Transcript: Giant mushroom tree says I struggle with emotional emptiness, abandonment issues, and having low self-worth. This makes my walk hard because my cup is always empty. God won’t answer my prayers. Any advice? Yeah, a giant mushroom tree, I don’t know you. I have to just guess at a couple of things here, so forgive me if I’m off base at all. It’s not my intention, but I also don’t like pat advice that doesn’t help people. I’ve seen enough of that. I’ve seen the kind of advice where people hear me saying this to you, they would go, “Oh, good answer, Mike, good answer,” and you’d be like, “Thanks, no, that didn’t help at all.” So I’m interested in what might actually help. So let me take some guesses, fill in your background info in my head a little bit, and I’ll suggest a couple of things.

One of the biggest issues, I think, for people who deal with emotional emptiness, abandonment issues, and low self-worth, and believing that God’s not answering your prayer, is in the faith category, but maybe not like you think. I’m not saying you lack faith; you’re just not having enough faith and you’d feel better if you believed more. I don’t mean that sometimes.

I remember thinking that after I sinned when I was younger, that I was like, “My relationship with God was broken, and I kind of had to live good for a few days or a week or whatever before we were okay again.” During that time where I felt like it was broken, I didn’t want to pray; I felt uncomfortable praying, I felt ashamed in praying, and all that. I wondered if God still loved me. I genuinely did. I was like, “Does He still love me?” And then I would go to church, there’d be a ton of worship, and I just felt like God loved me. I don’t remember if it was the teaching or reading the word or the worship time, but I just was like, “God, You do love me,” and I felt relieved, and I felt like now I can pray to You. All of that was all in my head.

God loved me the whole time, and what changed it for me was when I got to scripture. I’m giving this story for a reason, but when I got to scripture, it told me that, and it sunk in so hard that it stuck with me forever. The cross is God’s message that He still loves me, constantly loves me. We know He loves us because He gave His son to die for us, and that love is constant. He knew all your sin from the beginning. When I realized this, this was a theological fact of reality that God’s love for me is continual and constant, and that in Christ, as I have Christ, I have God’s love for me. He gives His Spirit to me; He gave His son to die for me. Anytime after that I started to doubt, “Does God really care about me? Does He really love me?” maybe because of my own issues, maybe because of my own family issues—not feeling loved, not feeling cared for, you know, in the past and having major problems, stuff I don’t talk about too much because I don’t want to embarrass my family members. I love them, and I don’t want to get into the stories, but let’s just say I get it.

But when I go through that stuff, I go, “But I have this anchor. I know God loves me because His word tells me He does.” This is where faith comes in because faith says, “I don’t feel like You love me, but I know You love me, so I’m going to choose to believe that and trust You.”

What I see a lot of times with people who deal with low self-worth, it’s not that they haven’t been told the right things, it’s that they don’t trust those things. They think, “Because I don’t feel like I’m loved, therefore I’m not,” but that’s a way of believing your own heart, your own admittedly stupid heart, over the fact of God’s word and the demonstration of His love in the Cross of Christ. You’re believing your emotional fears, and it’s you that’s causing your whole issue. Now maybe those emotional fears have been fed into through trauma and suffering of the past, but can you allow the truth of God’s love through the Cross of Christ to tell you this is

the constant love of God for you? This is the value that He placed in you. It wasn’t in you to start, but He placed it in you as He purchased you and bought you, and He put the blood of Christ on you, so you have Christ’s righteousness and you’re His.

What I’m saying is, when you struggle with emotional emptiness, abandonment issues, low self-worth, or thinking that God doesn’t hear your prayers, these things are answered by the clear teachings of scripture. There’s a battle to just believe what God has said and to tell yourself, “So what if my emotions don’t agree? I’m choosing to trust this anyway.” That, to me, is real, actionable, and helpful advice. I think and I hope that it blesses you. It blesses me.

See original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bIYND1XedY