Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Matt Pavlik

Enter Rest to Feel God’s Pleasure

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During a full rest, you are able to perform at your highest level. You probably do your best work when you are relaxed and “in the zone.”

Have you experienced this kind of rest? Would you like to learn how to enter into the rest God intends for you?

God made you with a sweet spot-also called your identity. You put in your effort while relying on God to carry what you were never meant to carry (the bulk of the load).

Sometimes the sweet spot is elusive because of sin and the curse. Sometimes you have to do what you don’t particularly want to do. Overcoming the curse requires hard work. The goal isn’t to eliminate your effort, but instead to optimize your effort.

A sweet spot is that optimal place that maximizes output with the least effort. Hitting your sweet spot is an honorable goal. The center of the sweet spot is you functioning as God intends and feeling His pleasure. If you want to feel God’s pleasure, first you must be free to be yourself.

Do you know what it feels like to pursue what you want to instead of what you have to (because of obligation or responsibility)? God wants you to experience unpressured living at least one day out of seven. The lift you gain from one day of rest can carry into the other six days.

Who are you (how do you live) when you’re under obligation? This is how you fill your day to meet the demands of life. It’s required. So don’t miss this: You’re probably not optimally in touch with your true identity while under obligation. That’s because obligation implies some amount of stress and that changes everything.

Who are you (how do you live) when you’re not under any obligation? This is what you accomplish during productive play. This isn’t lower functioning (brain dead) activities that allow passive living. Restful living means entering into a natural high by functioning at the level of God’s highest purposes for you. This is true recreation-an effort that recovers more energy than it spends.

When you practice entering rest, it will help you when you are under the stress of responsibility. You’ll be able to work more efficiently when you are under stress.

Restful living will be different for each person. What activities bring you more energy as you participate in them?

In the movie, Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell says, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” Even though he’s exerting himself completely he has entered God’s rest. He’s burdened with running, but not burdened with debilitating anxieties.

Fulfilling obligations is necessary. But playing is as important as working. To play is to rest. Some people can’t stop working. Their play is only work in disguise.

When God’s power is available genuine play is possible. That’s because He does the heavy lifting. Jesus said:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11:28-30

Have you ever felt God’s pleasure? You enter God’s rest and He is right there with you expressing His excitement for who you are. God is your cheerleader. Allow His cheers to propel you forward.

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Find and Accept Your True Self

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If you’re unable to accept yourself, you’re missing out on the joy that comes from contentment. God created you as you are for a specific reason. Life’s bumps and bruises can lead you to believe you have to be someone more or less than you are.

If you are not gifted athletically (or choose another ability), but compare yourself to those that are, you’ll always come up short and feel less than.

Have you ever tried something and felt inadequate? Or maybe someone told you that you didn’t measure up? If you can walk away understanding, “this isn’t for me,” then you have a healthy perspective. If you conclude that you are defective, then you are making it personal and that isn’t helpful.

Are you measuring yourself against the right ruler? God measures you by His original design. Everything else will give you a faulty or inaccurate measurement.

But more than that, you’ll feel miserable because there is no way for you to win. Proverbs 11:1 declares that God detests deception in dealings with others. How can you deal honestly with others if you don’t first deal honestly with your own value?

It’s possible to think you accept yourself when you really don’t. It’s possible to live with the heavy burden of trying to be who you think God wants you to be. But that can be different than who God knows you to be.

Are you living with an uncomfortable tension of always pushing yourself to reach some ever-elusive goal? If so, you’re never going to reach self-acceptance.

Below are 6 questions to help you assess how close your presented self (how others see you) is to your ideal self (how you see you). Answer the first 3 questions to determine your ideal self and the second 3 questions to define how you feel obligated to act to fulfill life’s demands.

  1. The thing I like most about myself is…
  2. I’m at my best when I contribute…
  3. I feel most connected to God when I…
  4. Others appreciate me for…
  5. My job requires me to…
  6. I feel like a fish out of water when I…

Now, compare your answers between all the questions. How consistent (or inconsistent) are you? Bonus question: Who does God say you are?

Imagine what it will feel like if your ideal self and God’s ideal for you are the same. That’s self-acceptance.

Is self-acceptance clear to you? Are you amazed by God’s goodness that He created us to enjoy Him and enjoy who He made you to be? If not, what seems to be hindering your understanding?

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Push Through Fear and Find Hope

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Are you stuck? Unable to move forward like you want to? Are you paralyzed with fear?

If you’re stuck, you must be afraid of something. At any moment in life you have the ability to choose a different path. With each decision you make, something changes.

I can think of two reasons why you might be afraid.

  1. You fear a change that will result in you being worse off than you are currently. Somehow you’ll make a bigger mess.
  2. You fear you’ll never be better off like you want to be. Any effort will be futile. You believe change is impossible.

Look to the Bridge of Hope

If nothing about you could ever change, you would become consumed with hopelessness. Without hope, fear can gain a death grip. The more you feel trapped, the more panicked you’ll feel. You can see a desirable outcome but have no bridge to get you there.

Anxiety blocks creativity. The more anxious I am, the less I have access to the part of me that can find solutions. When my ability to change my thinking becomes inaccessible, I become confused, paralyzed, and unable to move forward.

All positive, significant change is a decision to embrace more of who God made you to be. You can’t make a good decision when you’re anxious.

You were once dead in your sin, but now you are a new creation, capable of becoming more like Christ. This is the ultimate hope all believers have.

Focus on Your Identity

Circumstances can change for better or worse. But your identity is fixed. And this is good because it’s easier to hit a fixed target than one that moves all the time.

The kind of change I’m talking about is the kind that matters most. The priceless kind. Would you rather have an easy life, or the strength and peace to endure a hard life?

As you accept and move toward your true identity, you’ll gain the power to also accept your circumstances.

Start Unstoppable Momentum

The smallest change can result in unstoppable momentum. There’s always hope when there’s something you can change. If you can make a change in what you’re doing or saying, then something must be different inside of you.

Can you walk away from an abusive situation? I don’t mean give up on loving others. Instead, I mean choose to block lies from effecting your self-worth. Choose what is good rather than torture yourself with evil. If you’re believing lies about yourself, you are opening yourself to evil. God takes no pleasure in seeing you beat up or put down yourself. When something terrible happens, it has nothing to do with who you are.

Can you decide to take better care of yourself? Relax and allow yourself to find the greater separation between who your circumstance say you are and who God says you are. Always hold on to hope because you can make a change.

If the change you want seems too big, then start smaller. Even a small change can lead to big hope. Do something different. Take a walk instead of siting inside all day. Veg out instead of doing laundry all day. Choose peace despite your circumstances. Do something to enjoy the moment you have right now.

To explore this idea further see Ephesians 2:1-5, Proverbs 13:12, and see my post on Quora.
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Make Peace With Your Life

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Are you at odds with how your life is going? If you are feeling more disappointment than energy for life, you could benefit from pausing to examine your direction.

You can make peace with your life even when you are experiencing frequent discouragement. Disappointment can show up in a lot of ways:

  • Loss of a loved one or job
  • Inability to get on the same page with your spouse
  • Consistent effort followed by consistent setbacks or rejection
  • Lack of opportunities to connect with others

All of these can impact your sense of your identity, or who you are. Loss, stress, rejection, isolation are serious enough to cause a person to enter into self-doubt. When you start doubting your identity, you open yourself up to all kinds of trouble.

My life work for the past three years has been to study, write about, and teach the significance of knowing your identity.

Your identity comes from God and is secure with God. To know yourself as God made you is to know more about God. Click To Tweet

I focus so much on identity because knowing who I really am provides the reassurance I need. Without reassurance, life’s disappointments would overwhelm me.

How are you doing? Maybe you are finally prepared to make a course-correction. Would you like some help to assess your current place in life? Start with the guest post I wrote on Lori Schumacher’s blog. Then, if you have any questions, comment below so we can discuss how to find the positive and make peace with your life, even when a lot of negative is happening.

Or, if you want even more help with discovering your identity, consider my books Confident Identity and To Identity and Beyond.

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God Never Forgets Who You Are

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Do you remember what you looked like when you were sixteen? If you are significantly older, you’ve probably forgotten unless you look at a picture.

All of us begin aging from the moment of conception. At first this is a fantastic idea. We become bigger, stronger, and even develop a more capable intellect. But there does come that moment in life when aging catches up with us. What was once wonderful becomes discouraging.

From about midlife on, we become weaker on the outside, even if we are thriving on the inside. Physically we are dying even if spiritually we are better than ever (2 Corinthians 4:16).

God Never Forgets What You Look Like

God made us in His image (Genesis 1:27). Every human being retains that image, no matter their status before God. To be human is to bear the image of God. God’s image cannot be removed from our identity even when we are fallen, sinful, and God’s enemies. Even then we are still worth redeeming. (1)

Before we are born again, we are alienated from God. We lack the understanding of our true potential. We are so disfigured that we cannot consider our true identity. We see ourselves as though looking through a distorted mirror (1 Corinthians 13:12). It’s as if we are made from soft clay and our faces have been smeared and become unrecognizable.

Before you are born again, you are lost, unable to reach God by your effort. But God always knows where to find you. More than that, you are disfigured, but God knows exactly who you are at all times (Ephesians 2:8-10). Click To Tweet

Recall yourself on your worst day, while you were still a sinner and in conflict with God. From God’s perspective, though your fallen nature is clear, He “remembers” who you really are. He knows your true design and highest potential. From your perspective, you are lost in sin and unable to see God’s perspective.

God Reminds You Who You Are

Despite that you are lost and disfigured, God hunts you down. The image of who you really are drives Him forward. Even when you’re at your worst, God can see you at your best. He really loves you and pursues you relentlessly.

When He catches you and you accept His love, what a glorious day! He cares and begins both a cleanup and a clear up process to help you see yourself as He sees you. The mirror in your head, your self-image, once hopelessly dirty, becomes clearer every day. (2)

Even though you are already saved, God still needs to constantly feed you reminders of who you really are. He is the keeper of your true identity.

God is calling you to your true self – to His original design and intentions. He saves you from complete destruction and then allows you to participate in pursuing and redeeming others.

Can you hear God calling you now? Can you sense Him waking you up?

Take a moment to thank God that He knows your identity and even when you feel lost, you don’t have to be anxious.

God is coming for you!

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(1) See what-it-means-to-be-made-in-the-image-of-god
(2) Helpful: ywammontana.org/new-creation

Is Your Identity Defined By What You Do?

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Identity can’t be defined by what you do. It’s the other way around: what you do flows out of who you are.

The two are correlated though. What you do provides clues about who you are. But you are always more than what you do. And, in the case of a mistake, one moment in life doesn’t have the power to immortalize you.

What do you helps you discover your identity, but it doesn’t create or define your identity.

At the moment you came into existence, you have your identity. It serves as a map like your DNA. Life experiences are like sonar waves going out to detect your identity. Even what you do can be like identifying waves. Sometimes those waves contain distortions and you might get the wrong impression of who you are.

Your self-image is your best estimate of who you are. Your self-image is a limited, distorted version of your true identity. You limp along in life to some degree because you don’t know what it’s like to be completely free from the distortions. You can’t know, at least not in this life.

You can change your self-image to move into alignment with your identity. But your identity is fixed and unchanging for all time. That should be reassuring. You’re not aiming for at a moving target. You can become more aware of who you are.

Your identity is defined by your creator. If you want to know who you are, you need to ask God. So in this sense, who you are is somewhat of a mystery. Only God knows your identity completely.

Some people try to wrest control of their identity from their creator. “I’ll define myself my own way apart from God. I’ll manipulate my physical appearance, my body, and maybe even my DNA.” But this is only a superficial change compared to the identity God created for you.

You can observe your identity by looking at how you react to life experiences. You can also define it based on the truth found in the Bible. For example:

  • You are made in God’s image (similar to God but different, like how women are similar to men but different). See Genesis 1:26–27
  • You are a spiritual being that God made with intention. See Genesis 2:7
  • You are created to accomplish great things. See Ephesians 2:10

And there are many other defining statements in the Bible. Some of the definitions apply to everyone (everyone is made in God’s image), and some apply only to those who have become believers in Jesus Christ (Christians have a renewed spiritual connection with God and experience His love in a more intimate way – see 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Romans 5:5).

Then there are the specifics that only apply to each individual. You are unique. No one else has the same combination of abilities and perspective on life. You see God in a way that others need to hear. Your voice and contributions are needed – otherwise, God wouldn’t have bothered to create you. You are significant.

To define the specifics, you can look at your:

  • physical appearance and athletic ability
  • sex (male or female)
  • cognitive and emotional patterns and preferences
  • personality patterns
  • spiritual gifting
  • work preferences

When you start to notice the patterns in all of these, you will have a stronger sense of your identity.

As you seek your identity, remember that you aren’t self-sustaining. You can’t keep yourself alive forever. You have a distorted self-image. You need to look beyond yourself to find your identity. You are defined by your context; God is where you came from, and if you’re a believer, God is where you will return.

How are you doing with discovering your true identity? What struggles or obstacles are preventing you from realizing all God made you to be?

I posted this answer on Quora for the questions: Is our identity defined by what we do? If not, what is it defined by? If you like my answer, upvote it on Quora.

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