Pull Yourself Together

 Philippians 4:13(NLT)
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

“Don’t let me see you in the bed one more day crying over spilled milk! Pull yourself together! Wipe your tears and trust God to handle the rest.”

A broken heart can just about cripple your entire universe – if you let it! And most of us will let it! I know I did once. I was in a relationship with a man I believed to be the love of my life. He was a world traveling musician that spent most of his life on the road. I was in my late twenties and didn’t have a clue about the truth of God’s Word. I didn’t know how to create a Godly relationship with a man, and I had no idea about the boundaries God requires us to put in place. I wasn’t too concerned about the amount of time he was on the road, all that mattered was that we were a couple and he loved me. So, when the relationship ended after three-years, I was a mess. As with all the hardships I have experienced in life, I went to my mother for wisdom and comfort. She snapped me back into reality very quickly.

After speaking with my mother and hearing her wisdom, it was clear that I’d gotten myself completely on the wrong track. I’d made a person—a man—the focus of my life instead of keeping God first. What an awful mess I had gotten myself into. Jesus Christ commands us in Matthew 6:33(NLT), “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” A person will only seek someone or something that they believe is worth the effort of the search. Our Heavenly Father is the One True Living and Almighty God. He has no equal. He is Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, and He is good beyond our greatest imagination. There is no other that is more worthy to be sought than our God, and Christ commands us to seek Him in everything that we attempt to do.

God wants to be consulted on every detail of our lives. He knows what is best for us, and He wants to preserve and keep us from any harm so that we will be blessed and fulfilled in life. He wants to have a good and solid relationship with each of us, and He wants this relationship to grow and flourish as we become closer to Him and trust Him more and more. When we experience heartache the way that I did, it can devastate our lives. We struggle emotionally and in this vulnerable state, many of us lose sight of our relationship with God. We’re consumed with worry and angst over the person that is no longer in our lives.

We may not recognize it, but our gut-wrenching and agonizing pain over a broken relationship, and our failure to be attentive to our relationship with God, tells heaven and everything beneath it that God is not number one in our lives, but the person is. Our pain also signals that God’s love needs to come into our broken places and heal them. 1Peter 2:24(ESV) says, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” Jesus Christ took care of our pain and suffering on the Cross, when He gave His life as a sacrifice for our sins. Our responsibility is to believe in what he’s done for us, and then accept it deep within our hearts.

Psalm 103:8 tells us, “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Psalm 103:3 tells us that He forgives all our sin and heals all our diseases, and Psalm 34:18(NLT) tells us, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” My mother knew the Lord’s saving grace. As a domestic violence survivor, she had witnessed God’s healing power repeatedly. She understood that sinking into an abyss of pain can paralyze you if you allow it, and she also knew that having faith and being determined to be whole through Jesus Christ can change our lives completely.

God knew the choices I’d make, and He allowed me to make them. He also knew that some of my life’s experiences would cause me to see Him bigger and greater. He caused all things to work together for my good as Romans 8:28 says. Philippians 4:13 tells us that we can do all things through Christ who gives us strength. I leaned on this truth to get me through the rough patches while God’s love healed me. I realized that it wasn’t the end of the relationship or the fact I was no longer with the man that gutted me. It was the reality that I was searching to find in a human being what could only be found in the Lord Jesus Christ. I thought another human being could fill my cup, but only the love of Christ can do this.

When a relationship ends, through our faith in God, we can wish the person well and keep it moving.  What God has for us is for us, and we must have confidence in this. There are boundaries that we must honor in a relationship from the beginning. We must be patient and wait until God tells us that we’ve met the destiny partner we’ve been praying to meet. God never intended a relationship with a significant person to be our everything. Relationships are designed by God as an opportunity to serve another out of our obligation to Christ. No human being has the capability to hold you together, because that’s not how God made us. He’s the glue, so we can’t allow ourselves to become unglued and unravel emotionally because a relationship ends.

Love God and keep Him first in all that you do. Show Him your love by obeying His Word and living and behaving as Christ did when he walked upon this earth. Keep Godly boundaries in your relationships and remember that we are not strengthened by what we do but by what God has already done for us through our Lord and Savior. The love of Christ brings freedom and life to our circumstances, and because of this, we shouldn’t allow a broken relationship to detour us. It’s okay to shed a tear, but don’t stay in that place for long. Pull yourself together and forge ahead, because God loves you and is committed to bless you, and no person can ever take that away. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

“Pull Yourself Together”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Loving Ourselves the Right Way

 

Philippians 2:3(NLT)
"Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.”

God desires to see us blessed. We can depend on this. 1John 4:8(ESV) states, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Because our Heavenly Father is love, He is the definitive authority on the subject. In His Word, we learn some very important lessons about how love should behave. One of the most important things that He teaches us about love is the fact that love is a commitment, and this commitment is expressed, secured, and sustained through the right actions. Our Heavenly Father taught us this when He gave His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to die as a sacrifice for the sins of us all. This demonstrated how much God loves us. Romans 8:32(NLT) states, "Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else?"

Anyone can tell you that their love for you is true, but how will you really know it? The answer to this question lies within the person’s actions. James 2:26 tells us that faith without works is dead. In other words, it isn’t enough to make a declaration about what you feel or believe. Anyone can do this. I can tell someone that I care for them all day long, but my words are dead as a doorknob if I never do anything to demonstrate that I care. Our actions convey the depth of our feelings. Our actions convey what we truly believe. God tells us in His Word that He loves us, and He backed it up by sending His only begotten Son to earth to save us. Through God’s loving example, He demonstrates that His love is true love, and His love is the kind we should demonstrate for ourselves and for others.

Self-indulgence is something that people living in modern times do really well. We live in a “ME” society, and no one can argue against that successfully. Most of us are taught to put ourselves before any other person. Society values financial wealth, power, and fame more than any other attributes, and we are taught to aspire and achieve those things at any cost. God tells us something different in 1Timothy 6:6(NLT). He says, “Yet true godliness with contentment is itself great wealth.” As we can see, society and the world have a very different view of wealth than our Heavenly Father view. They do not value what He values, and they do not love what He loves. In God's eyes, living by the example of Christ and contentment with His blessings is great wealth. This is the way He sees it, and to be the men and women that He created us to be, we must see things His way as well.

God tells us in Philippians 2:3 that we’re not to be selfish, which means that the “all about me” attitude and mindset that many of us have must be kicked totally to the curb. We shouldn’t try to impress others with how much money we have or what kind of house, car, or clothes we wear. None of that matters to God. What matters to Him is that we are humble. We should never think that we’re better than anyone else, or that any person is less than another. God doesn’t have favorites, and He isn’t partial to one person over another. We must learn from His example.

I remember some years ago, I attended a gala for a non-profit organization. Their mission is to provide aid to the underserved in their local community. Along with donors and higher ups in the organization, many of the people they had helped were there that night. Some of them had wonderful success stories about how the organization’s assistance helped them get on their feet. In my opinion, this gala should have been all about them. They should have been celebrated, and to some extent they were, but I was shocked to see that as the food was being served at this gala, the top donors and employees were served first. This is not the way of Christ.

Loving ourselves isn’t all about pampering with spas and lavishness. Loving ourselves is loving God’s way. James 1:6(NLT) says, “But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.” Some of us have a divided mentality because we’re looking to the world for happiness. We’re looking to what the world offers to make us feel whole and special. God commands us to look to Him and Him alone. He is the Source of our joy and blessings, and we must never forget this.

Our behaviors sometime suggest that we think the world has the key to our happiness, but this could never be true. Jesus Christ commands us in Matthew 7:12(NLT), “Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you.” This is the truth that creates the space in our lives for God’s blessings to land. Many of us are feeling shaky and unsure, and our lives may be filled with uncertainly, but one thing is forever and always true, God’s love never fails. If we love God and put Him first in all things, we are loving ourselves the right way. If we love others with a heart that is unselfish and kind, we’re loving ourselves the right way. And if we put the welfare of others before ourselves continually, we are showing ourselves the greatest amount of love, and it will be returned to us in abundance. ■

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

“Loving Ourselves the Right Way”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.