habits keep you oriented toward God even when your emotional experience of that orientation has gone quiet. You are not doing these things to generate a feeling. You are doing them to stay in the conversation even when you cannot hear the other side clearly. The connection that feels severed during a dry season is maintained through continued practice more often than through waiting for the feeling to return.
6. Actively Look for Evidence of God’s Faithfulness in the Past
Memory is a spiritual discipline. All along the way in the Old Testament, God was telling His people to remember what He has done. Not as a religious act, but as a reminder of a time when God’s faithfulness was evident, one of the greatest resources for a season of lack.
Remember events when God has provided you with time, in specific detail. Impossible situations resolved. Satisfied needs in unanticipated ways. Seasons that you wouldn’t live through, you did. That record of faithfulness is your most honest answer to the fear that says things will not be okay this time.
7. Refuse to Make Permanent Decisions Based on Temporary Conditions
The thing that happens to us when we have a difficult season is that we make decisions about God, about ourselves, and about what is possible that we would never make in a good season. They decide that God is not real because He did not intervene when they needed Him to. They conclude that prayer is not effective because they prayed and it wasn’t what they wanted.
The choices they have made are usually ones of the heart in the middle of real pain, and they’re often passed on beyond the season that created them. The decisions made in the middle of the crisis continue to have an impact on the way people think about faith long after the crisis has passed. When the present moment is challenging, not making permanent judgements in a temporary moment is a wisdom that will guard your long-term relationship with God.
