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God's Way for Our Lives

Don’t Seek Your Own Way-Love Yourself

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(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)

Don’t Seek Your Own Way

Once again, we learn that loving ourselves biblically is not about being caught up in self-will and selfishness. In fact, loving ourselves means not getting caught up in seeking our own will. But how can that be? Surely if we loved ourselves, that would mean we only did what we wanted to do.

Nope. It doesn’t work that way.

You see, when we love ourselves we are willing to admit the truth about ourselves. The truth is when we’ve pursued our own path, we’ve messed up. We’ve sinned. Like Paul in Romans 7:14-24, we recognize that we have become enslaved to sin. We learn that if we simply do what comes naturally to us, it is going to leave us in desparation. It will end with the cry “wretched man that I am.” That is our only hope.

Proverbs 14:12 and 16:25 both say there is a way that seems right to us but it ends in death. If I love myself, I don’t want to give myself death. Therefore, I’m willing to hand the reins over to someone else. Instead of insisting on my own way, I seek the way of God. After all, His way works.

There is only one way that leads to life and that is through Jesus Christ (Matthew 7:13-14). If I love myself, I will love life. If I love life, I will love Jesus’ way, because it is the only way that goes there.

When I love Jesus and His way, that means I will love to serve others, seeking their good and their benefit. As Philippians 2:3-4 says, I will do nothing from rivarly or conceit. Rather, in humility I will see others as more significant, their needs as more necessary. I will serve them and submit to them. This doesn’t deny everything I’ve learned about loving myself. This doesn’t deny that I must take care of myself and be kind to myself. But it keeps in mind the important reason for which I need to care for me. I need to care for me so I can continue on to help others in a healthy way.

Loving myself is much too complex to simply be doing whatever I want and seeking my own. That is shallow. It may seem like love to the twisted and selfish. But it really isn’t. The person who truly loves themselves in a healthy and godly way will quickly recognize how shallow and dangerous it is to simply seek his own. He will branch out and learn to sacrifice and serve in healthy ways. And by that he will not only be loving others, but he will be doing so based on a healthy and godly love for himself.

Don’t seek your own today; instead, love yourself.

(Make sure to come back next Monday as we learn that we don’t have to be irritable with ourselves.)

The Rug: A Video Demonstration of Life

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I ran across this video the other day and thought I would share. There is only one way to keep the rug from being pulled out from under you. I know this should probably be a Monday post, but I didn’t want to wait until then.

Can you guess what it is?

Don’t Be Rude-Love Yourself

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(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)

Don’t Be Rude, Love Yourself

At first glance, this one seems to be difficult to apply to ourselves. Obviously when we love others we won’t be rude to them. But what does this have to do with how we treat ourselves?

Some translations say love does not behave unseemly or inappropriately. But how does that change our quandary? I really struggled with this until I did some more searching on the web forum I quoted in our very first article. There I learned about one woman who so hated herself that she was looking for love anywhere she could get it. Actually, it wasn’t love. It was her distorted perception of love. She turned to committing sexual immorality with those she described as “dirty OLD men.”

That story could be repeated again and again and again with differing people and different sins. Many times, our sins are simply responses to or attempts to escape from the seemingly overwhelming burden of self-loathing. As we wrongly believe we are worthless, everything that happens to us seems to reinforce that message. Therefore we respond to even minor issues with overwhelming fear, depression, shame, anger. These emotions become chaotic and unbearable so we seek an escape. Along comes our favorite sin to take us out of the reality of our emotions, to numb the feelings. It might be sex, gluttony, drinking alcohol, gambling, drugs, pornography, outbursts of wrath, self-mutilation, or any other number of innappropriate behaviors.

Can you readily see the cyclical dilemma here? Using our sins to numb our feelings may get us out of reality for a few minutes, but once the sin is committed, then we have another reason to see ourselves as worthless. The emotions come back even worse and we need our escape even more strongly. The woman I spoke of above did not feel better about herself, her life, her circumstance after being with those men, she felt worse. But because of the cycle, that only led her to another man, then she felt worse, then another man, then felt worse…

We can break this cycle. We don’t have to behave inappropriately toward ourselves. Instead, we can remember God loves us and therefore love ourselves as He does. We can recognize that the “dirty Old men” don’t love us and we don’t have to give ourselves over to them. Instead, we can put ourselves in God’s hands. We can remember His Son on the cross. We can remember how much He loved us despite all our sins (Romans 5:6-8). We don’t have to view our most recent sins as reasons to run into more sin. Instead, we can view them as reasons to run into God’s loving arms. We can let His love fill us and hold us as we work through the reality of our situation and our feeling.

Being Appropriate

What are some appropriate behaviors when these feelings come crashing on us and we want to turn to our sins for comfort?

1. Pray

Take your feelings to God. Even if your feelings about God. A touchstone passage about this is Psalm 88. God is able to handle your emotions. Cry in His arms. Yell at Him. Rejoice with Him. Whatever is going on, just tell it to Him. Sin doesn’t have to be your rock. God can be.

2. Reaffirm God’s love for you with Scripture

Plan for this right now. Find Bible passages that express God’s love for you. I used Romans 5:6-8 above. Find some others. Learn where the accounts of Christ’s crucifixion are and read those. Remember that this is His sacrifice for you. Remember John 3:16. I don’t normally advocate messing with the text, but in this instance, I encourage you to quote it this way: “For God so loved the world, with me in it, that He gave His only begotten Son…” Or just, “For God so loved me…” Remind yourself that God did all this even when He knew what you would do and how you feel at this very moment.

3. Reaffirm God’s love for you in your life

One of the greatest tools I’ve learned about in helping me overcome fears and depressions is a gratitude list. We sing a song that encourages us to count our many blessings; actually do that. Why not do this right now? Pull out a sheet of paper and make a list of things you are thankful for. Start small. Come up with a list of 5 things. I bet pretty quickly that list will expand to 10, then 20, then 50. Remember James 1:17. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above…” These blessings are from God because He loves you. Acknowledge Him in all your ways and all your gratitude. Recognizing these blessings are great reminders that God is not picking on you. He loves you. If He loved you like this, you can love yourself right now. You don’t have to turn to your sin.

 

4. Find a friend who will love you healthfully

Perhaps the easiest way to experience God’s love is to experience it in relationship with one of God’s children. I once read that we will likely never accept ourselves until we experience the loving acceptance of who we are from someone else. Find that someone. Find someone you can share everything with who will still love you without shaming you or taking advantage of you. I know this seems a tall order, but there are people like this out there. There are friends who stick closer than a brother (Proverbs 18:24). Some caveats on this. If your friend spends more time lecturing you about how you shouldn’t feel that way, find a different confidante. If your friend wants to take this intimacy to a physical level, find a different confidante (obviously, I’m not talking about hugging and shoulder crying). If your friend shares your secrets, find a different confidante. Find someone who will respect healthy boundaries, who will realize you are opening up because you want to do right, who humbling recognizes their own sinfulness and lack of ability to sit in judgment over you.

5. Sit in your feelings

This is hard. But instead of trying to escape your feelings, sit in them. It isn’t wrong to hurt, be sad, be angry, feel guilt and shame. These are all part of our lives. Instead of thinking you need to mask them, let them be. I know you probably can’t imagine this, but the feelings will pass if you let them run their course. We think that is not the case because they have lingered for so long. The issue is when we repress our feelings or try to escape our feelings, they actually just sit back and wait for an opportune time to come back. However, when we sit in them and figure out how to express them appropriately, they dissipate. Let me offer you a warning if you have continually and repeatedly turned to sins to numb these feelings. When you first try to sit in them they will seem infinitely worse than they ever have before. You’ve been numbing those pains like a surgery patient with a morphine pump. Take the pump away and the pain is amplified. Trust me, this will go away.

6. Identify the feeling and formulate a response

If you have repeatedly turned to sins to escape these feelings, you may not even be aware that you are feeling or what your feeling is. But one of the most appropriate things you can do is identify what is really going on in your heart. The eight core feelings are: gladness, sadness, hurt, anger, fear, shame, guilt, loneliness. Can you pinpoint one of those? Then ask yourself why you are feeling that way? Go beyond just, “So and so said such and such to me.” Ask yourself why their saying that is causing the emotion. For instance, you might say, “My boss didn’t approve my budget proposal for the coming year. He cut out several key parts saying they were frivolous and I should have known better.” But why is that causing you to feel hurt and sadness (if those are your feelings)? You might figure out, “This makes me feel hurt and sad because I believe I have to please everyone all the time to be a worthwhile person.” Now you’ve pinpointed something. You have a faulty belief. You don’t have to please everyone all the time to be a worthwhile person. God loves you just the way you are. God thought you were so worthwhile even though He knew you wouldn’t please your boss with this budget proposal that He sent Jesus to die for you anyway. You don’t need your boss’s approval to be worthwhile. Your appropriate response is to retool your belief about yourself and your relationships.

Or you may discover that you are angry because you saw your boss’s tone of voice and word choice as condescending, disrespectful, even hateful. How can you respond to that? Maybe you can recognize that this tone is your boss’s problem and not yours. Hateful people are so because of their own inner pain. They are trying to compensate for some weakness they see in themselves. Perhaps a good response for you is to feel compassion and sympathy for your boss’s pain and pray for him to find comfort in God for that pain. Or you may decide you need to express to your boss how that tone impacts you and establish a boundary. “Mr. Boss, I am very happy for the opportunity I have to work with you and for this company, but something has been bothering me and I think it will negatively impact my performance and production for you if I don’t talk to you about it. When would be a good time for us to talk about that?…When you critique me and use words like ‘frivolous’ and claim ‘I should have known better,’ that seems to be a condescending judgment against my motives. I want what is best for our company. This makes me fear for my job and question whether or not you approve of me working here…” Or that last sentence may have been about boundaries, “When you speak to me in that tone it seems to me that you are treating me more like a servant than an employee as if you are questioning my very worth as a worker in this company. I definitely want to hear what will help me be a better employee for you, but I’d like to have a boundary that says we both speak to each other with respect, even when we disagree with each other.”

Okay, this section is getting long and we could go on and on with numerous variables. But I hope you see the point. When you press pause, examine what you are feeling and why, then formulate an appropriate response, you’ll be amazed to see that you didn’t need the sin to deal with this at all.

The point is you do have healthy options. You don’t have to behave rudely to yourself (and you don’t have to put up with rude behavior from others). You don’t have to be inappropriate with yourself (and you don’t have to put up with inappropriate behavior from others). You don’t have to turn to your sin. Turn to God. Turn to His love. Let His love fill you. Love yourself as He loves you. Then you will be free to love others.

God loves you today. Love yourself today.

(Remember to come back next Monday and we’ll learn that love does not insist on its own way.)

Embezzling a Place in Heaven

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Here is John Powell on our relationship with God. I was totally smacked down with this.

Each of us has a unique and very limited concept of God, and it is very often marked and distorted by human experience. Negative emotions, like fear, tend to wear out. The distorted image of a vengeful God will eventually nauseate and be rejected. Fear is a fragile bond of union, a brittle basis of religion.

…

Those who do not reject a distorted image of God will limp along in the shadow of a frown. They certainly will not love with their whole heart, soul, and mind. A fearsome, vengeful God is not lovable. There will never be any trust and repose in the loving arms of a kindly Father; there will never be any mystique of belonging to God. People who serve out of fear, without the realization of love, will try to bargain with God. They will do little things for God, make little offerings, say little prayers, and so on, to embezzle a place in heaven. Life and religion will be a chess game, hardly an affair of love.

(Why Am I Afraid to Love?: Overcoming Rejection and Indifference*, John Powell, Tabor Publishing, Allen, TX, 1982, pp 5, 8) 

I guess it’s time to quit playing chess with God.

*Yes, that is an affiliate link. Here’s another one:

Do Not Boast or Be Arrogant–Love Yourself

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(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)

Do Not Boast or Be Arrogant–Love Yourself

Perhaps this shocks you. Generally when we think of those who love themselves, we think of boasting and arrogance. However, this demonstrates that loving ourselves as God loves us and the way we are to love others is not about being self-infatuated, self-centered, or selfish. Healthy love for ourselves doesn’t boast and isn’t arrogant.

When we see the Pharisee in Luke 18:11-12, we say, “That man’s problem is he loves himself too much.”

God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.

Despite how self-promoting that was, that is not a healthy love for self. Rather, it is a shallow approach to self. This man didn’t have a healthy love for himself because of any innate value as a creation and child of God. In fact, he did himself a disservice while not even realizing it. He only saw himself as worth anything based on how he compared to others. In this case, he saw himself as better than others, which is certainly a sinful attitude. However, it establishes a terrible groundrule by which to judge self. What would happen when he came across someone to whom he didn’t compare?

Loving ourselves in a healthy way is recognizing the innate value we have as a creation of God who is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14). Loving ourselves in a healthy way is recognizing the innate value we have because God loves us no matter who we are or what we’ve done (I John 4:19). Loving ourselves in a helathy way is recognizing the innate value we have because we are in the same boat as everyone else around us (Romans 3:23).

When we begin to pervert our healthy love into self-infatuation through boasting and arrogance as if our innate value originates from us and what we do rather than from God and what He has done in us, then we have ceased to love ourselves properly and will not be able to love others properly.

Boast in God, not self. You are worth far more than the shallow comparisons with other people whether those comparisons lead you to envy, as we discussed last week, or to boasting and arrogance. Don’t sacrifice the truly healthy love God has granted you for that shallow pretense of real love.

Don’t boast or be arrogant, instead love yourself as God has loved you.

ELC

(Remember to come back next Monday as we learn that we can love ourselves instead of being rude.)

Do Not Envy Others–Love Yourself

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(If you’ve stumbled across thist post, let me explain where you are. You have landed smack in the middle of one of my favorite series ever. We started some time ago by learning that God expects us to love ourselves. Now, we’re going through the definition of love in I Corinthians 13:4-7 to help us understand how we can love ourselves in a healthy way so can love others better. Go back to that first post to read the series from the beginning and to find an index of all the posts available. Enjoy today’s post as well.)

Do Not Envy Others: Love Yourself

A really good way to trash yourself is to constantly look at others and compare. On the one hand, you have envy. We’ll talk about the other hand next week.

Envy is wishing we were someone else. We want what they have. We want their talents, their resources, their gifts, their relationships, their abilities, their stuff. We don’t want ours. We convince ourselves that they are better. By default, we are worse. A great deal of self-trash talking is bound up in envy.

We can really be envious of the peace and serenity others seem to have. They don’t seem to have the problems we have. Their family seems to be perfect. Their job pays them lots of money. Their life is good while ours is in shambles.

Newsflash: In many cases, they’re thinking the exact same thing about you. Let me tell you about Mary and Heather (I’ve changed the names to preserve reputations). I can still remember when Mary was confiding in me one day about her struggle with Heather. Heather had her life all together. Things seemed to just be easy for her. Mary was sure that Heather had to know how messed up she was and was looking down her nose at her. The truly odd thing was within a week of that conversation I had almost the exact same story from Heather about Mary. Mary had her life all together. Things were easy for her. Her family was so good. Heather was sure Mary was looking down at her. Both of these sisters were filled with envy. What was sad is the envy stopped them from loving themselves and from being able to love each other.

The fact is everyone has problems. Romans 3:23 says we’ve all sinned. I don’t care who you are looking at, they are in the exact same boat as you. There is no need to envy them. It doesn’t matter how much money they have, they are a sinner in need of a Savior just like you are. It doesn’t matter how nice their family is, they are a sinner in need of a Savior just like you are. It doesn’t matter what abilities they have that you don’t, they are a sinner in need of a Savior just like you are. Why envy them? They are just like you. By their own strength, their life is in shambles just like yours is when run by your strength.

Further, I Corinthians 12:15-17 explains that we are different for a reason. God created us to accomplish the work He wants us to do. He used the physical body as an illustration. Feet do what feet do, not what hands do. Does it make sense for feet to envy the hand or vice versa? Does it make sense for either of them to think they are worthless simply because they can’t do what the other does? Of course not. Feet need to do what feet were made to do. Hands need to do what hands were made to do. You need to do what you were made to do.

Revel in that. Enjoy it. Give glory to God and thanksgiving for what He has given you to do. If you didn’t do it, who would? Don’t get caught up in how it seems to compare to anyone else’s job. Sure, we all want to be the rock star. We think if we aren’t the one singing on the stage what we are doing is worthless. How far do you think the rock star would get without the person who runs the sound board?

Don’t waste your time on envy. We’ve all got issues even if we won’t all share them. We’ve all got our job; God made us that way.

Love yourself; don’t envy.

(Make sure you come back next Monday to talk about that other hand. Loving ourselves means not boasting or being arrogant.)