Submit Yourselves to God
1What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? 2You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. 3When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.
4You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?[a] 6But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:
"God opposes the proud
but gives grace to the humble."[b]
7Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Just the week before, we had a Marketplace Connection lunch that really made an impact with some members of the Bible study. The topic: seeing yourself the way God sees you instead of the way the world sees you. It was one of those times where I spent more time praying to get a firm grip on my emotions than really soaking in the speaker's words. I wanted to cry. This is a topic that makes me want to cry.
I'm not exactly sure what to call it, but low self-esteem is one of the things I've fought for a lifetime and I'm afraid that it's going to be a battle forever. I was thinking about it on the way home, and I've made a decision that this is something that's completely unacceptable. My low self-esteem is a sin. It comes directly from listening to the world and it's my job to get over it. It's holding me back and keeping me from accomplishing God's goals in my life.
SO...the big question is what's next. When we talked about this verse, I mentioned how easy it is to slip into the world's way of thinking. I like to blend in with the crowd, not stand out. It's easy to perform for the world. As long as I look a certain way, say the right things, and avoid rocking the boat, I'm OK with the world. Maybe not quite good-looking enough or smart enough or popular enough or rich enough, but OK as long as I understand that what I have is not quite enough.
Of course, God didn't call me to blend in. The world is supposed to see a difference in me. As we talked about in the study, the only way to be different is to spend more time with God, to know His word so that instead of hearing all the ways that I'll never measure up, I hear what God has called me to do...with the skills he gave me, the talents, the body, the mind, the experience, the purpose he gave me.
Should be easy...right?
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