by Lucy | Jun 28, 2016 | biblical counseling, emotions
Mess-ups! Would you like to see yours in a new way? A better way?
Mess-ups are mistakes. They also are growth opportunities. God can turn your mess-ups into masterpieces when you choose to see them in a new way, his way.
In this short article, I’ll share:
- Some of my mess-ups that became pretty.
- The very special God-given instruction to see them afresh.
- How you can beautify your mess-ups too.
My Mess-Ups, Beautified
Friend, in this short list I’ll name just two of my many mistakes.Then I’ll reveal heart change for life change. What mess-ups is God asking you admit? Did you know change begins when you own up to your mistakes? Once you admit them, then you can learn from them and experience uplifting, godly change.
EXAMPLE 1: Stuffing my anger. At early as I can remember, I stuffed my anger and fear. This resulted in discouragement and eventually depression. Then I began to apply this biblical truth to my heart.
Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. Ephesians 4:15, NIV
Heart change: A desire to obey God and follow his instruction to speak the truth in love, which required me to open my mouth. For me. . .scary!
Life change: As I spoke the truth in love with the person who angered me, I felt peace. . .even when the other person disagreed. I knew speaking the truth in love honored God.
EXAMPLE 2: Fear of disapproval. Years ago while driving on a six-lane highway, I had a freaky panic attack, completely unexpected. I had another one in the same place the next day and the next. Weeks later, I recognized that just before the first panic attack I was playing a bad tape in my mind of a grueling conversation with a coworker. I feared her angst and my boss’ opinion.
‘We must obey God rather than men.’ Acts 5:29, ESV
Heart change: A determination to please God most of all, not people. I had hated people’s disapproval. The strength to obey God grew from learning his attributes while reading the Bible and through prayer.
Life change: With practice, I renewed my thinking and God freed me from panic attacks and people-pleasing.
God’s Special Instruction
The Lord instructs you to build your life on what matters most of all–God’s Word.
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. Matthew 7:24-25
Wise women build their life on the foundational truths in the Bible. In its pages, you’ll discover
Says Sinclair Ferguson: “Almost every area problem or failure in the Christian live is in some way rooted in the fact that we do not understand or we forget who God is and who we are.” Doesn’t this make a lot of sense? Does your spirit agree?
Beautify Your Mess-Ups
May I challenge you? It’s customary for me to give assignments to my counselees.
I have one for you. It’ll help you know God through Scripture. Open your Bible to Ephesians 1 and begin listing who God is, verse by verse. The first three are below. Keep adding to the list. You may reach 20, even more.
- a grace-giver (verse 2)
- one who blesses (verse 3)
- a planner (verse 4)
When you believe God is who he says he is, your thinking is renewed and you will begin to think rightly. As you think rightly, you will experience peace and contentment.
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You’ll even see your mess-ups as opportunities to make masterpieces.
FREE CONSULT: For a free, 20-minute consultation to find out how biblical counseling can help you or a friend, please contact me. Thanks!
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Jun 9, 2016 | biblical counseling, thoughts |
Whether you know it or not, you have a worldview, and it colors how you see the world and how you solve your problems.
In this short article, you’ll discover:
- what a worldview is and why it matters to your spiritual growth.
- how to reclaim a Christian worldview if yours goes off track.
- the super important link between your heart and your worldview.
PLUS: the best encouragement to stay sane in a crazy world.
What Is a Worldview?
A worldview is the framework from which you view reality and make sense of life. It consists of the values—or, your fundamental belief system—that determines your attitudes and desires, and ultimately your actions. It is the sum total of your beliefs about the world.
EXAMPLES:
- A toddler believes she’s the center of the universe.
- A humanist believes the material world is all that exists.
- A postmodernist believes what true for him is truth.
What’s a Christian Worldview?
A Christian worldview is based on belief that the Word of God—that is, the Bible—is true.
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When you believe the Bible is true, then you embrace the Living Word, who is Jesus. The Bible becomes the foundation of everything you think, say, feel, and do.
To determine if you have a Christian worldview, why not answer the following questions in a survey formulated by pollster George Barna?
Do absolute moral truths exist?
Is absolute truth defined by the Bible?
Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life?
Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and does He still rule it today?
Is salvation a gift from God that cannot be earned?
Is Satan real?
Does a Christian have a responsibility to share her his or her faith in Christ with others?
Is the Bible accurate in all of its teachings?
Did you answer “yes” to these questions? Then you have a Christian worldview, specifically a biblical worldview. (Some liberal Christians would say they have a Christian world view but would say “no” to a number of Barna’s questions including the accuracy of the Bible.)
Your Worldview Matters
When you believe the Bible is true, you want your life to show it. You’ll read the Bible and pray – not out of obligation – because you have the life of Christ and He lives his life through you.
Your deepening faith that permeates your entire life: marriage or singleness, relationships at work and with neighbors and family, your choices, your emotions, and your thinking.
Yet the secular worldview encroaches on every believer like a rising flood, desiring to suck you into its undercurrents. You see it on billboards, TV, and internet ads; you hear it in popular music and many a teen’s slang.
The world’s enticement is one reason a Christian believer might fall into muck the Bible calls sin. Sin is unholy wrongdoing that offends God.
He might be look with lust at a woman. She might crave a shiny Corvette. He might trip into an addiction. She might lie. He might slander a coworker. She might bow to the idol of materialism to find her worth.
Colossians 2:8 speaks to empty, worldly philosophies:
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
Reclaim Your Worldview
Christian believers who ascribe to a biblical worldview can become confused and make strange choices—strange for a self-identifying Christian.
EXAMPLES:
- Shanna visits a Reiki practitioner who uses a technique called palm healing by which “universal energy” is said to encourage healing.
- Liz discovers the underbelly of Internet porn and frequents online chat rooms.
- A mother of four young children increasingly uses profanity while yelling at them.
In every case, the Christian has fallen into a secular worldview to solve problems. Shanna looks to New Age for help with emotional pain. Liz enters a sex fantasy world to escape a loveless marriage. In anger the mother uses the coarse language of the times. Haven’t you acted unChristian too at times? Haven’t we all?
To reclaim your biblical worldview, agree with God where your went off the rails. Did you gossip? Yell? Get jealous?
Then repent. Repent is a church-y word that means to “do a 180” and go the opposite direction you were headed. The gossiper starts speaking kindly about others. The yeller embraces a new approach of being “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry” (James 1:19). The jealous one remembers to be thankful.
Worldview and Your Heart
In the Bible, your heart refers to your mind, your emotions, and your will. At the heart of your heart is your worldview, or the sum of what you believe. It is “your control center.”
A healthy heart has godly thoughts, godly emotions, and godly actions—all because you have a worldview set on the truth of God’s Word.
May I encourage one important activity to keep your worldview and heart healthy? Read your Bible every day. The Word of God renews your mind.
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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2, ESV)
It changes the way you think. It encourages and instructs you. It teaches you right from wrong.
It keeps you sane in a world gone crazy.
Sharing Hope with Your Heart,
by Lucy | Apr 27, 2016 | biblical counseling, emotions, identity in Christ |
Performance-living is a mindset that says what you do determines your value.
It is a lie.
This lie tempts you to save yourself as you give in to its demands. Do you feel weary? Burdened? Exhausted? Then you may have a bad case of performance-living.
And it’s very demanding, a taskmaster, demanding that you get your own straw to make bricks and meet the quota (Exodus 5:6-9). Push, push, hurry, hurry — and look good as you try performance-living.
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It has at least three traps.
1. Performance-living: Achieve!
Performance-living ties your achievement to your value as a person. The more you achieve, the greater your value. What about people who aren’t smart like Steve Jobs? Do they have less value because they aren’t “Person of the Year”? The psalmist says,
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. Psalm 34:18, NIV
2. Performance-living: Beautify!
It links your looks to your value. The lie is only the young and beautiful matter. Haven’t you used makeup to cover a blemish? Or perhaps Root Rescue to hide gray? Or gone on a diet or exercised to lose weight and tone up?
Believing beauty determines your worth is a treadmill of anxiety and it’s exhausting.
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The apostle Peter writes,
Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. 1 Peter 3:3-4
Beauty is a gentle and quiet spirit. Not liposuction!
3. Performance-living: Be Perfect!
Want anxiety? Derive your value from perfection: well-behaved kids, a gorgeous home, a fulfilling career, and. . .lead a small group, keep a prayer journal faithfully, and read the Bible in a year, every year.
This is what God wants, right? Perfection? Doesn’t Jesus say, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48)? Here Jesus means growth into maturity of godliness. He doesn’t mean super-woman performance-living.
When you “succeed,” performance-living becomes pride.
When you “fail,” performance-living turns into anger, fear, and depression, resulting in all kinds of untoward behavior unbecoming of a Christian woman. Your thoughts morph into ugliness too.
Gospel-Centered Solution
Exchange performance-living for grace-living. Grace-living is believing and acting on the truth of the good news that God loves you and values you.
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Your value isn’t dependent on what you do. God determines your value, and aren’t you more precious to him than a sparrow?
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows. Matthew 10:29-31
The gospel isn’t something you do. Grace is a gift of God. There is no score card. No boxes to check. No to-do lists.
Your value is anchored in Christ’s accomplishment, not yours. Refreshing, isn’t it?
Counseling hearts to hope,
by Lucy | Apr 7, 2016 | biblical counseling, thoughts
You can escape temptation. Knowing this brings hope, doesn’t it? Here’s an escape plan.
If someone offered you houseboat a few yards above Niagara Falls, would you buy it? Of course not.
Would you let your teen attend a Prom with a known drug user? No again.
These are obvious risks. You wouldn’t feel tempted to “give in.” Temptation is an enticement to make an ungodly choice because you think that you will gain something: pleasure or another benefit. At times you have succumbed to temptation, haven’t you? We all have.
In this article, you’ll discover three ways to overcome temptation.
- Understand how temptation works.
- Know true change is possible.
- Draw near to God.
1. Understand How Temptation Works
Why do Christian women sometimes lose the temptation battle and–
The short answer: You have an enemy who wants to snooker you into believing the lie that giving in means more happiness for you. It doesn’t. Maybe for a very short while you experience fleeting happiness. Soon guilt weighs you down and you feel shame, fear, even depression.
When you understand how temptation works, you are more likely to escape it.
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Once a beautiful angel named Lucifer, Satan desired exaltation above God (Isaiah 14:12-14). God then kicked him out of heaven along with angels who sided with Satan. Satan now “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). He is strategic and intelligent but not all-powerful. He is a defeated foe with two basic plans.
Plan A: Interfere with your following Christ in the first place.
Plan B: Tempt you to be an ineffective Christian by doubting God’s goodness and power.
Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’: for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he himself tempt anyone (James 1:13).
2. Know True Change Is Possible
You can hope to overcome temptation. Hope isn’t wishful thinking. It is the confident expectation of good.
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This confidence depends on God’s nature and his Word, not circumstances. It assures you that sin no longer rules (Romans 6:14). It guarantees that God has the ultimate victory over sin and death (Romans 8:35-39). 14). It strengthens you in the midst of difficulties.
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.
God knows when you’re tempted and he promises to provide a way of escape. Isn’t this comforting? You aren’t the first one to face trials like yours. Others have–successfully. You can choose a new, godly response. You need not fall back on old sinful responses.
As a well-known biblical counselor has said, “Paul makes it clear that to say ‘I can’t’ is not an option when God says one can.”
3. Draw Near to God
A while back, while loading groceries in my car, I noticed sunglasses in the corner of my cart. I had failed to the item on the check-out counter and didn’t pay for it.
My teenage son said, “Mom, let’s go back in and pay.” I was already running behind schedule and was tempted to zip away, rationalizing that the cashier should have seen the sunglasses so it was her fault, not mine. What would you have done? I returned to the store and paid.
Temptation itself is not sin. Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert and didn’t give in to the temptation (Matthew 4:1-11). When temptation is resisted there is no sin.
Jesus told the devil, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written,
‘You shall worship the Lord your God
and him only shall you serve.’”
Jesus’ words remind me of this verse in James:
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you (James 4:7)
What a comforting promise! Satan’s Plan B — to tempt you to be an ineffective Christian by doubting God’s goodness and power — doesn’t stand a chance against the Lord. You can be victorious in Christ when tempted to gossip, right? Or yell at your kids. Or get drunk. Or give in to fear.
When tempted, resist!
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This escape plan sounds to easy to work, doesn’t it? I challenge you to keep track of the times you’re tempted, what you did to resist the devil (or failed to do), and what was the result. God is able to keep you from stumbling.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. (Jude 24-25)
Sharing hope with your heart,
by Lucy | Aug 21, 2012 | biblical counseling, emotions |
Did God Really Say That?
When the crafty serpent queried Eve, “Indeed, has God said. . .” (Genesis 3:1), women and men (kids, too) have challenged the Word of God, better know as the Bible, the sixty-six books, from Genesis to Revelation, inspired by the Holy Spirit that make up the counsel of God.
God is THE greatest counselor ever.
Through millenniums, people and evil supernatural beings have challenged God’s counsel, its authority, its truthfulness, and its application to human life.
Chicken Flap
Take the controversy over the definition of marriage. God created marriage (Genesis 2) and defined it. The concept of marriage originated in the mind of God. He defined it as the sacred union between one man and one woman. The covenant of marriage is a visible picture of the invisible relationship between Christ and His Bride, the Church.
As you know, a whole bunch of people — and I won’t name names — want marriage redefined to include same-sex couples. Hence, the Chick-Fil-A flap and the resulting same sex “kiss-in.”
The “redefiners” challenge God’s Word, which is perfect and true. They basically are saying God’s a liar and Satan speaks truth. God forbid!
So Now What?
This year the flap is Chick-Fil-A. Next year it’ll be something else.
While the specific challenge changes from year to year, the argument does not. The gist of the argument is always, “Indeed, has God said?” That is, does His Word really have authority over this or that, such as my ungodly anger toward my spouse or my daughter’s pity party? Does His Word have relevance today? Does it speak to the whole of human existence, including emotions and thoughts and behavior?
Does God’s Word point to solutions leading to contentment and peace?
Yes and yes and YES.
His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. (2 Peter 1:3)
Do you know how to get a hold of this truth and make it a reality in your life?
This peace? This contentment? This abundant joy overflowing?
Hint: It begins with your continual decision for Christ to rule your life.
Please finish this sentence. If I experienced peace and contentment daily, then my life would ________________.
Do you want a life marked by peace and contentment? You can have it now. May I invite you to look at my counseling page? It has helpful information for you.
With Joy Overflowing!
