Bringing your Potential to Light
Reading time: <1 minutes
I follow other people because they can share an encouraging perspective on God that I might not see immediately. This week, instead of reading something new from me, I recommend you check out these resources:
https://faithandfitness.net/identity-defined-at-cedar-pointe-fitness
Brad Bloom’s Faith & Fitness Magazine
Reading time: 3 minutes
Rest makes it possible 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 to enter into the rest God intends for you?
God made you with an identity which is the place of optimal functioning. This sweet spot is where the least amount of effort still produces the maximum output. Hitting your sweet spot is an honorable goal. God intends for you to feel the pleasure of acting from the center of who you are. If you want to know God’s favor, first you must be free to be yourself.
Sometimes the sweet spot is elusive because of sin and the curse. They cloud and distort who you are. 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. You put in your effort while relying on God to carry what you were never meant to carry.
Do you know what it feels like to pursue what you want instead of what you must (because of obligation or responsibility)? God created the sabbath so you can 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 when you’re under obligation? How do you fill your day to meet the demands of life? 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 when you’re not under any obligation? Then, how do you live? This is what you can accomplish during productive play. 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.
Fulfilling obligations is necessary. But playing is as important as working. What do you think of when you think of playing? Productive play does not involve low-functioning activities that allow passive living. Your brain can be fully engaged and relaxed during play.
Whatever you do should have a purpose. Some activities can seem like they have no eternal significance, but if they rejuvenate you, they have value. For example, consider watching a movie. What value do you gain from it? Does it uplift or strengthen you? Does it help you to better understand life? Or does it drain you or lead you into sin?
To play is to relax. Some people can’t stop working. Their play is only work in disguise. When you practice relaxing, 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.
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.
Learn more about play.
Image by skeeze from Pixabay
Last Updated 2023/10/15
Reading time: 3 minutes
If you’re unable to accept yourself, you’re likely missing out on joy. To maximize joy you must appreciate both God and yourself. How can a person worship God but hate himself? How can a person like herself but hate God? The two must go together to maximize enjoyment of life.
God created you as you are for a specific reason. Life’s bumps and bruises can deceive you into believing you are someone more or less than you are. If you are not gifted athletically (or some other enviable ability) but compare yourself to those who 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, you are making it personal, which isn’t helpful.
Are you measuring yourself with 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 declar
The Lord detests the use of dishonest scales, but he delights in accurate weights.
Proverbs 11:1 NLT
Are you weighing your value with honest scales? Romans 12:3 communicates the same idea.
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
Romans 12:3 ESV
It’s possible to think you accept yourself when you 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. You can’t perform your way to acceptance.
God’s acceptance is free for His children. Even though we don’t have to work for our value, we must learn our value by who God made us to be.
Below are 7 questions to help you assess how well you know yourself and how consistently you present yourself. Answer the first 3 questions to determine your self-image (how you see and value yourself), the second 3 questions to define how you feel obligated to act to fulfill life’s demands (how others see and value you), and the seventh question to consider God’s perspective (how He sees and values you).
The final seventh question is this: Describe yourself as God sees you through His loving, creative eyes. Be specific. Generate your answer from your heart. Provide a detailed answer related to how uniquely God created you. Now, compare your answers between all the questions. How consistent (or inconsistent) are you?
Imagine what it would be like if your self-image, your presented-image, and God’s-image all described the same person. You would act the same way across all different areas of your life, according to God’s design for you. That’s self-acceptance.
Is self-acceptance clear to you? Are you amazed by God’s goodness that He created you to enjoy Him and enjoy who He made you to be? If not, what seems to be holding you back from the joy of authenticity?
Learn more about worship and joy.
Image by Janine Bolon from Pixabay
Last updated 2025/03/02
Reading time: 4 minutes
A string of devastating disappointments can weaken you to the point you live in constant fear of the next disaster. Don’t give up. You can push through fear and find hope.
Job experienced multiple traumas. He suffered from the loss of his children, his finances, and his health. Though he was greatly distressed, he held on until God brought him relief.
In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.
Job 1:22 NIV
Just like Job, your mental attitude makes a difference. Do all you can to guard your heart against bitterness toward God. A healthy fear of God is good.
At any moment, you have the ability to choose a different path. With each decision you make, something changes. As long as something is changing, hope is alive.
If it seems like you are up against a wall with no way out, perhaps you are afraid of something. The enemy uses fear to distract you. When you are afraid, everything looks worse than it really is.
Here are two possible ways you can become immobilized by fear:
If nothing about you could ever change, fear would multiple quickly. You would become consumed with hopelessness. The more you feel trapped, the more you would panic. The more you panic, the more trapped you would feel.
Anxiety blocks creativity. The more anxious I am, the less I have access to the part of me that can find solutions. I can’t make a good decision when I am anxious. When my ability to change my thinking becomes inaccessible, I become confused, paralyzed, and unable to move forward.
Don’t give up. Push through fear like you would cross a scary bridge. You can use these 3 strategies to bridge your way to hope:
You were once dead in your sin, but now you are a new creation. You are forgiven and capable of becoming more like Christ. You can change because God is empowering you. This is the ultimate hope all believers have.
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?
The hope of the Gospel is more than enough to calm my fears.
All positive, significant change is a decision to embrace more of who God made you to be. 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.
As you accept and move toward your true identity, you’ll gain the power to also accept your circumstances.
If you’re believing lies about yourself, you are opening yourself to evil. Walk away from abusive situations. I don’t mean give up on loving others. Instead, I mean improve your self-worth by actively refuting lies with the truth.
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.
God takes no pleasure in seeing you beat yourself up or put yourself down. When something terrible happens, it has nothing to do with who you are. Remember Job? He lost so much, but that didn’t change who he was to God.
Can you decide to take better care of yourself? Relax and allow yourself to find the greater separation between who your circumstance says 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 sitting inside all day. Veg out instead of doing laundry all day. Do something to enjoy the moment you have right now.
To push through fear and choose peace despite your circumstances, you will need to pray.
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.
Philippians 4:6-8 NIV
To explore this idea further see Ephesians 2:1-5, Proverbs 13:12, and see my post on Quora.
Image by Bishnu Sarangi from Pixabay
Reading time: 1 minutes
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:
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. Share on XI 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.
Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay
Reading time: 3 minutes
Do you remember what you looked like when you were sixteen? The older you are, the more difficult it will be, unless you look at a picture. But God knows exactly what you look like in your prime.
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 when aging catches up with us. What was once wonderful becomes discouraging.
The problem isn’t so much putting on the years as it is suffering from a deteriorating body. From about midlife on, we become weaker on the outside, even if we are thriving on the inside. Our outside appearance no longer reflects the strength and beauty that God built into our souls. Physically we are dying.
The good news is that we can be spiritually better than ever (2 Corinthians 4:16). God will continue to renew our spirits if we let Him. Hopefully, as we give up our youthful vigor we are wise enough to gain spiritual vigor.
God made us in His image (Genesis 1:27). Every human being retains that image, no matter their eternal status. To be human is to bear the image of God. His image cannot be removed from our identity even when we are fallen, sinful, and His enemies. Even then we are still worth redeeming, otherwise, why would God bother with us? (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 perceive 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 through your effort. But He always knows where to find you. More than that, your appearance is distorted, but He knows exactly who you are at all times (Ephesians 2:8-10). Share on XRecall yourself on your worst day, while you were still a sinner and in conflict with God. From His perspective, though your fallen nature is evident, He “remembers” who you really are. He knows your true design and highest potential. From your perspective, you are lost in sin and might feel worthless. On the most difficult days, it’s easy to forget how you look through God’s eyes.
You might be lost and disfigured, but God has a mission to bring clarity to your vision. The image of who you really
When He catches your attention and you accept His love, what a glorious day! He cares and begins 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 if you are already saved, you need constant reminders of who you really are. God, as the keeper of your true identity, can continuously feed you this truth.
God is calling you to your true self — 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 Him that He knows your identity and even when you feel lost, you don’t have to be anxious.
God will never stop helping you see the truth of who you are and who He is!
Read more about seeing yourself as God sees you.
Photo by Luizmedeirosph from Pexels
(1) See what-it-means-to-be-made-in-the-image-of-god
(2) Helpful: ywammontana.org/new-creation
Last updated 2023/01/01
