(CP) The former prime minister of Australia has told The Christian Post how God sustained him when he led his country through an especially tumultuous time, and the way he has learned to seek out his value not in power, but in God’s love for him.
Scott Morrison, a Christian who served as Australia’s thirtieth prime minister from 2018 to 2022, detailed his faith journey in his 2024 book, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister’s Testimony of God’s Faithfulness.
The book posits three predominant questions based on Jeremiah 29:11, exhorting readers to contemplate “Who am I?,” “How should I live?,” and “What should I hope for?” The book provides pastoral reflections on how you can answer such fundamental questions while weaving compelling stories from his own life and time in office.
Morrison emphasized to CP that the book will not be a political memoir, but somewhat a message of hope to readers facing their very own doubts and struggles.
“It’s not a political book,” he said. “If I wanted to write down a political book, it probably would have been 3 times longer and would have been stuffed with defenses and advocacy of my political agenda. That’s what I did in politics, and I did that for a very long time.”
Morrison said his faith was not something he went into fairly often in great depth while serving as prime minister, but that leaving the general public stage has offered him “a possibility for me to only to be very open about my Christian faith and to declare it.”
‘A really difficult time’
Morrison’s time as prime minister was marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, which he described as the most important crisis Australia had faced since World War II.
The COVID-19 protocols in Australia drew criticism from some who believed they were too strict, though the country of 25 million people was one in all the few capable of bring latest community-acquired COVID-19 cases right down to zero in 2020. Morrison pushed back against critics who maintain there was a world conspiracy to oppress residents.
“It was a really difficult time, and I believe there was lots of uncertainty and anxiety on the time,” Morrison said. “People were trying to know and explain what was happening. I just knew that we were coping with a pathogen which was very, very dangerous and we needed to take care of it. If there was a conspiracy, nobody invited me to the meetings.”
“It was tough. You’re never going to get remedies and responses to that which was going to make everybody pleased,” he added.
Morrison said coping with the rise of China was probably the most difficult issue he needed to take care of as prime minister, noting how the Chinese government “sought to bully and break Australia,” at the same time as they were straining under the burden of the pandemic, a recession and among the worst natural disasters the country had seen “in quite a while.”
“Everywhere I went, I used to be seeing devastation and heartache in my very own country, and that was heartbreaking,” he said, adding that he credits God for strengthening him “to arise to China and to achieve this with the backing of a lot of our friends, particularly within the United States, with whom I formed some excellent personal and shut relationships.”
‘Anxiety is human’
Morrison can be very open in his book about how he began to suffer anxiety attacks while serving as prime minister that required medication in 2021. He urged Christians to not be ashamed in the event that they need assistance with their mental health amid what he described as “an anxiety crisis, particularly in Western society.”
“Anxiety is human,” he said, adding that his anxiety was not brought on by policy challenges or security threats, but somewhat “physical exhaustion combined with the tenacious, relentless, personal, vindictive attacks — principally through secular voices within the media and opponents.”
“We’re all flesh and blood, mind and spirit,” he said. “And these items can affect us after some time frame.”
“I say to Christians that you just take a pill for a headache, and your mental health isn’t any different,” he said. “The stresses that we labour under at times need that type of support.”
“I used to be on my knees at the moment, I used to be praying, I used to be searching for the counsel and support of Christian friends and others, but there are physical things that occur that may affect your mental health, and you have got to be mindful of those things.”
Morrison also said Christians should acknowledge the spiritual aspect of hysteria by casting their anxieties on the Lord.
“As Christians, we’d like to learn the way we are able to just hand these items over to God; the anxieties are real, the things we’re anxious about are real,” he added. “We cannot pretend they are not there, and we have just got to take care of them and hand them over to Him and permit Him to offer us peace.”
‘Constant source of strength and wisdom’
Morrison stressed the importance of getting a community of believers who upheld him in prayer while he was in office, including a tight-knit group of pastors.
“You cannot live your faith apart from in community of brothers and sisters in Christ, and that is intentional by design, I feel,” he said.
“God helps us after we’re on our knees in prayer; He helps us after we’re reflecting on His work, and He also encourages us and supports us through those he puts around us. I’ve all the time been blessed with that, and, frankly, sought it out.”
Morrison suggested the increasingly secular nature of Western societies makes Christian fellowship much more vital.
“You cannot live in a secular society faithfully and strongly in case you’re not in a community of those that love Christ,” he said. “They are a relentless source of strength and wisdom and support and love, and to be in such a community is one in all the nice joys and blessings of Christian life.”
‘We do not have to prove anything’
A piece within the third chapter of Morrison’s book delves into the numerous setbacks and failures he has suffered, starting with when he was fired from his job within the country’s tourism agency during his late 30s. He claims he was fired for political reasons by then-Prime Minister John Howard, with whom he had a superb relationship and whose campaign he worked for.
The experience, he writes, was “humiliating and soul destroying,” but revealed to him how much he was placing his self-worth in his own accomplishments as a substitute of in God’s unconditional love for him.
“We do not have to prove anything to God, even the things we predict we’re doing for Him,” Morrison writes. “God’s love has nothing to do with what we predict we are able to offer. He loves us just as we’re, in all our brokenness.”
“God’s love is transformational in case you allow it to be. It’s one thing to just accept it; it’s entirely one other to let it transform you and mean you can see yourself through His eyes as a substitute of through the attitude of what you’ve or have not completed.”
That lesson would prove invaluable throughout the remainder of his life and steel him to experience other losses, including ultimately losing reelection as prime minister in 2022. He writes that while some politicians who lose begin to crave the “relevance” they lost, he’s free from such an “affliction.”
Morrison suggested to CP that one in all the best lessons he has learned is God’s faithfulness no matter what vocation to which he is named in different seasons of his life.
“I just found God faithful to me in every walk of life, whether it was as prime minister, as a treasurer, as a cupboard minister, a member of parliament, a father, senior chief executive, all these types of things that I’ve done over the course of my life,” he said.
“He’s all the time been there with me, and that is really what I’m attempting to say. It doesn’t matter what your vocation is, what job you’ve, what you are doing in life. The prize is Christ and His presence. That’s what’s going to sustain you usually in all the pieces.”
