Category: Sister Judy (Page 254 of 271)

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

How do we find God in our work? How do we allow our work to move us toward the person God wants us to be? Jesus must have valued work for he spent more than ¾ of his life as a carpenter.
God has placed His desires in us for the calling He has for each of us and that will bless others.  When we are working, the joy and power we feel is the presence of His Spirit.  We were born with strengths and when we discover them we can put them to use and focus on developing them. There are certain activities that thrill and challenge us, and others that bore and drain us. When we discover our strengths, we are learning what an indispensible part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Dorothy Sayers said, “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”

The best moments of our lives don’t come from leisure or pleasure, but from being immersed in a significant task that is challenging and matched up with our abilities.  It is like we are in a flow and being swept up by something outside ourselves. Should we complain when we are about to do that for which we were born and placed on earth? May we see our work as a form of love and connect with the One who in turn uses the flow to shape us.

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

Sometimes we want to change people but we must remember that only God can touch the deepest place of another’s soul. We may think we can intimidate, lecture, flatter, reason, cajole, reward, to get the desired behavior from another but we can’t touch the deepest part of another person. Only God can. Prayer is the closest we can come to being able to influence people at their deepest level, to be able to go with God into another person’s soul, because always between us and inner part of another person stands Jesus.  The most direct way to another person is not talking to them. It is talking to Jesus.
 When God is present we don’t have to offer up frantic prayer but let go of the controls and let God do His work.
The space between us and our enemy is the space where love can grow.  Jesus never prayed for God to remove difficult people from his life and he had many.  If God answered our prayer to remove all the difficult people in our lives, we would lose the opportunity for growth.  That doesn’t mean we lay down and take everything an insulter would say to us. Sometimes it  means confronting the person with honesty and strength, being creative and patient, and working toward reconciliation.  The persons we are dealing with are human beings and we can put ourselves in their place and try to imagine how they feel, how they’ve been treated.  We can ask what interaction becomes an opportunity for us to practice becoming the best version of myself. We actually need difficult people to practice becoming the best version of ourselves.

Devotions for John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

We all need difficult people in our lives to help us grow and become the best version of ourselves.  Other people don’t create our spirit; they reveal our spirit.  If we need to develop love, then some unlovable people will be our greatest challenge. If we need to develop hope, maintaining it in the face of discouragers will make it strong. If we want to grown in our ability to confront, a hard-to-confront intimidator will give us practice.
Because God loves us and wants to shape us, He will send some difficult people our way. A sobering thought is that we may be the difficult person who God is sending to shape someone else!

We are always being energized or drained by each interaction with others.  Some people are life-bringers to us and increase our energy and add to our joy. Others are life-drainers and add to our anxiety.
How do we grow through difficult relationships? More tomorrow.

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The  Me I Want to Be

Our relationships with others grows deep when we are real and honest about the sin that is common to us all. When we can step into openness and stop pretending, we will find ourselves coming alive. Hiddenness is the enemy of flourishing. When someone knows the embarrassing, humiliating truth about us and still accepts us we come alive.

We don’t’ need people to give advice and solve our problems so much as we need someone who can touch our wounds with a tender hand,  sit with us in silence, who can stay with us in our hour of grief  and who cares for us.

“To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.” Pretending cuts us off from the flow of the Spirit.   We are all forgiven, recovering sinners, and no one can be secure in a relationship if they are loved only because they are smart, pretty, strong or successful. Confession, connectedness to each other and to God, brings healing.

“In a community gathered around a cross, there is no room for pedestals.”  Our churches should be a place where everyone can bring their baggage and brokenness and be loved without pretending!

 Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be 
We were designed to flourish in connectedness.  Connectedness brings gifts. 

Who are the life-giving people around us?  Who are the ones who notice us? Who know what we love and fear? Who do little things with great love? 

Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can’t do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can’t do them with a little love, do them anyway.
We need love to live.  The author said, “I have never known anyone who failed at love yet succeeded at life. I have never known anyone who succeeded at love yet failed at life.” 

Every moment is an opportunity to practice a gesture of love.
In the circle of connectedness we learn what a good thing joy is.  Joyful people make us come alive.  Joy gives strength and helps us persevere. It is contagious. Joy is the Velcro that makes relationships stick.

Happiness travels like ripples on a pond.

“The joy of the Lord is our strength.”

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book The Me I Want To Me.

As the body is nourished by food so our souls are nourished by others.

More than we realize, we are shaped by people and they bring us much encouragement.  What distinguishes happy people from others less happy is the presence of rich, deep, joy-producing, life-changing, meaningful relationships.

We flourish when our souls are nourished in the love of God and other people.

When we are loved we become more our real self. “Love brings the power to become the Me I want to be. Loving people are literally life-givers. That is connectedness.”

When we live in isolation, we can become self-absorbed, selfish, and may give in to discouragement.  People who are socially disconnected are between 2 and 5 times more likely to die from any cause than those who have close ties to friends and family. 

Not only do we suffer when we live in disconnectedness from others, but others who God places around us get cheated out of love God intended us to give them.

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

There is a unique way in which we experience the presence of the Lord when we are alone.  God wants to give us a sanctuary , a place where we can be ourselves before Him.  Abraham Kuyper wrote about the similarity between the structure of our individual life and that of the tabernacle in the O.T.  There was the outer court, where everyone had access. We have an outer court, the part everyone sees of us. Like when we work, shop, play etc.  The inner chamber is where we allow only certain people to enter such as close friends or family. We decide who we let in. Then there is a very small carefully guarded place deep inside that is most sacred. There is only room for one person and God.

All of us have one of these places inside of us where only God is allowed.  Our soul is alone with God.
Jesus prayed when His life was crowded and draining, when he face important choices, when he was sad, when He needed strength for his work, when he faced insurmountable things etc..  When He prayed things happened. The Spirit invites us to pray and is alongside us helping us by praying in us and for us.  HE knows us far better than we know ourselves. He keeps us present before God.  We don’t have to have fancy words for He is there!

We are free to pray in ways that will best help us live in the joyful awareness of God’s presence.   We can use candles, a verse, and anything that helps us know we are meeting with our very best friend. “In prayer- in the presence of God- we come closest to being fully ourselves.”

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

“The one pair of eyes into which you can never gaze is your own.”  There are parts of ourselves we will never see without a mirror or outside help.  In one sense we know ourselves better than anyone in the world as we have access to our inner thoughts and feelings. But in another way we know ourselves worse than anyone else since we rationalize, justify our behavior, and may not know we are even doing it.  “There is a me I cannot see.”
  We deceive ourselves and claim too much credit and too little blame. Our memories are usually in favor of our egos.   Apart from the flow of the Spirit, we can’t even see our sin. The Psalmist wrote “Who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults?”   We are insensitive and don’t know the truth about ourselves. But God will help reveal to us the truth that we are able to handle. Our job is simply to listen and to respond. God can give us enough grace, strength, and truth to overcome our distorted vision. Left to ourselves we often call evil good and good evil. Guilt is not our enemy. Sin, which blocks our lives, is the enemy. The Spirit will often bring a sense of conviction, and when He does, the best response is not to suppress our guilt but to admit it.  Let us allow our thoughts and responses to be guided by the Spirit.  What a wonderful word to our hearts when we hear the word FORGIVEN

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

Sin is a word not often thought about seriously in our day. But sin is a deadly force to us because it takes us out of the flow of the Spirit.  Sin keeps us from becoming the person God wants us to become. All other challenges face us from the outside. Sin works its way inside, strangling our soul.  Our particular sin doesn’t look quite the same in anyone else as it does is us. Our sin pattern is unique to us.
Temptation rarely begins by trying to get us to do something that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of our values. It is something more subtle that just pulls us a few degrees off course. But it is enough to disrupt the flow of the Spirit in our lives.  Our life has a signature sin which is based on certain patterns, relationships, temperaments, and gifts that are unique to us.  Certain temptations may be appealing to me but not especially to you.  “WE also live in a spiritual environment and leave a sin footprint, which damages our spiritual environment.”

The area of our gifts and passions indicate the areas of our vulnerability. Extroverts who can encourage others are prone to gossip. Good listeners may be passive enablers. People who love to learn are tempted to feel superior etc.

It is good for us to know our signature pattern of sin because we are most vulnerable when we lack self-awareness. Otherwise we go around taking the speck out of our brother’s eye when we have a log in our own.  Knowing our own sin pattern also helps us know what we need most to become spiritually alive. And knowing other people’s patterns can help us live in community better for we are more patient with them.

When we know ourselves and each other, we can walk in love and be free to be the best version of ourselves – God’s hand-signed version of ourselves!

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

Temptation is painful because when we give it to it, it hurts from the inside. Temptation tries to get our appetites and will to override our deepest values.

Temptation promises us freedom, but it makes us a slave. There is always a hook. “Real freedom is not the external freedom to gratify every appetite; it is the internal freedom not to be enslaved by our appetites, to have a place to stand so that we are not mastered by them.”

We don’t face temptation alone and one way of dealing with it is to share our struggle with another person.  We can also ask ourselves, “If I walk down this road, where will it lead in the long run-toward or away from the Me I want to be.”

We need to notice the level of soul satisfaction in our lives.  We become vulnerable to temptation when we are dissatisfied with our lives. If we do not find soul satisfaction in the Lord, we will look for it somewhere else.  It becomes an idol or an addiction. The enemy is also the accuser and may tell us if we have given in to temptation we are beyond redemption. But the Spirit is just the opposite and is always seeking to deliver us from evil and moves us toward forgiveness and healing.

What we really long for is to be loved by and connected to God.  That connection is ours if we want it.