7 Must-Know Truths About God’s Purpose for You
Grab your latte & let's chat purpose. Listen In On Spotify | Stitcher | Apple Podcasts Episode 145 7 Must Know's About God's Purpose for YouWhat is purpose? What is living purposefully? The word purpose is thrown around a TON. It has different...
Comparison: Losing Sight
Comparison holds me back from celebrating others because I envy. Comparison holds me back from what God has for me and my purpose on this earth because I spend too much time thinking about others’ successes OR MYSELF and my own inadequacies — making me feel lesser-than and hopeless. Comparison breeds discontentment causing me to be dissatisfied with who I am. “The cost of comparison: pride & insecurity.” Summed up, comparison tears me down and it tears down my relationships with others as I grow in jealousy rather than love. It takes my focus off of God and what He calls me to and who He’s made me to be. She wrote in that same post: “the cure? 1. Recognize your universal calling (to keep your eyes on JESUS) 2. Recognize your unique calling (whatever it is the Lord has created ONLY you to do right where you are).”
How To Help A Friend Who’s Hurting
In 2 Corinthians 1, the Bible gives an incredible explanation on the purpose of pain and suffering.
It’s a section that has HEALED my heart drastically from pain and suffering in my own life.
But recently, I noticed another perspective it leaves about suffering in the middle of the chapter: how to be a good community to someone who is suffering.
In his suffering, Paul tells the recipients of his letters one thing that he wants from them: prayer.
2 Corinthians 1:11 says, “You also must help us by prayer, so that many will give thanks on our behalf for the blessing granted us through the prayers of many.”
PRAYER.
And he seems to really believe it’ll make an impact when he says blessings will come THROUGH those prayers.
Before I continue, there are other ways to help our friends who are suffering, hurting and going through the thick of it.
In my own suffering seasons, I cherished people who would sit with me as I cried, who cried with me, and who stuck with me through it. I cherished people who simply were THERE for me.
BUT …
Be Free of Your Burdens
I’m sure many of you have felt these weights of life. But what the Lord has been impressing upon my heart is this:
Hold up that white flag. Surrender. Fully.
That’s the thing. We can’t go into this year without fully giving up. Giving up all our fear and all our doubts. He calls us to give it up when we can’t see what’s ahead of us, when we aren’t in control of the situation we want to be or when we’re filled with the crippling fear of “can I actually do this?” Yet, we so foolishly allow our fear to overcome us. Feeling the weight or these fears is perfectly normal, yet it is our response that is pivotal. We go through trials and testing, where we feel overburdened and defeated, to remind us that there is a God who sees us through. And it isn’t whenever He feels like it – HE ALWAYS SEES US THROUGH.
Jesus: God’s Gift
We all love good gifts don’t we? Jesus is the best gift you could get from the One you deserve it least! God so loved the world that He gifted us His only Son so if we believed in Him, we would have eternal life.
Baby Jesus, God’s Gift affected the lives of the people around Him. Different people, roles and reactions. All people we can resonate with and learn something from.
Mary
In Luke 1:26-38, we meet Mary, soon-to-be mother of Jesus. I encourage you to read this section before continuing.
Mary was a young woman. I’m sure she was scared, maybe embarrassed and a bit confused. It seems she wanted to do God’s will, but it’s important to note that she already had plans of her own. She was going to get married to Joseph, be a wife and a mom and have a happy life. Then one day, the angel of the Lord tells Mary that God is pleased with her. (Yay!) He is in fact very pleased with her. (Yay!!) And then he tells her… all her plans and dreams are about to change. (Wait, what???)
Maybe someone is reading that has or had her life figured out, all your ducks in a row. You are trying to follow God, doing everything right, and now God is saying, “Sweet daughter of Mine, things are about to change, but trust Me. Sometimes My thoughts and yours are not the same, but will you trust Me?”
When We Fail
After years of priding myself on what I could bring to God, I realized I had nothing to bring of my own. It became very clear that those things that for years very much seemed MINE were absolutely not.
All of those qualities were things that God had placed in me. They were HIS qualities in me.
I had nothing on my own.
But the Lord called me anyway.
“And the Lord turned to him and said, “Go…; Do not I send you?’
And he said to Him, ‘Please, Lord, how can I… I am the least.’
And the Lord said to him, ‘But I will be with you.’”
How To Use Your Talents and Gifts
Be careful not to bury the gifts and talents God has entrusted you with. We must invest and increase. This is such a major factor of living purposefully.
Let’s let this VITAL truth and way of life sink into our hearts, minds and lives.
1. Talents and gifts are given by GRACE. The gifts we have are just that… a GIFT. They are not of us but given to us. They are not only gifts but gifts from God. This truth really brings perspective on how we should treat talents and gifts and use them. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a parable of a man who goes on a journey and gives, entrusts his servants, with his property. The story goes and we see that the three different servants receive different amounts of money and they all do different things with those amounts. Two multiple it and one wastes it. A striking aspect to be noted for this first point of grace is that this master entrusts his land to his servants. There is nothing earned about this. It is GRACE on grace. It’s an accurate representation of God entrusting HIS gifts to us – not our land, not our talents, not our gifts but His. In Romans 12:6, Paul says that our gifts are given according to the “grace given to us.” Then in 1 Peter 4:10 that we ought to use the gifts to serve as “good stewards of God’s varied grace.”