Resentment always hurts you more than it does the person you resent. While your offender has probably forgotten the offense and gone on with life, you continue to stew in your pain, perpetuating the past. Listen: those who hurt you in the past cannot continue to hurt you now unless you hold on to the pain through resentment. Your past is past! Nothing will change it. You are only hurting yourself with your bitterness. For your own sake, learn from it, and then let it go.
The search for the purpose of life has puzzled people for thousands of years. That’s because we typically begin at the wrong starting point – ourselves. We ask self-centered questions like What do I want to be? What should I do with my life? What are my goals, my ambitions, my dreams for my future? But focusing on ourselves will never reveal our life’s purpose.
The New testament commanded to love each other, pray for each other, encourage each other, admonish each other, greet each other, serve each other, teach each other, accept each other, honor each other, bear each other’s burdens, forgive each other, submit to each other, be devoted each other, and many other mutual tasks. This is biblical membership!
When you think about a problem over and over in your mind, that’s called worry. When you think about God’s Word over and over in your mind, that’s meditation. If you know how to worry, you already know how to meditate!
You didn’t create yourself, so there is no way you can tell yourself what you were created for! If I handed you an invention you had never seen before, you wouldn’t know it’s purpose, and the invention itself wouldn’t be able to tell you either. Only the creator or the owner’s manual could reveal it’s purpose.
But God’s presence in your life has nothing to do with your feelings. Your emotions are susceptible to all kinds of influences, so they are often unreliable. Sometimes the worst advice you can get is “Do what you feel.” Often what we feel is neither real nor right. Your emotional state can be the result of memories, hormones, medicines, food, lack of sleep, tension, or fears. Whenever I start to feel anxious about a situation, I remind myself that fear is often False Evidence Appearing Real.
You cannot arrive at your life’s purpose by starting with a focus on yourself. You must begin with God, your Creator. You exist only because God wills that you exist. You were made by God and for God – and until you understand that, life will never make sense. It is only in God that we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance, and our destiny. Every other path leads to a dead end.
The most common myth about money is that having more will make me more secure. It won’t. Wealth can be lost instantly through a variety of uncontrollable factors. Real security can only be found in that which can never be taken from you – your relationship with God.
Prayer lets you speak to God; meditation lets God speak to you. Both are essential to becoming a friend of God.
You cannot keep yourself from talking about what you care about most. Jesus said, “A man’s heart determines his speech.
Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self.
Retirement is not the goal of a surrendered life, because it competes with God for the primary attention of our lives.
Point to Ponder: If there were no God, and everything was a result of random chance, there would be no purpose to your life. It all starts with God.
Without God life makes no sense.
As so many people in the Bible did, tell God exactly how you feel.
You cannot make God stop loving you, because his love is based on who he is, not what you do. It is based on his character, not your conduct.
Jesus specialized in menial tasks that everyone else tried to avoid: washing feet, helping children, fixing breakfast, and serving lepers. Nothing was beneath him, because he came to serve. It wasn’t in spite of his greatness that he did these things, but because of it, and he expects us to follow his example.
God’s purpose is not limited by your past.
If you are serious about changing your life, you are going to have to get into the Bible.
God wants your life – all of it. Ninety-five percent is not enough.