Purpose

Pain Is A Fierce Enemy And A Pivotal Ally

January 31, 2021 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Pain: We can’t live with it; We can’t live without it. Emotional pain is a strange beast. It’s both annoying and essential. We spend our lives ignoring it or coping with it or finding relief from it. But pain is also our greatest ally even if it is a necessary evil.

Fear of pain keeps us from harm. Pain keeps us on the road instead of driving into a ditch. Or if we do slip into a ditch, it keeps us from driving headlong into a tree. Or, if we hit a tree, it helps us brake or turn to lessen the impact.

Don’t Avoid Pain At All Costs

When pain becomes extreme, it can flip over and push a person toward death. People consider suicide when their anguish becomes unbearable. Whether you are aiming for the tree or avoiding the tree, the goal can be the same: avoid pain. But there is a difference: suicide attempts to end the pain at all costs.

You’ve heard the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” That’s exactly what suicide does. It’s overkill. We need the pain to warn us that something is wrong. But the suicidal person wrongly assumes there is no possible relief.

With God, there is always a path to healing. But the restorative journey isn’t always one that everyone is willing to take. If you’re stubborn enough to choose your way over God’s way, then you are more likely to end up off-road and into a tree.

If you’d like more help for unbearable pain, consider this helpful resource for stories to help you become hopeful.

Coping is helpful as a short-term solution. If you fall and cut your leg, any first-aid is a balm used to promote healing. It won’t help much without the body’s innate ability to fight infection and replace damaged skin.

The same is true spiritually. Whatever you can do to stop your pain doesn’t compare to what Jesus can do. Therefore, it’s important that you endure your discomfort long enough to complete the healing process.

A suicidal person places too high a premium on the short-term outlook. They look at their life through unrealistic expectations. For example, if you want to run a marathon (26.2 miles) in an hour, it’s not going to happen and you’ll stress yourself if you believe you can. If you keep trying and failing, you might drive yourself to suicide if you take the challenge too seriously. Most situations in life are not life-or-death.

How is your life going? Are you stuck in despair? Here are some options to consider:

Bring your expectations down to somewhere realistic.
Increase your resources such as time or energy.
If you want something to happen that isn’t happening, trust God that He knows it’s not the right time yet.
If something is happening that you don’t want, trust God with any loss you’re experiencing.

Don’t Embrace Pain At All Costs

If what you want is out of reach, adjust your goals to something more manageable so you can enjoy life in the present. If you can’t run a marathon at world-record speeds, then try running enough for your health and enjoyment.

Do what you must to reduce your level of emotional distress. You can’t put your life in its proper perspective when you are in excruciating pain. But try to endure it long enough so you can identify what is wrong and find a path forward. When you’re in pain, God is probably trying to teach you something.

If your desire is realistic and God-honoring, then it’s worth pursuing even if you must first fail many times to reach your goal. Sometimes the path to a hopeful, uplifting place means experiencing the bottom of a pit first. Keep in mind:

The pit isn’t bottomless.
If you can change your thinking (stop being so stubborn), you will probably find that path forward.

God doesn’t promise He will answer your prayers how you want them to be answered. Sometimes we must wait on Him for direction. Other times we must keep trying as best as we know how. The secret to reducing your pain is to enjoy the journey: enjoy the pursuit of something great more than requiring a specific result in a fixed time period.

Supercharge Your Living With A Prayer Journal

January 17, 2021 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

A healthy prayer life allows you to connect with God so you can receive the spiritual nutrition you crave. In a world that drains your energy, God’s living water is essential.

“but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
John 4:14 ESV

God’s well never runs dry. But as your imperfect body ages, it wears out. Hearing from God always refreshes your spirit and boosts your energy levels. Even Jesus, being human, relied on prayer.

…the report of [Jesus’s] power spread even faster, and vast crowds came to hear him preach and to be healed of their diseases. But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.
Luke 5:15-16 NLT

Have you heard the saying, “It’s not the years, it’s the mileage?” When you abuse or misuse your body, it’s going to wear out faster. If you take care of your belongings, they usually last longer.

If you have a new car, it becomes used the moment you drive it off the lot. From then on you have to perform regular maintenance to keep it from breaking down prematurely.

Balance Supercharges Your Life

Without maintenance, your car’s tires don’t wear evenly. Your steering becomes misaligned. Small errors become significantly larger if given enough time. The same is true for your spiritual life.

A life out of balance will usually function less efficiently than one in balance. Imagine if you exercised your left leg ten times as much as your right leg. You would probably be better off if you hadn’t exercised at all. That’s fairly easy to see. But the same is true for the broad functional areas of your life as well. If you keep yourself mentally fit but ignore your physical and emotional health, you’re going to suffer.

Here is a basic list of areas to keep in balance.

Career
Physical Health
Emotional Health
Finances
Recreation
Spiritual Growth
Romantic Relationship
Family
Friends
Church
Rest
Creative Work
Service to Others
Adventure

The list isn’t comprehensive and isn’t in any particular order, so you can add, remove, or prioritize areas to fit your lifestyle. Focusing on one area at a time can be beneficial. If you identify an area of weakness, you can bring it up to par with the other areas. The categories above are broad, so you can add more detailed areas if you want. For example, for career, you could add specific disciplines that will help make your work healthier.

Prayer Supercharges Your Life

A prayer journal is a written record of your prayer requests and answers. A life balance worksheet helps you evaluate and improve the quality of your living. When you put the two together, you get a comprehensive prayer plan.

What if you rated each of your life balance areas on a regular basis? When I do that, it helps me see where I need to focus. On a scale of 0 to 10, how are you doing in each area? But you don’t have to stop there.

What if for each area you wrote out what is going well and what needs improvement? It’s easier for me to dwell on the negatives, so this helps me be thankful for the positives. But you don’t have to stop there.

What if you wrote a short prayer for each area? Thank God for what is going well and petition Him in areas that need improvement. That’s one way you can perform regular spiritual maintenance.

If you haven’t figured it out already, this is a great tool to use when you feel discouraged, directionless, or disconnected. When you feel a strong negative emotion, chances are, someone area of your life is out of balance.

Man desiring to be powerful, looking to God for help.

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

October 4, 2020 by Matt Pavlik 1 Comment

The quickest way to be powerful is to develop healthy doses of humility and confidence. If you lean too far in one direction then life becomes unbalanced and can lead to a world of hurt and trouble. But, healthy humility and confidence result in joy.

How does joy related to power? To answer this, I first want you to consider the following four possible combinations of humility and confidence:

Self-loathing: a false humility without much if any confidence means harmfully low self-worth. This person actively rejects the truth about who God is and who He made them to be.
Self-deprecating: a helpful amount of humility without enough confidence leads to questionable self-worth. This person is healthy when they have a lighthearted ability to laugh at their mistakes. However, their negative self-expression can also come from a poisoned self-image.
Self-confident: a helpful dose of humility and confidence means self-care without arrogance. This person lets God be God while also feeling good about who they are.
Self-absorbed: too little humility with too much confidence results in an inflated sense of importance. This person becomes overcompensates for their low self-worth by focusing too much on trying to feel powerful. Increasing focus on self becomes a dead-end at self-loathing. An unhealthy preoccupation with self misses out on what God has to offer.

People become self-absorbed when they look only within themselves to heal their brokenness. In futility, people try to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. But, the power that originates anywhere except from God promises only the illusion of confidence.

For example, if self becomes everything and God is minimized, then God isn’t in His rightful position in our lives. We’re not really going to succeed – maybe we’ll succeed with financially or something – but overall for God’s kingdom and his purposes we won’t be succeeding.

Be Humble So You Can Be Powerful

The world says you must be strong and independent to be powerful. But an “I can do it all by myself” attitude fails to activate God’s power.

Do you want to be full of your own power or full of God's power? You can be humble, confident, and full of God's power. Why settle for only what you can muster without God? Click To Tweet

God says to be powerful, you must be weak enough to accept His help. A healthy weakness is a vulnerable dependence. Depending upon God activates His power.

Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.
2 Corinthians 12:9 NLT

Be Confident So You Can Be Powerful

If you focus too much on God, if that’s possible, and minimize yourself then you can develop self-loathing where you don’t feel like you’re much of anything. Self-loathing is simply another form of arrogance that blocks God out of your life.

God’s power isn’t going to shine through you then. You need to have a right view of yourself so that God’s power will rest on you and work through you.

Be Joyful So You Can Be Powerful

The joy of the Lord is your strength (Nehemiah 8:10). How can you experience joy if you carry the heavy load of bitterness toward your own spirit?

Passively waiting for God to make you powerful doesn’t work. To be full of power, you must actively allow God to fill you, which also means keeping yourself empty of substitute fillings. Being filled with the Spirit means having great joy in God.

So be very careful how you live, not being like those with no understanding, but live honorably with true wisdom, for we are living in evil times. Take full advantage of every day as you spend your life for his purposes. And don’t live foolishly for then you will have discernment to fully understand God’s will. And don’t get drunk with wine, which is rebellion; instead be filled with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 5:15-18 TPT

How Can We Be Powerful And Not Self-absorbed? How Can We Be Confident While Also Humble?

If we want to be powerful, we must be joyful. If we want to be joyful, we can’t live rebelliously independent from God. We must stop living with the habits of self-deprecation and self-absorption. The antidote for poisoning shame is to look to God for help.

Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.
Psalm 34:5 NLT

So we should go for everything. We should do all that we can – shoot from the moon so to speak – but also keep that in check by accepting whatever God provides or doesn’t provide in our lives.

He may have a different plan than the one on our minds, and it may take some time to figure out what that is, but it doesn’t mean we should just be sidelined and sitting back and waiting for something to happen either.

We should take the truths in the Bible that God has given us and run with them as best as we can. But ultimately it is up to God to author our success.

The inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had with Kidron Tirey.

Image by İbarihim Halil Uyğur from Pixabay

How To Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up

September 7, 2020 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

What are some reasons you feel like giving up? Do they include any of the following?

Have you experienced too many failures or rejections?
Do you feel worth less than others?
Do you feel not needed or not wanted?
Do you feel tired, lost, or confused?
Does your existence seem pointless?

You might not think of yourself as depressed, but if you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are experiencing some form of discouragement. When your burden becomes too great, you’ll naturally consider giving up. Feeling like you want to give up should throw a red flag for you.

Unfortunately, you will encounter discouraging people and circumstances. Sometimes you can make better choices to prevent bad things from happening. Other times, there isn’t anything you could have done differently. Either way, when you continue to suffer long after a difficult experience, there’s usually a good reason.

What keeps you weighed down and prevents you from moving forward? Do any of these sound like you?

You’re trying to do it all yourself.
You believe God doesn’t care or He is somehow against you.
You think being humble means you should have low self-worth.
You think you’ve committed the unpardonable sin and God is condemning you to hell.

Unfortunately, you can become committed to a life strategy that doesn’t work. If so, it’s either based on a lie or it’s not the right approach for you.

What do you need to know to keep going instead of giving up? Can you say that any of these are true?

You have a clear purpose and act on it consistently.
You ask God to help you advance His kingdom.
You ask God to purify your motives.
You understand God is responsible for the results (the fruit).
You trust God to multiply your efforts.
You surrender the outcome to God.

Why are you really doing what you’re doing? Do you have at least one main reason? If you don’t, you’ll find you have no gas in your tank to draw on when the going gets tough.

Are you weary, carrying a heavy burden? Then come to me. I will refresh your life, for I am your oasis. Simply join your life with mine. Learn my ways and you’ll discover that I’m gentle, humble, easy to please. You will find refreshment and rest in me.
Matthew 11:28-29 TPT

You are to be faithful to the resources God has given you. God causes all things to grow.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
1 Corinthians 3:6-9 NIV

It’s easy to have selfish motives. If you can see yourself as partnering with God, then you’ll be more willing to let God help you align your desires to His desires.

Don’t give up. God loves you and has a plan for your life.

Are you still feeling like giving up? What do you struggle with the most about finding and living your purpose? Are you able to both know your purpose and enjoy your life?

Photo From: https://www.si.edu/object/signal-flag-pole:nmaahc_2017.111.19

No Guts No Glory

October 4, 2019 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

Do you ever feel like just being you is too risky? The cost of authenticity might be rejection, but the payoff brings a bit of heaven down to earth.

Last week I wrote about the benefits of imagining what heaven will be like. I asked, “How would knowing the best possible interpretation impact the way you live today?” One person’s answer demonstrates the shift from despair to hope that I aimed for. He gave me permission to share his answer:

I enjoyed the post you wrote on Heaven. Thanks for posing the question. It gave me a chance to think about what the rest of my life could look like and how it could begin to move in that direction even now.

Knowing what heaven is like and who I am as God’s finished product would change the way I live out the rest of my days on earth.

During a recent checkup, my doctor said, “You look pretty good for someone who almost died a year ago.” Coming face-to-face with death has me thinking more about how I want to be remembered.

If I knew for sure what God plans for me in heaven, I could risk being that person more on earth no matter what others thought of me because I would know it pleased God. I should be doing that anyway, but there is always a struggle to know if I’m being the real me.

I want to:

be more unselfish, putting others’ needs before mine.
be more transparent about my feelings and not concerned about how that would look to others.
speak what is in my heart; I wouldn’t be unkind, but I would be free to disagree with others and risk being rejected and isolated from others.
be more vulnerable to love others and help them no matter what it cost me emotionally or materially.
be more humble, living out my purpose of bringing glory to God and doing things that have eternal value, not just what had meaning for my time on earth.

Acting in this way would bring more meaning to my remaining time here, leave an eternal mark, and make something in my life worth remembering to those I leave behind.

Imagining heaven’s best helps me trust God more (I can see why He led me through what He did) and value what He values. I want to see with a better perspective what is really important in this life and also what matters so little because it won’t be coming with me into heaven.

How about you? What will your life look like if you live with no regrets? No guts no glory. When you risk being who God made you to be, God is glorified. AND… when you share in Christ’s suffering today, you will also share in in glory (Romans 8:17).

Image by Cindy Lever from Pixabay

Hope When All Seems Hopeless

August 18, 2019 by Matt Pavlik Leave a Comment

When you feel discouraged, where do you turn? Hoping in hope is empty. Positive thinking won’t last long unless it’s based upon the reality that comes from God. I want to hope in something real. That’s what truly inspired me when I first became a Christian.

When I became a Christian, my whole understanding of life crossed over from complete meaninglessness to an ordered plan. At times I lose the sense that the details of life are ordered. When bad things happen, life doesn’t make much sense. But this doesn’t change the ultimate truth that God is real.

When all seems hopeless, there is always still hope for a believer in Jesus Christ. You might have had the worst luck or just received the worst news. You might have nothing left, but if you’re breathing… If you’re alive, then you have a purpose for being here. If everything is failing, but you are alive, then God still has a purpose for you being here.

You can be experiencing nothing much happening that is meaningful, but still know that life has meaning and purpose.

You can despair of this life and the difficulties and pain it brings, yet burn inside because the flame of God’s hope will never go out.

When you hit bottom, you’re ready to give up hope in everything else. God’s message of hope shines all the brighter.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:16-18

I encourage you to ponder what your life might look like if you hold onto God, and move in the direction that God is leaving open to you. Is God closing doors? That’s God pruning you, so you will grow in another direction.

God doesn’t want you to give up; He wants you to try something new – something you haven’t tried yet.

With God there are infinite possibilities, but only a finite number of closed doors. Click To Tweet

What dream is in your heart? What other ways can you pursue your dream beyond the closed doors? Leave me a comment or send me an email about your dream so I can pray over you and your dream.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay