Hello and Merry Christmas to each and every one of you. I’m saying it a little bit early because we don’t put out an episode on Christmas week here on the podcast. Hopefully you are enjoying the joys of this season, and of course, every year I try to do an episode to help bring us back to. The reason for the season, the reason that we are celebrating Christmas.
Hello and welcome to Christian Faith and OCD with Carrie Bock. I’m a Christ follower, wife and mother licensed professional counselor who helps Christian struggling with OCD get to a deeper level of healing. When I couldn’t find resources for my clients with OCD, God called me to bring this podcast to you.
With practical tools for developing greater peace, we’re here to bust through the shame and stigma surrounding struggling with OCD as a Christian, sharing hopeful stories of healing and helping you replace uncertainty with faith. I’m here to help you let go of the past and future to walk in the present abundant life God has for you.
So let’s dive right into today’s episode. We can get so caught up in the hustle and bustle of buying gifts, making lists, baking cookies, going to Christmas plays and pageants. Maybe you’re even in one at your church. I don’t know. Maybe you’re singing for the choir. We often sing Christmas songs with the word Emmanuel in them.
I wanted to see, do you know in Isaiah seven 14, this is a common verse we hear around Christmas. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and she’ll call his name Emmanuel. Emmanuel means God with us. That’s really the heart of Christmas. God, who could have saved us in any way that he wanted to, chose to become a baby, to come into the world like we do.
He chose to be born essentially into a stable, a place of poverty, a lowly place, not a palace where you would imagine a king coming into. That’s how God entered our world on Christmas, and I wanna thank about the promise that we have, that God is always with us. One of Jesus’s final words on Earth is at the end of Matthew 28 20.
Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age, when we’re going through hard times, we often question, we say, God, I don’t feel you. I don’t sense your presence. It doesn’t seem like you’re here. I feel abandoned right now. But the truth of the matter is that God has never left us. Even in the times where we’ve left him, God continues to call us back, continues to say, you are still my child and I still love you.
Romans 8 38 and 39 tell us for I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers. Nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Hebrews 13 to five tells us, I will never leave you nor forsake you.
So when you are lied to by the enemy, who doesn’t want you to believe that God loves you, who doesn’t want you to believe that God is with you? Who doesn’t want you to believe that God is for you? Or when you doubt because you don’t feel God being close to you or you feel like he’s abandoned you just remember to hold on to these truth principles.
And say, okay, God, even if I don’t feel you in the midst of my circumstance right now, even if I feel afraid, lonely, understanding that my feelings aren’t always facts, sometimes they’re based on past experiences that have happened to me. They’re based on potentially church leaders that have hurt me.
Other family members that have wounded me, and I’m now taking that and projecting that onto God and saying, you must be like this person that hurt me, but God is not like that person that has hurt you. And even though there are people in the church that are not representing Christ, we cannot blame God for other people’s behavior.
We have to be grounded in the scriptural truth of who God is. Know that if you are hurting, that the Bible tells us that God is near to the broken hearted in Psalm 34 18. That’s a beautiful scripture verse because when you feel hurt and you feel like God is so far that the scriptures tell us that he is near to you, he is near to people who are hurting and who are suffering.
If you’re listening to this and you’re struggling with OCD, you may really be questioning and doubting who God is. You may be doubting who you are in relationship to him. You may have all types of fears surrounding God or the Holy Spirit. Know that God understands those things. Know that God relates to you and identifies.
Know that God understands everything that you are going through, even more than you do at a deep, intimate level, and he loves you and wants to come alongside you. He loves you and wants to show himself to you. So I encourage you as you go throughout this Christmas season to really seek God, seek Jesus for who he is.
Be like the shepherds who were told that Jesus was here and they stopped and they ran to see for themselves. You may be relying on what other people have told you about God, which may or may not be true. You may be relying on some information you received from a persona on the internet that may or may not be true about God, but we have the opportunity to come to Jesus, to meet him through the scriptures and to seek him in prayer to find out who he really is.
God entered our world, became God with us at Christmas because he wants to have an intimate relationship with us. He could have stayed lofty, aloof, distant, said, Hey, I am holy. I’m set apart, and I don’t want to get that close to you. You’re sinful. God could have said that. But he didn’t do that. He could have saved us from afar, but he decided to come near because he wants to have an intimate relationship with you, and that intimate relationship isn’t just about being saved.
It’s about a day to day walk where you get up and you say, good morning to God, where you say, Hey, I lay my day before you. These are the things that I have on my calendar. Allow me to be open to your Holy Spirit and what you want me to do now, that if you are in Christ, you have the Holy Spirit inside of you.
I’m super excited to be having a podcast guest that’s gonna come on, and we’re gonna talk about this a little bit more in depth about hearing from God. Jesus said that it was good for him to go away so that we could receive the Holy Spirit. This is so mind blowing. How could it be good for Jesus to go away?
I’m sure the disciples were thinking the same thing. What do you mean it’s good if you go away? Jesus said, I am sending you the Holy Spirit. I am sending you the counselor. Jesus is sending us an advocate to live inside of us. So that we can be in tune with God on a day-to-day, moment by moment basis.
This is an absolutely beautiful thing. If the Holy Spirit is inside of you, he’s not leaving you. We know that we can quench the spirit, that we can distance ourselves from God. And harm that relationship. Then we have an opportunity to repair it through repentance, through forgiveness and grace and mercy.
So we in ourselves can push God away, but God doesn’t remove himself from us. If we are in Christ, we have been justified, which is a legal term, to show that our sins have been wiped clean. God is not holding those things against us. I know oftentimes I talk with people who are still holding on to guilt and shame for past sin.
You don’t need to do that. The forgiveness is available for you. We can’t undo the consequences. We can’t change the past, but what we can do is say today as I’m here, I am standing in Christ’s forgiveness and I am going to walk out as a forgiven person. Because what we do, and we’re still stuck in that guilt and shame is oftentimes we go back to those types of behaviors because our focus is all off.
Our focus is not on being renewed and sanctified in Christ day by day. We’re looking in the rear view mirror, trying to drive the spiritual car, and God wants you to know that he came so that we could have a fresh start, a new beginning in Christ. I wanna talk about God being with us always, even in the midst of our suffering.
OCD may be taking hours out of your day. I want you to know that Joseph and Mary, who were following God’s desires for their life and were following in obedience, they didn’t have an easy road. Mary was bouncing along on a donkey at nine months pregnant. That sounds. Terrible. Has anyone ever thought of that?
That sounds horrible. Joseph had public disgrace and shame. Both of them really did. Why are you marrying this woman that’s pregnant now? You guys have done something that’s not honoring in God’s sight. I’m sure that they were judged. They ended up with no room at the end. Not because they didn’t have family that they could stay with.
They most likely had family they could stay with. They were traveling to where they were originally from. They didn’t have an easy road doing what God had called them to do. Sometimes we mistakenly think if I’m in the will of God or if I’m doing the things that God wants me to do, if I’m being obedient and somehow God is gonna pave this smooth road before me.
And everything’s going to be easy and fine. It just doesn’t work that way. God is refining us. He’s making us new, and there’s blessing in obedience, but there can also be a cost to it as well, and we have to know that we have to understand and know that there is a cost to being a disciple and following the ward.
Know that if you’re suffering right now, there’s a greater story. There’s a purpose in it. We don’t fully understand it when we’re going through it at the time. It’s really hard. We can rest. Knowing God has our best interests at heart, knowing that he sees everything and we only see a small sliver of a detail.
God being with us doesn’t mean that always, that the difficult pieces are going to be removed. What it does mean is that he will walk with us on that difficult journey and carry us through the hard moments. Jesus understands what you are going through. He knows what it’s like to have friends walk out on him.
I’ve lost some significant relationships in the past couple of years. It’s been hard. It’s been a difficult road. I’ve outgrown some of my friendships in the sense that we’re just two different people living two different lives. They’re a great person. Still love them. We’re just not jiving the way that we used to anymore, and it’s okay.
Jesus understands that. He understands loneliness. He understands loss of community. He understands relationship issues, rejection. He knows what it’s like to be tired, to be exhausted, to feel like you just need God so desperately. That’s why Jesus got up early in the morning and prayed. That’s why the night that he was betrayed, he was in the garden praying as his disciples were falling asleep because he knew that he needed God so desperately.
If you are feeling or thinking, God is not with me today. Know that Christmas provides us his beautiful truth. God is Emmanuel. He is with us. He is not too far off removed from what we are going through. He understands and he feels our pain at the deepest level of suffering. Whether that’s suffering is physical or emotional, or whether you even just feel spiritually wounded from church hurt situations or rejections.
May you be blessed this Christmas season. May God give you the eyes to see that he is right there with you. This whole time. I’ll be back on the podcast right before the new year to talk about letting go of end of the year regrets in order to be able to move into. This is the new season of 2026, so if you’re holding onto anything from the past, you’re gonna wanna check out that episode.
Until next time, may you be comforted by God’s great love for you Christian faith and OCD is a production of By the Well Counseling. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be a substitute for seeking mental health treatment in your area.
