Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Matt Pavlik

Are You Addicted to God?

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Reading time: 3 minutes

What is your ‘why’ that drives you out of bed every morning? If you’re relying on something other than God and His calling, you’re missing out on God’s best.

I spent the first twenty years of my life on the outside looking for some sense of meaning. I was desperate to find something more powerful than the emptiness of day-to-day life. When I became a Christian at twenty, I finally found my answer.

You can do better than what the world has to offer. You can start each day with motivation that originates from deep within you.

You can do better than caffeine

Caffeine stimulates, but it doesn’t connect you to your Creator.

Everyone has a purpose. Some people are aware of their calling. But too few invest the continuous effort required to reject the lies the world offers and grow into their God-given identity. Play the long game.

Playing the long game means looking at life with long-range vision. What is happening today is never the end, but only the beginning. Each day has its purpose but also builds towards a bigger plan tomorrow.

You can do better than boring

Life is boring without God. But God’s plan unfolds in new ways every second of the day.

God didn’t waste a second of Jesus’s life. He had a purpose and a strategy for everything He accomplished. Jesus lived up to His identity and fulfilled His deepest longing. Now He calls you to find your passion and advance God’s kingdom.

To advance God’s kingdom, you must be connected to Jesus. Apart from Him, you can’t accomplish anything of spiritual worth (John 15:5). When you are enlightened by God’s Spirit, you have the power to advance God’s purposes.

You can do better than random

Life is mysterious. God doesn’t reveal everything about His plans, but He wants you to seek and find spiritual insight.

God knew you before you were born. You have a destiny to pursue. Your identity doesn’t change, but how you see yourself changes over your lifetime. Pursue your identity and enjoy abundant life.

Abundant life comes from participating with God in His work. You can’t have life to the fullest without participating in spiritual growth. God’s plan for your life involves your spiritual growth and helping others with their spiritual growth.

You can do better than worrying

Short-term solutions provide a false hope. Then, you’re back to worrying about where to find your next fix.

God is the perfect fit for the receptors in your brain. He’s better than drugs or medicine. When you’re connected to Him, you experience a transcendent peace. God wired you to connect with Him.

Don’t be afraid to ask God to speak encouragement to you. I don’t always feel great about life. There are plenty of distractions. When you feel discouraged, that’s a perfect time to revisit your ‘why’. Ask God why you should continue when life isn’t going the way you hoped it would.

You can have passion for living and become unstoppable

Being addicted to God means you have at least tasted that God is good (Psalm 34:8). Life can be challenging. You won’t be able to do everything right all the time. But in your heart you know you can return to God’s goodness. Once you’ve tasted God, you realize nothing else comes close to satisfying like He does.

Are you waking up to who God is? Can you see His reality?

You are unstoppable because you have access to God at all times. God’s kingdom is real and your participation counts.

Tomorrow morning when you wake up, think about what motivates you to keep doing what you need to do. Can you sense what is at stake if you give up?

Many things satisfy earthy desires. These aren’t necessarily wrong. But…

You can do better.

God, awaken our spiritual senses to You. Reveal more of who you are. Help us not forget there’s more to this life than we can see.

Image by Myriam Zilles from Pixabay

Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

Who Are You Really?

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Reading time: 3 minutes

What do you know beyond a shadow of a doubt?

Do you know who you are? Can you know who you are? If so, can you tell me with absolute certainly?

Who you think you are may not be who you really are.

Question Reality

Do you accept reality as you see it? Are people basically good? Has anyone ever called you naïve?

Are you ever a little bit curious about another’s motive? If you’ve been betrayed, you might have become doubtful or suspicious. Could others be plotting your demise?  

Too much questioning encourages fear. Paranoia is a sickness, but some suspicion might help you sniff out reality.

Think about your two closest neighbors or friends. Could one of them be an alien from another planet? Maybe some people you know are spies from another country, or wolves in sheep’s clothing.

It’s easy for me to question reality. I wonder about some people more than others, and you should too.

Am I being silly or am I being serious? Either way, you’ll never know before it’s too late. Maybe I’m an alien with a plan to take over the world.

Protect Reality

Question what you know to be true to strengthen your convictions. You will have less fear. You will have more assurance and peace.

The people of this world are concerned with protecting their territories:

How can we protect earth from an alien invasion or asteroid collision?

Who should we allow in our country?

Can you trust your neighbor?

Efforts to protect your home are necessarily. But more important than guarding your physical borders is discovering who you really are.

Discover Reality

I’m convinced there is a truer reality beyond what you can see. This truer reality is greater than you can imagine. You can’t see it completely, but it is still knowable. To see it you must search for it with spiritual eyes — the ones connected to your brain AND to your heart.

In C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, four children discover a magic wardrobe that contains a portal into another reality. The adults in their lives see only a plain wardrobe. But those four children, with their childlike innocence, see and enter into the truer reality. They begin an all-immersive adventure, and you can too.

Know Reality

If you believe in God, there are many surprising truths about God’s reality that apply directly to you. Are you an alien from another planet or a child of God? Maybe both, right?

You are more than a stranger to this world. But you are not a bizarre, diabolical alien. God says you are an ambassador. You are from “planet” God and one day you will return to Him.

You are more than a spy. Beneath whatever clothing you wear, are wounds, scars, and weaknesses that you want to keep secret from the rest of the world. But, instead of staying hidden, you seek to be brave enough to come forward as a witness and reveal your true identity.

You might fear you are a wolf because sometimes you behave like one. But in reality, you are a new creation made by God. You are an innocent sheep under God’s care.

Are you hiding your victories, gifts, and strengths from others and even from yourself? Your greatest victories come from your most painful wounds. Your gifts grow out of your scars. You are strong because you are also weak.

If you want to know the reality of who you are, you must look to both your strengths and your weaknesses.

Conclusion

There is a truer reality beyond what you see in front of you. You must seek it out with spiritual eyes. When you do, you can know for sure who you are.

I’m Matt Pavlik. I’m an ambassador who sometimes feels alienated from God, a witness who sometimes hides like a spy, and a sheep who sometimes acts like a wolf. But more than that, I know for sure I am a child of God (John 1:12).

If you’re ready for an adventure and you can see the portal, step through and start discovering who you really are.

Journaling Keeps Your Heart Healthy

Journaling Keeps Your Heart Healthy

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Reading time: 5 minutes

Journaling can help set you free from the evil that seeks to poison your heart. A heart that strains to pump blood isn’t healthy. Likewise, failure to express the emotions that weigh on your heart also weakens your heart.

Have you ever been so confined that you felt like you were suffocating? If you stuff your feelings, that’s a panic attack waiting to happen. What can help you breathe again? Writing can help you to restore your mental and emotional health.

When I was a young child, maybe 4 years old, my parents had a nightstand with sliding front doors. I liked crawling inside this fortress and enjoying the safety of the enclosed space.

On one particular day, after I had grown some more, I wanted to visit this fort again. I remembered it being fun, but there wasn’t much room left for me to fit inside. I squeezed in anyway.

Once inside, every part of my body pressed against the outer walls, the floor, the ceiling, and even the door. I could barely slide the last door shut. And as soon as I did, I started to panic. I felt so cramped I believed I wasn’t going to be able to get out. I started to breathe faster and all I could feel was my hot breath. As much as I wanted to enjoy the experience, I was desperate to get out.

That must be what claustrophobia feels like. Or what a baby about to be born experiences.

The doors didn’t shut tight, but I had to work to pull back from one of them so I could slide it open. After I inched the door open enough, I banged around to force myself into the opening. Fresh cool air entered my lungs.

I was once small enough to fit inside comfortably. But after that experience, I never went inside again. I went in voluntarily, but sometimes life can have a way of forcing you back into too small a place – a place you don’t fit or belong.

People Can Restrict Your Heart

Sometimes your own choices restrict your heart. Sometimes other people confine your heart. Either way injures your heart.

Goliath, an enemy of God’s people, blocked God’s desire for His people. No one in King Saul’s army wanted to fight him. David was willing but without any battle armor. Saul offered his armor, but it severely restricted David’s movement. David didn’t need Saul’s armor to fight Goliath. Instead, he fought Goliath in the name of the living God (1 Samuel 17:38-40).

Well-intentioned people can box you in. They’re trying to help, but they don’t recognize who you are. They want to help, but their help only weighs you down even more.

Other people aren’t so well-intentioned. They have a destructive agenda for your life. They use and abuse you (sometimes literally) if you give them the opportunity. They take what they want for their own gain. The more you let them take, the more they will take.

Your enemy the devil shows mercy to no one. He wants nothing more than to restrict all people from knowing Jesus and living a fulfilled life.

Journaling Helps Free Your Heart From Emotional Restrictions

You can use writing to throw off restrictions that aren’t a part of who God made you to be. Writing in your journal can lead you to freedom. You can be free of the unnatural confines of your encounters with evil.

Evil wants to bind you up, twist and contort you until you look nothing like yourself. Evil wants to confine you to a box smaller than you are. You can effectively forget who you are. Or, the restrictive environment prevents you from knowing who you really are.

Journaling can help you find who you are. But if you want it to work, you have to go about it a certain way. Hold on a second. I’m not trying to box you in.

The best way to journal is your way. Your best behaviors will derive from who God says you are. Your heart contains the riches of your God-given identity. That’s why God says to guard your heart.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.

Proverbs 4:23

But a stopped-up well isn’t healthy. To heal, try expressing who you are on your journal pages. You can’t become well using someone else’s words. It’s worth the effort to find your voice.

Sure, you can experiment with other’s styles. You can start by imitating others, but eventually, you must put your story into your words in the way only you can express them. Maybe you won’t even have words at first. Maybe some scribbles, doodles, or diagrams will help you unlock who you really are.

When you stare at a blank page and you’re not sure what to write, that could be because you’re trying to write right instead of write true. What you put on the page at first might not best represent you, but it’s a start. That desire to be authentic counts. It counts a lot.

If you’re ready, take a moment to pray. Tell God you want to make contact with the real you. God help me unbox my life. Help me unplug the wellspring of my heart.

A boxed-up life can be painful to open up. A stopped-up heart needs to release some poison before the pure water starts flowing. The pain you’re experiencing points to the real you hidden beneath the hurtful experiences. In other words, you hurt because there’s a real person in there somewhere. You can write to find that person.

The pain isn’t the problem. Pain is part of the solution to help you find your way out of the darkness and out of the lies you believe about yourself.

What’s in your heart? Take time now to look inside and write about what comes up from the deep. Unbox your heart for the glory of God.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Have Mercy On Me

Lord Jesus Have Mercy On Me

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Reading time: 5 minutes

When I get stressed I sometimes pray the Jesus Prayer to help me focus on God more than my concerns: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me (some people add, a sinner).

I first heard about the Jesus Prayer through a friend who uses it for his personal meditations. According to Wikipedia, it first came into use around the 5th century BC and is based upon three separate scriptures. The prayer definitely brings to mind the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax collector in Luke 18:

But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

Luke 18:13 ESV

The parable focuses on dependence upon God. It’s a humble plea for forgiveness. The prayer’s references to Jesus and Son of God emphasize God’s strengths amidst our weakness.

Because I know Jesus saved me from my sin already, I don’t repeat this prayer to secure my salvation. God hears all our prayers the first time. Repeating the prayer helps me focus on God’s presence in the moment of my concern.

I can struggle with how to best use my time while I’m still on earth. Am I focusing on what matters most? Will I have enough time to accomplish my goals? I realize God knows what is best; where my goals differ from His, His goals are more important. But this knowledge alone doesn’t remove all of my stress.

The prayer helps me focus on surrendering my life into Jesus’s hands. Praying this way reminds me that He is in control. The more I’m able to do this, the more relaxed I become.

Would you like to strengthen your connection with God? Connecting with God can help put your worries to rest. Repeating the Jesus Prayer can create a unique focus. The main goal is not to see all your wishes come true. Instead, the focused prayer, when used the right way, becomes worship. Whenever you worship God, you are automatically more relaxed.

When you repeat the phrase multiple times (sincerely and pausing in between each time) it’s impossible to not come away with a sense of Jesus’s position of power and your position of vulnerability. The moment this happens, you can release your burdens to the One who has all things under control.

Alternate Uses

You can customize the Jesus Prayer according to your immediate need. I recommend you start with the original phrase and then consider various changes to move deeper into prayer. When you are ready for something different, try emphasizing words or shortening the prayer. Eventually you might try substituting different words.

Emphasize Key Words

Focus on one or two words at a time. For example, if you emphasize Lord, you can begin to examine how Jesus being Lord influences how you feel about your concerns.

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me.

Focusing on the name Jesus Christ allows for more intimacy. You are calling the God of the universe by His personal name. When you experience God’s care for you, that’s personal.

Son of God emphasizes that Jesus comes from God and is God. But it also alludes to Jesus being the son of man, which emphasizes that Jesus is our human priest who is perfect and can sympathize with our weaknesses.

Emphasizing mercy is also helpful when you want to acknowledge and confess your sin. “Have mercy on me” is an intimate plea to experience God’s love and forgiveness.

Remove Key Words

Next, try shortening the phrase to discover different meanings. Each of the following has a different feel to them than the longer version.

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.
  • Lord Jesus Christ.
  • Lord Jesus.
  • Lord.
  • Lord have mercy.
  • Son of God have mercy.

Substitute Key Words

Swap out a word to create your own meaning. For example, instead of “have mercy on me”, you could say, “strengthen my spirit.”

  • Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, grant me wisdom.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, your will be done in my life.
  • Lord Jesus Christ, my savior, have mercy on me.
  • Jesus, be near to me and save me from my troubles.
  • Jesus, I surrender all of me.
  • Jesus, forgive me for all of my sins.
  • Lord Jesus, have your way with me.

You can’t go wrong by focusing on powerful truths about who God is. In case you are wondering, repeating specific words doesn’t grant you any special or magical powers. But, there is power in prayer and in the truth of the scriptures.

You can trust a powerful God who also cares enough to relate to you in your weakness. The brevity of the prayers allows you to focus on the spiritual connection so you can relax your heart and mind, instead of filling your mind with many words and many worries.

Speaking of which, here is another type of prayer from me to you:

The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.

Numbers 6:24-26 NIV

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Transforming Panic into Peace

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Reading time: 5 minutes

Would you rather panic for no reason or face your known, but shameful experiences? If you refuse to face your experiences, you will probably end up with increasing anxiety. But if you choose to face your negative experiences, you can transform them into God moments.

When you push specific emotions out of your awareness, they will eventually resurface as some unnamed but equally uncomfortable emotion. You might experience some relief if you don’t have to name the feeling. But unnamed feelings only increase in intensity until you deal with them. The feelings associated with negative experiences are like an undetected virus that moves freely through your body.

Chances are, when you don’t have the stomach to face the reality of what you have been through, you will avoid naming and claiming your emotions. Who would want to remember being beat up at school, being sexually assaulted, or being yelled at by parents?

Trauma disorganizes and it takes significant effort to restore order. Facing the sickening emotions can drain most of your reserves. But that effort produces healing.

God designed you to respond to the difficulties of life. Whether you like it or not, God made you able to feel the pain of your negative experiences. God declares a law of reaping and sowing (Galatians 6:7-8). You’ll reap what others sow if you are powerless to step out of harm’s way.

You can't control what happened to you, but you can control how you respond. The longer you avoid dealing with emotional unrest, the more time you give it to establish a stronghold of chaos. Share on X

Has the chaos within become normal to you? Have you forgotten or never known what peace feels like?

During the first few years after I became a Christian, I journaled almost every day. Becoming a Christian enabled me to look back at my first twenty years and realize how much I didn’t understand. I processed through my experiences with new insight. As I connected life events, I also connected with emotions that I didn’t know I had.

Becoming a Christian felt like waking up from a bad dream. I was thankful I wasn’t stuck in the former reality. But at the same time, I had to face the reality of all I had experienced.

Today, I don’t need to process the distant past as frequently, but I’m always learning something new and working to have it make sense with my personal history.

This kind of processing is like decompressing after a long day. What would happen if I didn’t take the time to express everything? What do you call energy that is building up in a closed system? A bomb!

Do you realize when you hold in emotions that God intended you to release, you create a ticking time bomb? The pressure starts building and a date with destiny is set. When time runs out and the bomb goes off, there will be personal and collateral damage.

There are only so many ways you can manage uncomfortable emotions. You can Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out.

Numb Out

Numbing out means you shut down your emotions. You cut the power; you trip the circuit breaker. Your brain circuits are overloaded and you are fortunate your automatic shut down is working.

This averts the immediate disaster. You dodge the bullet; you avoid feeling the crushing weight of what happened. You gain some immediate relief, but also more than you bargain for: some long-term problems.

Burn Out

In the midst of re-experiencing an overwhelming event, you are unable to find the automatic off switch. The intensity of your emotions continues to grow. The pain and panic become so unbearable that you must look for a way to force the shut down.

You might start cutting yourself. Or drinking a lot. Or end up in the emergency room because you think you’re having a heart attack.

Ride Out

You endure the waves of painful emotion without going in critical overload. If you’ve been through trauma, this is easier said than done. But it’s possible.

Riding out is a commitment to re-engaging your emotions while learning how to manage them so they don’t create a new trauma. When you can’t manage this without going critical, that’s when you need support.

What happens when a newborn baby cries? The baby is expressing discomfort about a situation that she can’t control. She is hungry, has a messy diaper, or needs sleep.

God didn’t provide newborns with the brain wiring to self-sooth. If no one addresses the problem and no one soothes her, she must eventually choose to Numb Out.

Because of the severity of the trauma you’ve been through, you could be in a situation like the newborn. You don’t have enough practice to calm yourself down, so you need to borrow the support of others. You need a surrogate mom to help you soothe.

With the right amount of support, the energy from the waves of emotion will die down eventually. With the tension gone, you experience peace instead of panic.

Choosing to Ride Out by facing dreaded emotions is an act of bravery. Remember, you reap what you sow. If you confront your past, you can move beyond it.

How much time do you spend in Numb Out, Burn Out, or Ride Out? Why is that?

What questions do you have about facing unpleasant emotions?

Are you ready to gain more peace? Tell God you are ready to face and then embrace your emotional pain. Ask Him for insight into your suffering. Allow Him to guide you on the journey to greater emotional wholeness.

Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

Jesus Promises He Will Never Cast You Out

Jesus Promises He Will Never Cast You Out

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Reading time: 3 minutes

Some companies offer lifetime guarantees. But, there’s always some limit or exception. Jesus offers an upgraded guarantee: a personally backed promise.

In a company guarantee, “lifetime” applies to the purchased item, not to the purchaser. Imagine if washers and dryers came with lifetime-of-the-purchaser guarantees. You would need a replacement every five years, but you’d only have to pay for them once. No company can afford to sell a dryer for $500 and make it last 100 years.

Things don’t last like they used to. Nothing lasts forever.

Jesus’s Promises Last Forever

In a world of broken and replaceable things, it’s easy to believe I am broken and replaceable too. If there’s no such thing as a lifetime guarantee, then is there such a thing as eternal security? Maybe even God can’t offer a lifetime guarantee. At least, that’s what the enemy wants me to believe.

Jesus doesn’t offer lifetime guarantees like the world. He promises infinitely more!

Jesus offers something completely different from a typical lifetime-of-the-product guarantee. He offers an upgrade: an eternal life promise. He promises to keep you alive forever, even while other things break and pass out of… Share on X

Jesus’s Promises Cannot Fail

God the Father and Jesus have an understanding. God wills something to happen; Jesus makes it happen. If you believe in Jesus, God’s will is for you to have eternal life.

All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

John 6:37-40 ESV

Do you believe? If you believe, you have eternal life. The only work you have to do is to believe (John 6:29). When you believe, you trust that the Father has chosen you and given you to Jesus.

Then, you will come to Jesus and He won’t cast you out. You have the Spirit’s seal of approval. You are secure in Jesus’s eternal life promise.

Jesus Promises that You Belong

You belong only because of Jesus. God adopts you into His family. Anything good you have comes from God. You can accept yourself and count yourself as good and worthwhile because your creator says so.

Your life would have no meaning apart from the life of Jesus Christ. But because you are joined to God through Jesus, all of God’s blessings flow to you. To reject yourself in the face of this reality would be to reject the very words of God.

Security and belonging are not optional for emotional health. Jesus provides both. What does life look like without security and belonging? I like how Brene Brown describes life without belonging:

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Brene Brown, Research Professor at the University of Houston

It’s possible to struggle to feel God’s love and acceptance. In future posts, I’ll explore breaking, falling apart, and numbing so you can work toward becoming whole.

If you don’t feel like you belong, first consider how secure you feel. Do you trust that Jesus will follow through with His promises?

This post is part of a series on eternal security. You can read the introductory post: eternal security means full assurance of salvation.
Image created by Matt Pavlik.