Maybe you’re familiar with Acts 14:22, where Paul and Barnabas remind the new believers, there, then, and everywhere of a fact:
“They encouraged them to continue in the faith, reminding them that we must suffer many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.”
That word “hardships” is often translated “tribulations,” and whenever it pops up in scripture, our minds probably go to something like persecution, or any of the woes of life that woe themselves onto us, right?
In other words, something in life happens to us, and we have to go through it, push on, and that’s the “tribulation,” right?
But here’s the fascinating thing.
If you look at the Greek for “tribulations” or “hardships,” you’ll find the transliteration, thlipsis.
And here’s how Strong’s Greek concordance explains that word:
It is “pressure….. used of a narrow place that ‘hems someone in’; tribulation, especially internal pressure that causes someone to feel confined.
Thlipsis (“compression, tribulation”) carries the challenge of coping with the internal pressure of a tribulation, especially when feeling there is ‘no way of escape’.”
[By contrast, stenoxoria focuses on the external pressure exerted by circumstances].”
Did you get that?
The hardship, the tribulation is the feeling of constriction — the feeling of no way out that we often feel during intense depression or anxiety.
It’s an internal pressure.
Now, we’d immediately assume it’s an “external pressure exerted by circumstances.”
You know, an external circumstance (losing a job, a relationship, a friend) drags us into the ground and we feel internal pressure.
But no, the Greek here indicates it’s something else.
And it suggests the early Christians were challenged by the same thing that often challenges us — hardships, tribulations of the mind that make us feel we have no good options, that squeeze the life out of us.
And they merely come from our mind!
It’s true that external hardships are undoubtedly hardships.
And we go down the rabbit hole of, “Oh, others have it so much worse. I shouldn’t feel this way.”
But no matter your external hardship, everyone is primarily dogged by internal pressures of the mind that have no bearing on external circumstances.
And, by the way, Jesus himself used the word, translated thlipsin, in John 16:33 when he told the disciples they’d have many tribulations.
We might assume he’d be talking of the upcoming beheadings, executions, stonings.
But he’d use stenoxoria for that, because that’s the word for those kinds of tribulations.
So the greatest tribulation, for anyone then and now, is what we endure in the mind, regardless of circumstance.
As Charles Spurgeon once described it: ““Quite involuntarily, unhappiness of mind, depression of spirit, and sorrow of heart will come upon you. You may be without any real reason for grief, and yet may become among the most unhappy of men.”
And that’s a powerful message that you’re not alone.
Find a psychiatrist here.
Find a therapist here.
If you’re having thoughts of harming yourself or others, please call the National Suicide Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255
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