John 8:32 – Then you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

Is it scary to hear the truth? Often it is. If you’re praying and asking for the truth in your circumstances, be prepared that the truth might be tough to take. Nobody wants to realize truths like:

• The person you love is using you.
• Your spouse is cheating on you.
• That woman posing as a friend intends to steal from you.
• The person you fully trust is committing fraud and extortion against you.
• A person you thought was above that level of cruelty, lied to turn your children against you.
• A trusted friend or family member abused your children.
• Your loved one is racist, or militant, or deceitful, and they feel no guilt about it.
• Your friend or family member is blindly and wrongly loyal, and an accomplice in harming others.
• The person you trusted is a manipulator.
• You have been fooled; you have been manipulated.

Truths are not always good news. But if it’s true, staying blissfully ignorant is not in your best interests. Being a pawn of some thing, or some person with selfish intents is not a good place to be.

Whether we like the truth or not, it is empowering to know it. With the bad news, you need a strategy. You need to look out for you, as well as others involved. If a thing or a person you trusted will throw you under the bus — if they will use and abuse you — you have some big decisions to make. Wise decisions.

To learn truths like that is a blow. God knows how much it hurts. But it’s best for your well-being that you know the truth. If he has shared it with you, he knows it is bearable. And don’t forget the silver lining, that empowerment I mentioned before. This is the point when the power is shifted from your “user and abuser” to you. Be patient, restrained, righteous, and wise with that power.

Brace yourself for the unexpected. God may disclose the source of your trouble as spiritual.

Ephesians 6:12 – For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

1 Peter 5:8 – Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.

If that’s the case, stop accepting your circumstances and start resisting.

James 4:7 – Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

You need to take action instead of acquiescing to evil circumstances—you have God’s blessing and direction to resist the current that swept you away. You can get out of the harmful river and be free of it.

Once you get yourself to safety on the riverbank, study that river and see that it didn’t really hold you in it. You just thought you were captive there. Knowing the truth made a monumental difference. You are not a victim. You are free. It is the river that is powerless to keep you in it, or to force you back in.

Let’s go back over this. When you’re in the cruel current, it tells you that you can’t get out. You think, “It’s fate. It’s from God. It’s in my DNA. I am powerless.” You believe that. It pulls and threatens and overpowers you till you are swallowing water and gasping for air.

But once you are out of its pull — often it only takes a mental shift — you see it doesn’t have the power it appeared to.

You are on solid ground with a gentle breeze and warm sun on your head, free of the raging water. It isn’t drowning you anymore. You can’t believe you ever fell for the philosophy that it was your lot in life to be in that horrible river.

Now you know the truth. You are free, and standing on solid ground.

As the old hymn goes, “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.”