Bringing your Potential to Light
Reading time: <1 minutes
I wrote an article for Darlene Harris, creator of And He Restoreth My Soul Project. Her goal is to provide healing resources for those caught in the crossfire of abuse.
If you suffer from the effects of abuse or know someone who does, this article explains the emotional and spiritual struggles of abuse and offers steps for recovery. Read Part I: Sexual Abuse Recovery From a Christian Perspective. Part II will be posted on May 14.
Reading time: 5 minutes
The secret to fulfillment is hunger. The stronger your desire, the greater your fulfillment. You can strengthen your desires by first being aware of them and then correctly prioritizing them.
You can starve for lack of a healthy desire. When you ache for the right stuff, you’ll be satisfied.
Do you realize you have more than one way to experience fulfillment?
When most people think of their desires, they focus on their immediate physical needs. But God also created you with emotional and spiritual desires, which provide a deeper level of satisfaction. Think of these desires as three stomachs, each with its distinct appetite or craving:
To experience contentment and satisfaction, you must learn how to manage your desires. You can’t rely on one stomach to the exclusion of the others. You’d starve. The secret to fulfillment is attending to all three desires with the right priority and balance.
After your worldly fulfillment reaches its capacity, move on to experiencing and fulfilling your identity desires. As your identity fulfillment reaches its capacity, move on to your kingdom desires.
Worldly desires are temporary physical wants or needs. They won’t be around in heaven, or they’ll function differently. Physical desires are like sugar. Sugar is highly desirable but fails to provide lasting nutrition.
Being satisfied, content, and fulfilled aren’t only possible, they’re also God’s will for you. However, gaining your heart’s desire doesn’t mean you can have every possession or pleasure you’ve ever wanted. Having every superficial want met in the way you want it isn’t possible. If you eat too much of the same food, your taste for the food will eventually become saturated.
Instant pleasure is different than lasting joy. Most things are wants, not needs. If you ache too long for the wrong things you might end up getting what you want.
Don’t make the things of life more important than God intended. If you don’t exercise self-control, you could end up getting what you want without fulfilling God’s purpose for your life. Some desires really are distractions and not worth the effort.
Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 10:39 ESV
Identity desires are like organic, whole foods. They fully nourish and fill you in ways that sugar can’t.
Meeting these desires should take priority over your worldly desires. When you focus on identity desires, you reach for the best things in life — the things that no one can steal.
Five longings God meets when you’re His child:
God is responsible for meeting these needs. No other person is completely capable like God is. Cloud and Townsend say that relationships are God’s delivery system for all emotional needs. However, you can’t expect or insist any one particular person meets your needs.
You won’t be able to enjoy life unless your identity desires are being met. If you’re unsatisfied with work and life, this probably means a basic emotional need is unmet. When these needs go unmet, your hunger should drive you back to God.
Kingdom Desires are fulfilled by spiritual food. While all healthy desires are from God, kingdom desires are an exceptional hunger for seeing God’s work completed.
Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”
But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”
“My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”—John 4:31–34
You have an advantage as a Christian. You have a stomach (an appetite) for spiritual fulfillment. Humans won’t ever be completely satisfied until they experience a spiritual hunger only God can fill.
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.—Matthew 5:3, 6
If your identity desires are met, you should be able to pursue your kingdom desires. But this doesn’t mean you’ll naturally pursue kingdom desires unless you intentionally put them first. To appreciate spiritual fulfillment sometimes you must fast from worldly desires and look beyond identity desires.
God desires that you pursue Christlikeness and fulfill the great commission. When Paul explains contentment to Timothy, he mentions several examples of Christlike behavior: righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. But you, man of God, flee from all this, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance and gentleness.
—1 Timothy 6:6–11
Godliness is acting maturely like God. Contentment means you’re satisfied with what you have while pursuing God’s kingdom. Don’t give up the eternal in order to hold onto the temporary.
How fulfilled are you as a Christian? Do you see your advantage? Isn’t God amazing how He created you to have multiple appetites? What can you do right now to ensure you have a balanced desire diet?
Photo by Edgar Castrejon on Unsplash
Reading time: 3 minutes
Confidence can be elusive but your identity is the key to finding it. Overshoot and you become proud or arrogant. Undershoot and you carry a heavy burden of discouragement. It’s possible to be confident and humble at the same time. It all depends on how you orient your life: where you find your identity.
Becoming confident takes time. You can develop it as you experience life when considering God as your audience of one. You can become your ideal self–the best version of you that you are pleased with.
Your ideal self is precisely who God means for you to be. You can’t know your ideal self instantaneously. Your identity is God’s greatest gift to you only if you open it up and discover who you are.
I love the following quote, which I first discovered through Darlene Harris while planning an article for her site, andherestorethmysoulproject.org.
Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.
St. Catherine of Siena
This means you have a significant destiny to fulfill by being your ideal self. If you knew who God meant for you to be you wouldn’t want to be anyone else.
To become your ideal self you must journey through four developmental stages. Each stage has a primary focus: caregiver, creation, crisis, and finally Christ. Before you can reach your full potential in one stage, you must complete the challenge of the previous stage. You can work on multiple stages at a time, but incomplete work limits your progress.
You start life dependent on your primary caregivers. You don’t have anything to contribute to others. Your only real job is to learn how to receive from others. Can you receive from others without becoming unnecessarily dependent on them? You can receive and grow at the same time. You receive so you can grow.
You develop competency and skill by interacting with the external world. At first, you learn to crawl, walk, and run. You learn who you are based on who you connect with the world beyond your body. If you do this well, you contribute to others through the work of your hands. If you don’t, you can become dependent on creation, instead of your creator, to sustain a positive outlook on life.
At some point in your life, you face a crisis. A crisis tests your internalized growth or identity. It forces you to clarify your worldview and specifically your Godview. Will you choose to:
If you reject God in some way (option 1 or 2), you’ll likely choose some other ally to depend on (creation or caregivers) as if they were God. You’re vulnerable to developing an addiction because you remain crisis focused instead of Christ-focused. You struggle to accept a good God in a world where you’ve experienced evil.
You can become a Christian at any of the four steps along the way to identity maturity. However, if you’re not a Christian by the time you reach stage three, the process of resolving your crisis by allying with God and becoming a Christian allows you to enter stage four.
In this final state, you’re sold out on becoming exactly who God made you to be. You desire to align yourself with God’s reality, not a reality you make up. You’re determined to remove any false ideas concerning who you are.
Can you feel the burning in your heart to become all that God made you to be? Are you stuck at any stage in particular? God has all His resources ready to help you become who He made you to be. Then you can set the world on fire. The material in this post comes from my book To Identity and Beyond.
Read more about identity.
Image by Piyapong Saydaung from Pixabay
Reading time: 3 minutes
Most people think of being limited as a negative, but not God. Another way of saying you are limited is you were created on purpose and for a purpose. Your limits are restrictive but they also highlight your unique gifting. Others have what you don’t and you have what others don’t.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
Psalm 139:14 NIV
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of who God made you to be. God has already done the hard work of creating you exactly as He wants you to be. You need to discover who you are, not create who you want to be. The mapping of your DNA determines how your body will grow. Likewise, the mapping of your identity (God’s design for you) determines your personality. Your purpose flows out of your identity.
To be human and have a personality is to be limited. As a believer, trying to be someone you are not is exhausting and ultimately impossible. You don’t have to make up who you are or wonder if you are inferior. Unhealthy comparison means believing you’re not good enough and you should be like someone else. Healthy comparison allows you to see how you’re different and value the differences. Uniqueness creates value.
Being limited simply means you have definition. If you weren’t limited, you’d be God. You’d have every ability God has. But even God is limited. He can’t be evil. Limited doesn’t have to mean incapable or impotent; it can mean intentional focus.
Jesus’s primary identity and purpose is to reveal who God is. Jesus is human; He has a personality. Jesus is also God and when we see Jesus, we see all that God is, too (John 14:9).
Jesus prioritized the time He had on earth. For example, because Jesus is also God, He could express perfect athletic ability. He could have come to earth to be a pro athlete, but He didn’t because that’s not His purpose.
By becoming a person and following God’s will, Jesus limited himself in many ways so He could remain focused on completing His mission. To limit attention is to focus. Jesus limited His ministry to what God purposed for Him. He didn’t try to be everything to everybody; He stayed focused on His purpose. Following are several scriptures that define Jesus’s focus.
So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
John 5:19 ESV
Jesus answered, “For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.”
John 18:37 NIV
And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Luke 4:17-19 ESV
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
If you can accept your limits, they will lead you to your unique gifts. What you can’t do highlights all the more what you can do. You can’t be anything you want to be, but you can be more of exactly who God made you to be. Jesus has His purpose and you have yours. Focusing on who God made you to be maximizes your potential. You’ll fulfill God’s will.
Reading time: 1 minutes
While you’ll see I’ve posted in several different categories, I write through one primary lens: identity. I want everyone to understand their God-given identity. Here are my top core beliefs about identity:
Reading time: 2 minutes
In today’s world even Christians struggle with understanding who they are. Matt Pavlik wrote Confident Identity: Christian Strategies to Forget Who You Aren’t and Discover Who You Really Are to provide a clear guide for Christians to grasp the full significance of their identities. A Christian’s identity is God’s greatest gift only when it is opened and explored.
“Confident Identity is a conversation-starter, a thought-generator, and a game-changer,” says Licensed Professional Counselor, Jessica Buczek. “Days after reading its final pages, I found myself deliberately and intentionally contemplating my sense of purpose. Combining Scripture, clinical theories, and practical tools, Matt has thoughtfully crafted a beautiful resource filled with an abundance of insightful questions, constructive ideas, easy-to-read charts, and meaningful activities and tests which allow an individual to thoroughly explore, expand, and exercise their identity.”
Your identity is everything. If you understand who you are, then you’ll have purpose and you’ll know how to live your life. A lack of identity is at true epidemic proportions today because people search for meaning to the exclusion of their Christian origins. In Confident Identity, Pavlik enlightens Christian readers to their spiritual identities and unique personalities. God doesn’t make duplicates. He crafts each individual for a specific purpose.
Confident Identity: Christian Strategies to Forget Who You Aren’t and Discover Who You Really Are (paperback, 230 pages, ISBN 978-0986383151) is available on Amazon (amazon.com/author/mattpavlik) for $21.95. More information is available at ConfidentIdentity.com.
About the Author:
Matt Pavlik, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, published his first book, Marriage From Roots To Fruits, in 2015. He has counseled individuals and couples at his Christian counseling practice, New Reflections Counseling, since 2003. He completed his Master of Arts in Clinical Pastoral Counseling from Ashland Theological Seminary and his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Illinois. Matt and his wife Georgette have been married for over 20 years and have four children.
About the Publisher:
Christian Concepts (an imprint of New Reflections Counseling, Inc. located in Dayton, Ohio) publishes books that help Christians reach their potential.
