Better at Building Relationships
If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18 (NIV)
We can do relationships better. In Romans 12, Paul is teaching that you might be, in some of your relationships, the only witness for Christ. Or if not the only witness, you might be the strongest witness, which means if the person you are engaged in a relationship with is ever going to get a right and clear picture of Christ, it’s going to be contingent upon what they observe in their relationship with you.
Paul is simply teaching that the people you are in relationships with might shape their desires differently regarding Christ if they witness your life responding to the leading of the Spirit. That means your witness matters.
This is why he puts the pressure on you to spark the conversation. It’s why you have to make the reservations and initiate the considerations. It’s why you have to be the first to reach out. It’s why, even if you haven’t done anything wrong, you have to offer the first apology. It’s why you have to arrange the agenda and navigate the terrain. It’s why you have to make all the decisions. And yes, it’s tiring, and I know it’s fatiguing, but God knows what He put in you, and He knows it works. You just need to be faithful.
You can shift your language from “God, this isn’t fair” and “Why is it always me?” to “God, what a blessing that you trust me to carry this kind of weight. Thank you that you’ve settled your Spirit in me like this, that I’m going to at least fight to react in obedience.”
In many people’s lives, you are perhaps the only person who brings Jesus into the conversation. And that’s why God depends on you. Because when they watch your reaction, when they listen to your commentary, when they see how you respond to things that are happening in your life and how you are staying together with so much chaos swirling around you, it provides lenses for them into what it means to live in perfect peace. When your mind is steadied on Jesus, being a witness becomes more important than anything else.
Better at Loving Me
The one who gets wisdom loves life; the one who cherishes understanding will soon prosper.
Proverbs 19:8 (NIV)
Part of the Hebrew understanding of love makes it not only emotional but actionable. You can use the word love in relation to God’s love for you to shape your perception of yourself, to guide your self-care, and to frame your view of life, including how you fit into the world and what’s really important about your life.
God wants you to love His people, and He certainly wants you to love Him. He wants you to love His church and His creation. But God also wants you to love yourself, and He wants you to love yourself as He loves you, which means you have a right to make loving yourself a priority. You are honoring God when you love yourself because it affirms your gratitude for the way God decided to express His creative, sovereign, divine imagination through your life.
If you carry God’s wisdom, you are receiving what helps you to love yourself, and therefore, you don’t need to depend on or become addicted to whether other people are handling you with a healthy love. When you love yourself, you don’t mind demanding from others how you expect to be handled as you grow and mature and change.
They need to handle you based on the you that you’ve become and not the you that you used to be, still timid and afraid and uncertain and unaware. In Christ, there is no stagnation. He’s always growing us and maturing us and shaping us and filling us and blessing us and elevating us and progressing us. So that means you are always growing, and you have to give yourself permission to love yourself enough to move forward.
Do you know how many of us won’t accept God’s blessings because we’re still beating ourselves up over who we used to be? Perhaps guilt is suppressing you so much that you don’t think you deserve it. Know that the devil is a liar. He who the son sets free is free indeed. And if you are free, that means every opportunity God has in your future is given with full knowledge of your past, and He’s telling you to forget those days that are behind you.
Called to Steward
But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.”
Luke 1:30-31 (NIV)
God has dispensed special graces to you that show up in ways that make it unmistakably clear that you have to walk your journey according to God’s speed. He dispenses graces to each one of us, which make us able to honor Him in spaces and with assignments in life that others would never be able to steward in the same way.
For Mary, it was her womb. For some, it’s teaching. For some, it’s their parenting. For others, it’s their hands. For others, it’s their strength, their courage, their compassion, or their grit. For some, it’s their suffering.
Mary is told that God’s favor requires her to stand as an anomaly in her whole community’s customs and practices, their spiritual considerations, their ideas about what a miracle is, and how they understand God to work in human affairs. God was saying through His angel: Mary, I’m getting ready to use you to confuse a whole lot of people. It is going to cause community questions and speculations. You’re going to be the brunt of a whole lot of rumors, and it’s going to cause a lot of confusion, because I dispense grace for you to birth redemption. You will give birth to a son without having sex with a man.
That’s awe-striking in itself! But then the angel also tells her what she is to call the baby. In a society where every child is culturally and customarily named by the Father, Mary was dispensed the special grace to name him Jesus because He would save people from their sins.
The favor you find with God requires faith, courage, and a surrender to the path that God constructs in your life.
If you want to know what you’re called to do, you have to ask yourself, where is God releasing graces to you? Because that’s how you have found favor with God. Connected to it is the call that God has for your life. Here’s the frustration for some of us: we are trying to traffic where we have not been graced. That’s going to create frustration. You have to find out where God has dispensed grace, and that doesn’t always mean an easy path.
You need Jesus to help you identify where graces have been released into your life because sometimes His graces may have been dispensed in your pain and in your pressure as much as it could be in your pleasure and in your prosperity. You need this because the assignment might require you to be different, change, and grow. If you want your life to count in ways that God has imagined for you, then you have to strengthen your faith in Jesus because that creates a road from your divine calling to your divine destiny.
Doing Me Better
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?
1 Corinthians 3:16 (NIV)
As you nurture your spirituality, as you feed your faith, as you grow to understand your gifts, as you move to steward your anointing, to honor your ministry, to offer God your service, to render to Him your sacrifice, to lift to Him your praise, to offer to Him your worship—don’t be tempted to be different from those who handed down the Christian faith to you. You’re not going to grow any stronger without prayer, without the intake of Scripture, without worship, without witness, without testimony, without giving.
You are the temple of God and God dwells in your midst. You house the presence of the Spirit. The “temple” is not just describing the sanctuary; it’s including everything peripheral and attached to it. The courtyards, the auxiliary buildings—it all describes the temple, and it means the same thing for us: the dwelling place of God.
Nurturing a better you starts here: I am the dwelling place for God. More than God around me. More than celebrating that God is for me. More than offering my ideas for God. More than God shaping me, blessing me, using me, accepting my life, my offerings. More than my ministry. Larger than any of these is this truth: God dwells in me. This is why we have to love ourselves, care for ourselves, accept ourselves as we are even with all our specificities and peculiarities.
You house God’s Spirit. Your personality has to be shaped by this revelation. You are not just flesh and blood. You are not just hair, nails, and clothes. You are not just your car and your employment. You are not just your neighborhood and your square footage. You are God’s temple, which means you also have to guard who gets to traffic in and through your life.
You have to guard who gets to speak into your life.
You have to guard who gets to have a word that matters in your life.
Your purpose is defined by it.
Your thoughts have to always consider it.
You have to filter your every experience through it.
You have to consider everything based upon it.
You have to discern everything through this lens: you are God’s temple.
Responding to life’s hard hits is completely different when you see yourself as a temple of God. You carry conviction that you can survive anything, recover from anything, settle for what God intends, and believe God for everything. Do you better by seeing you better. You’ll start seeing yourself better by living with the conviction that you are the dwelling place for God.
Better by Counting the Cost
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’”
Luke 14:28-30 (NIV)
Every single person listening to Jesus when He said these words could resonate with them. He’s trying to teach them that spiritual growth is never a quick build. It’s not a speedy process. It’s not about cutting as many corners as one can with no attention to the building of a strong foundation and no estimation of the costs associated with it. To the contrary, Jesus is teaching that building a better life for yourself in Him is being intentional.
Building a powerful life for Christ is about estimating what it takes to live better for Him.
There is a cost to living spiritually whole and healthy. You don’t wake up in the morning with just a desire and a passion to be whole, holy, and complete. And then just because you desire it or are passionate about it, that doesn’t mean God is going to automatically deliver it to the front door of your emotionality. If you want to live whole and happy and healthy and holy, you are going to have to sit down and estimate the cost, because in order to achieve it, you are going to have to pay the cost.
Jesus is teaching that faith doesn’t grow without spiritual estimation, intentionality, internal quality control, self-restraint, and surrendered motives. You don’t grow holy by accident. You become holy by intentionality. And that intentionality always raises the reality of what it’s going to cost you. Being a better you comes with the spiritual discipline of estimating the cost of being a better you, estimating the cost of living as a powerful Christian.
What has to be sacrificed from your life? How do you develop love and desire for things God loves and desires? And how do you develop the courage to purge from your life the things that are displeasing to God? What do you do with your career goals? How do you address your financial appetites? What do you do about your attraction to things, your material acquisition, your mental conditioning, your emotional needs, and your health status?
The best word for “cost” from the original Greek word is “assess” or “budget.” To live a powerful life in Christ, it takes more than passion, more than desire, more than drive, more than worship. All of these are necessary, notwithstanding, but the one thing that cannot be ignored is the need to count the cost. Estimate what it’s going to take in order for you to get there and then surrender to living by that necessity that comes as a budget. Determine whether or not you can really show up and offer God all that is necessary.
