Christian Concepts

Bringing your Potential to Light

Boundaries

Use Your Potential or You Might Lose It

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Reading time: 3 minutes

One of Aesop’s Fables, The Miser and His Gold, demonstrates that without God, the fear of not having enough is strong.

Once upon a time there was a Miser who buried his gold near a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and left town with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair and raised such an outcry that all the neighbors came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold.

“Did you ever take any of it out?” asked one of them.

“No,” said he, “I only came to look at it.”

“Then come again and look at the hole,” said a neighbor; “it will do you just as much good.”

Wealth unused might as well not exist.

The Miser lives a stagnant, distracted life and remains empty despite having a treasure. He is mesmerized by his treasure but he only has the illusion of fullness. He has the wrong focus: external and worldly. He clings to the vain and empty. He feels anxious because he uses creation the wrong way.

Using the visible to attempt to fill the spiritual doesn’t work.

The Miser expects security from wealth when God didn’t make money for this purpose (1 Timothy 6:10). Using something the wrong way is expecting more from it that it is capable of delivering. If you put too much strain on a shovel, it will break. Or, if you put too much weight in an elevator, the cable snaps. If you expect too much from a friend, you might lose your friend.

Another story, the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14–30), demonstrates that without a Confident Identity you can’t please God. In the parable, the master gives his servants talents (money) according to their ability. Two of the servants multiply their God-given resources. The master showers them with equal praise, independent of their ability. But, the master condemns the lazy servant who doesn’t attempt to use his ability. He lacks initiative because he focuses on his fear of failure. He is unable to perform because he doesn’t feel secure in his identity.

Why doesn’t the servant feel secure enough to invest? He probably didn’t take the time to pursue learning his identity with the help of others’ encouragement. The lesson for the servant might be potential that you never use might as well not exist. Those who completely avoid God out of fear demonstrate they don’t really know Him. God wants you to trust and invest. God wants you to activate what He’s given you. Your identity won’t do you any good unless you discover it and use it wisely.

Both the Miser and the lazy servant believe the wrong information about God and their own sense of self. Both are fear based and seek a false security. The Miser relies on a treasure instead of God. The servant would rather not try at all than to try and fail, even though to not try is the surest way to fail. Neither is willing to risk failure in order to live up to their potential. Both seek self-preservation apart from God.

As with many stories Jesus told in the Bible, the interpretation depends on your standing before God. When you’re in good standing already (meaning you’re a believer) the stories are meant to encourage and reassure. God wants to shower praise on you for your sincere efforts. For those who hate God and don’t know Him, the messages are extreme. They’re meant as a warning to encourage drastic action to put you in good standing.

Use it or you might lose it. Think of a gift or blessing God has given you. How can you use it today?

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

Be Powerful Without Being Self-absorbed

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Reading time: 4 minutes

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? Share on X

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

Why Two Identities Struggle to Resolve Conflict

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Reading time: 4 minutes

In my previous post, How Two Identities Become One, I compared relationships to roads. Roads are helpful but they require significant effort to build and maintain. Potholes and dead ends threaten to prevent you from arriving at your destination: connection and closeness.

On the road, potholes represent the fear of intimacy. Destructive conflict is a result of the inability to tolerate intimacy. And what is intimacy, really? Intimacy is nothing else but reality: the way things really are — flaws and all.

How much do you want to know the way things really are? God knows you perfectly. Do you want to know others and yourself perfectly? Reality is scary sometimes. Being authentic requires dropping your guard. Are connection and closeness worth the risk?

If the risk is too great, you can opt for denial and attempt to maintain the status quo (avoid conflict). If you want true intimacy, you can accept the condition of the road and plan a road construction project (embrace conflict).

Denial Makes for a Long, Bumpy Ride

Denial is like driving without your lights on at night. You can’t see the road. But sometimes you don’t want to see.

If you came face-to-face with the brokenness of your fiance and you realized your mate-to-be can’t meet your deepest longings, would you still want to get married? What if I told you the purpose of marriage isn’t to meet your deepest longings? God is merciful here in that de-emphasizing some of your potential mate’s faults allows you to appreciate their positive qualities and pursue marriage.

However, a flat-out denial of your or your mate’s immaturity will weaken your marriage in the long run. You can use denial to obscure a painful reality. Denial helps you cope with the disappointment of discovering flaws only by keeping alive a false hope.

Conflict will come, however, when you realize your mate isn’t capable of what you hope for the most. If you feel entitled, as in your mate owes you, then you’ll probably pick a fight. Fighting allows you to keep the hope alive that your mate can meet your needs. Else, why bother to fight if the situation is hopeless?

When you can’t accept reality one option is to blame your partner for the condition of the road. Conflict becomes a perpetual attempt to avoid facing the death of hope. You reason:

If I try again a different way, even if I create bad conflict, I keep hope alive. They could meet my need if they wanted.

You remain in denial that the other person can’t or won’t fix their road.

Acceptance Allows Detours of Opportunity

In this context, a fear of intimacy is a fear of unfulfillment.

I’ve been hoping all my life to finally make a connection and experience that I’m loved, needed, and wanted. I can’t handle not experiencing this with my mate.

Sometimes there is no fix. Or, at least, no immediate fix. The best solution, healthy grief, allows for the acceptance of true intimacy.

What I want isn’t going to happen. That really sucks! But I’ll be okay.

Putting aside your denial and moving toward acceptance is a tough, but mature, move. It puts a roadblock in the path of your hopes.

Yet, the blocking of one path allows you to see other paths you couldn’t see until now. That “I’ll be okay” can transform future conflict from bad to good. You’re no longer an unreasonable negotiator. You’re emotionally able to consider alternative solutions.

Wait. You mean there’s more than one way for me to experience peace and fulfillment?

Now you’re ready to see your partner in a more realistic light. A mature person wants to see reality more than they want instant fulfillment. Ironically, once this happens, a deeper fulfillment is possible. You’re no longer held hostage because you’re believing there’s only one solution to your pain problem.

Intimacy which results in seeing the limits of the relationship doesn’t have to lead down a path to a dead end. You can see the potential and put up a road construction sign and begin work to fill the potholes and expand the road in the direction God provides:

  • You can start pursuing self-intimacy (knowing yourself), instead of focusing so much on changing your partner.
  • You can feel good about yourself, even if your relationship is limited.
  • You can accept yourself and the needs you have, even if they aren’t currently being met how you want.
  • You have more reason to negotiate because you have more acceptable outcomes.
  • You move beyond destructive conflict because you accept true intimacy.
  • Acceptance allows you to appreciate your mate for who they are, not who you want them to be.

After you’re able to manage your fear of intimacy, you’re ready to resolve conflict. Next week, I’ll discuss cleaving together by defining a set of team values and negotiating decisions.

Introducing Marriage from Roots to Fruits

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Reading time: 3 minutes

When Failure is Not an Option!

Do any of these describe your experience with marriage?

  • Overwhelmed by perpetual unresolved conflict;
  • Drifting away from your partner;
  • Experiencing the pain of betrayal;
  • Confused by the complexity of marriage;
  • Afraid to walk down the aisle.

Marriage from Roots to Fruits brings much needed hope to couples who are at a point of despair and intense emotional pain. It is filled with practical tools and real life examples to encourage couples along the path of healing and living victoriously. You will learn details of God’s design for a healthy relationship while experiencing how deeply God knows, understands, and cares about the struggle that can come with marriage.

S_ChokingTree72S_FruitfulTree72

Marriage: Mission Critical

Marriage is God joining together a man and a woman, loyal to each other for life, who each contribute distinct but equally important abilities towards the completion of a fruitful mission greater than can be accomplished apart.

Unfortunately, a marriage license does not mean we are ready or competent enough to marry. If we continue to think and feel like a single person, we will remain single on the inside even though, outwardly, we are married. How many people have plunged ahead into marriage without a clue? What would happen if no one was required to pass a test for a driver’s license before getting behind the wheel?

Whether you are single, engaged, single-again, or married, this book is for your personal growth. This book is especially for you, if you:

  • Are struggling with how to make your relationship work;
  • Like to understand how things work—how each part functions in relation to the whole;
  • Want to learn the details of God’s design for relationships;
  • Like to reflect in order to gain understanding;
  • Want a full-brain (left and right) learning experience;
  • Appreciate visual diagrams to gain understanding;
  • Want to apply the appropriate principles and ideas to bring about positive change;
  • Want to make the most of your time in counseling.

God created you with a blueprint which establishes not only your identity (His end-in-mind for you as a work of art) but also your growth journey (the step-by-step plans). However, your experiences with the darkness of this world, sin, and the enemy deface the blueprint and leave you disoriented. A marriage at its best provides an encouraging companion who helps you discover your true identity. But without God, marriage becomes a place of fear and self-doubt.

In Marriage from Roots to Fruits, you will learn:

  • How to experience spiritual growth and truly know God;
  • How to live in your true identity and ensure individual growth;
  • How to enjoy marriage growth and true love for your partner.

This book contains unique counseling insights with strong biblical applications. Pastors and counselors can use it to help couples prepare for marriage as well as heal existing marriages. It is also applicable for married couples who feel okay about the relationship they have, but want to have a stronger and deeper relationship with God and each other.

This book is designed with 52 short lessons which include:

  • Concept diagrams: learn the principles visually;
  • For Reflection ideas: think deeper about each lesson;
  • Experiential exercises: know the truths in your heart;
  • Next Steps actions: apply what you learn in your marriage.

The 4 Steps to Growing a Fruitful Marriage

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Reading time: 1 minutes

You are probably thinking, “Awesome! Only four steps! I can be done next week.” But God made marriage to last a lifetime for a reason. The steps I am about to show you are real steps that we all go through at one time or another. But first, read Matthew 13:3-9.

Jesus uses the Parable of the Sower to speak about our receptivity to God’s words. Let’s consider how the parable also applies to marriage. The four types of soil in the parable match up with four types of relationships. From least to most desirable, these are Path, Rocks, Thorns, and Good Soil. The typical inexperienced couple begins as either Conflicted or Careless. Along the way, every couple experiences being Conflicted, Careless, and Choking before making it to Cooperating.

Ch01_Fruitful

The Conflicted Couple needs to learn how to experience a basic positive connection. The Careless Couple needs to experience and resolve conflict to build endurance. The Choking Couple needs to find a deeper enjoyment amidst the busyness of life. The Cooperating Couple needs to refine and maintain what they’ve accomplished so far.

As no person is perfect, no marriage is perfect. No matter which soil condition most closely describes your relationship, you can decide to grow a godly marriage by cultivating the path, clearing out the rocks, pulling out the thorns, and planting in the good soil. When you do this, you will be well on your way to yielding fruit one hundred times what was sown.