Who is your God? Many Messianic Jews may answer the God of Israel of course, but is He really? There is a pretty fast way to check who you put your hope in.
When you are under stress what do you do? Who do you call? For a while the first person I thought of if I had a problem was Rabbi and recently it was a nice Jewish lady who mentors me in matters of common sense and so on. And they were and are very nice and helpful.
People are not bad; when you are growing and even when you are mature there is still a place for human counsel. The Bible doesn't discourage seeking advice from those more experienced than you. In fact the Bible says “The godly offer good counsel; they teach right from wrong.” Psalm 37:30 “And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will guide you with knowledge and understanding.” Jeremiah 3:15. God wants you to have wise teachers; however, it is a problem if God is the last person you seek to learn from.
As my wise mentor said, when we do that it is like falling in love with the mailman for delivering the gift, and not thanking the one who sent it. You should pray and seek counsel from godly people, not expect godly people to be God for you. When you are thankful - as you should be - remember to thank God the most for creating and sending godly people into your life instead of assuming godly people are godly by their own merit.
The first thing or person you turn to when you are distressed reveals your source of comfort and where and to whom you put your confidence. If you don't think of God as your first option when you freak out about something it is because God isn't who you trust the most. Even when we are turning to godly people for advice we should not make the mistake of using their experience as a substitute for investing in our own relationship with God. Our actions under stress are very telling. So make a conscious effort to remember who or what you do when under stress and ask yourself why.
Before I turned to Rabbi, I turned to self in the form of “petty” self-harm. I could not control the situations (or so I thought) but I could control me. I didn't try to hurt myself most of the time but I would focus on what I thought were imperfections which ironically often consisted of old scars that I had caused by previously by my exact same poor coping skills and start picking at my skin excessively to remove spots and things I didn’t like which of course lead to more scaring and spots. I was trying to fix myself or at least “fix” something other than what was the actually problem by giving myself a false sense of control while distracting myself from the problem.
If I wasn’t doing that I would often turn to some distraction maybe T.V, music, and things that are not necessarily bad but are not actually helping either. But controlling other things beside the problem avoiding it isn’t going to help the problem. “Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you.” Psalm 37:5 Sometimes God will help you by sending a godly person into your life to tell you want you need to hear just as God sent the Jewish prophets to help correct Israel’s errors in the past in but don’t substitute anything or anyone for God.
