Do Not let yourself be burdened again!

This is a word to the weary control freak. Why do I use the word, weary, to describe us? Because when we are trying to control all the details of life to meet our ideal it becomes exhausting. When you try to be just what you think everyone in your life wants you to be, you feel depleted. In each area of our life there is an ideal of what we think would be best (dare I say even perfect). We have an ideal in our minds of how to be the best possible parent, and when time or circumstances prevent us from meeting that ideal we feel terrible about ourselves. We have in mind what kind of loving and supportive spouse we want to be and when we are low on sleep and are pushing our waking hours to the max we feel guilt that we aren’t being the spouses we desire to be. We have an ideal of how we will perform with excellence in our jobs, and then we find ourselves getting into survival mode just trying to meet what’s required of us. We have an ideal of how we will be outgoing and nice to our coworkers, neighbors, church members, and other team parents, but sometimes we are so worn thin by the time we get there we can’t seem to find our conversational skills. We have an expectation on ourselves on how well we will show respect and interest by quickly and politely responding to texts and emails, and then we find ourselves questioning whether we ever even remembered to respond. We have an ideal for how often we will check in with our friends and think of thoughtful ways to serve them, but then we realize weeks have gone by since we’ve even texted or called them. We have an ideal of how much we should weigh, how often we should exercise and what kind of food we should be eating, and when the demands of life make getting a work out in impossible and fast food inevitable we are discouraged. We even often do it in our Christian walk we know that we should be praying and how diligent and passionate we expect our prayer life to be. We have in mind what kind of personal Bible study and public service we think would make us strong Christians and when we fail in those endeavors we get down on ourselves. We look at our ideals like a bar graph and when we stop to take stock on how well we are doing in the many areas of our lives we can often feel like failures. I just heard myself tell my husband last week that I feel like I’m failing in every area of my life. I feel like I’m not really good at any of them, sub-par at best, but there are too many demands to meet and too many people to please. What is really dangerous about living life this way despite the fact that it makes us utterly discouraged is that it leads to a joyless, burdened, anxious state of mind that makes us just want to quit.

In this type of living every area of our life has a standard we are trying to meet, for most Christians these standards have been formed from what we’ve read in the Bible, heard from Christian speakers or read in Christian books. In standard, ideal living I end up making the things God has given me to bring me joy: marriage, children, ministry, health, and even my relationship with him a duty or burden to bear that sits like a heavy yoke of responsibility on my shoulders. This way of living steals my joy and the freedom Christ died to give me.   “It is for freedom that Christ set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery to the law.”(Gal 5:1). When we live with the pressure of measuring up in all these different areas of our life then we let ourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery to the standard and we lose our freedom. We are right where the enemy wants us to be, a place of guilt-ridden joyless living.   This is not what God wants for us, “but now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” (Rom 7:5).

I struggle with such a performance mind set even about the things of God in a society were try harder is always rewarded I have to keep the truth of the gospel always in front of me because I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility to please God with my life.   Here’s the truth:

God will please God with my life.

Through the Holy Spirit living within me God will work in me to please him. He will empower me and enable me and even give me the desire to do His will that is the truth of scripture. “May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him. (Heb 13:20-21) In the standard ideal way of living we try to perform for God in the gospel we depend on and rely upon God to live through us.  So let’s get our eyes of our performance bar graphs of standards and “let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our” lives. (Heb 12:2b).

2016/06/16 at 5:46 pm