Obviously that’s a pretty small problem in the grand scheme of life, but it proves a point nonetheless. We often avoid asking for help at all costs! I’m sure you can relate. The book of Judges tells us about a time period in Israel’s history when they were ruled by a series of judges appointed by God. The people were stuck in a cycle… 

• Disobedience to God
• Foreign oppression
• Cries for help
• Deliverance from God
• Repeat

When my read-the-Bible-chronologically-in-a-year plan took me through Judges this spring, I often found myself thinking: I wonder what finally triggered the Israelites to cry out for help? Because if you read through the book from start to finish, you’ll find that often when the people turned to the Lord, it was after a lengthy time period of struggle. Here are a couple examples: 

Because [Jabin, king of Canaan] had nine hundred chariots fitted with iron and had cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years, they cried to the Lord for help. -Judges 4:3

For eighteen years [the Philistines and the Ammonites] oppressed all the Israelites on the east side of the Jordan in Gilead, the land of the Amorites. … Then the Israelites cried out to the Lord, “We have sinned against you, forsaking our God and serving the Baals.” -Judges 10:8 and 10

After 20 years of cruel oppression in one instance, and 18 years another time, I wonder what finally caused them to ask for help. And why did it take so long? Of course, it’s easy for me to sit over here and speculate. Who knows, if I’d been in their shoes, I may have waited that long, too. Ultimately, I’m sure the situation was complicated despite the fact that it seems simple to us readers today. The simplicity we can interpret is this: if you’re disobeying God, life probably won’t go smoothly, so turn to Him and ask for help. But obviously, as proven by the fact that I wasted a bunch of time before swallowing my pride and asking for help on a data tracker, when you’re in the middle of a situation, it’s easy to get caught up in self-dependence. When life gets messy, crying out to God isn’t always an instinctive response. 

If you think through times in your life when you struggled and/or suffered longer than you would’ve had to, can you pinpoint what stopped you from asking God for help? Was it pride? A determination to solve the problem on your own? A skepticism about God’s power and capabilities? Were you too scared or embarrassed to cry out to God because of how you got yourself tangled up in that mess in the first place? Were you assuming that He didn’t care about that particular kind of problem? Were you so wrapped up in yourself and your circumstance that you forgot about God’s accessibility and availability to help? 

I encourage you to take a minute and really get to the bottom of things. Pinpoint the reason why you either didn’t ask for help or why it took you so long to do so. Then, resolve to go straight to the Lord next time. Think through the kinds of disobedience you struggle with. Also, think about difficult situations you find yourself in that follow some of the same patterns. What are the warning signs that alert you to these patterns and struggles? Make a list of them! And the next time you can tell you’re starting to turn down that path, STOP and ask God to help you! It can be just a simple prayer like this one: 

Lord, I feel myself starting to fall back into a cycle of disobedience… I don’t want to get stuck in my sin. Show me the way out. Amen.

Don’t let yourself be oppressed by the world for 20 years (or even 20 months or days) because you forget to look up and cry out for help. …or because you are too proud to look up and cry out for help. …or because you’re too doubtful or embarrassed to look up and cry out for help. God is faithful, and He stands ready to deliver. Just give Him the chance.