god hacks

God Hacks for Living – Part 4

/ Jana / Leave a comment

Ready for another truth bomb? We have been doing a series that offers more than clever life hacks and conveniences. Instead, these God Hacks are life changers, if we let them. God hacks, though, they cut deep. Think bone and marrow. Soul and spirit.

As we begin, imagine yourself standing there, a bag of chips in your hand, eating one after the after. Mindlessly. Maybe instead of chips, it’s spoonfuls of ice cream, a bag of weed, or sips of a drink. Maybe you’re swiping a screen, one image after the other, memes to like, clothes to buy, or bodies to lust over. The key word here is, mindlessly.

We have all done it.  Frankly. It never scratches the real itch.

But God.

Today I want to poke that tender place called coping. Coping has a word origin meaning to cover, which lines right up with this verse from Hebrews.

For whatever God says to us is full of living power:

it is sharper than the sharpest dagger,

cutting swift and deep into our innermost thoughts and desires with all their parts,

exposing us for what we really are.

Hebrews 4:12 TLB

We want to cover what we really are, so coping seems like a really good idea at the moment. But God’s powerful word exposes what we really are. For those of you who are shamed-based, that language may seem scary. Exposing us for what we really are. Note it says, what. Not who. God’s love for us, His name and His place for us is unconditional. Our Who we are is secure. The what, however, is a different matter.

There is a good and bad kind of exposing.

Today’s psycho-pop version of coping looks more like pretending, ignoring, denying, and fantasying about an alter-reality. How do I cover up what is really going on inside? But Holy Spirit uses scripture, and any other expression God wants to use, to tell us the truth and take off our masks. He invites us into the real world of His presence. What are we actually feeling, needing, lacking?

Which leads to today’s truth bomb.

God’s Comfort: all addiction is a desperate covering of deep hurt.

Wait. Comfort? Isn’t that the same thing as coping? No. Not at all.

The word origin of comfort is strong or strengthen, from the word Fortis. Think fortify. Fortress. Fort.

Comfort equals strong.  

Coping equals cover.

The reality of coping and addiction is once is never enough. You have to keep covering. masking, hiding. The pain demands that you keep eating, masturbating, snorting, smoking, buying.

It is covering pain — not healing it.

Comfort is God’s strength for you, in you, through you to actually face the pain and heal the pain. Imagine not needing to go through all the coping antics because you no longer feel deep hurt.

What are you looking for?

In some of my hardest moments of coping, the Lord asks me this question. What are we looking for when we are grabbing — fill in the blank? When we are hurting, angry, tired, afraid, exhausted, abandoned, unloved, lonely, or neglected what do we really need?

For the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God. Everything is naked and exposed before his eyes, and he is the one to whom we are accountable.

So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe. This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for he faced all of the same testings we do, yet he did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. Hebrews 4:12-16 NLT

Fortify.

I feel compelled to add this thought. How do you comfort? 

You get still with God. You invite His presence into your mess instead of avoiding it. You let Him have all the words, emotions, and needs. Then you wait to hear His perspective, counsel, or affirmation. This is a miraculous moment when Heaven invades Earth. I want to release a testimony of the goodness of God literally invading my worst of moments like a victorious army.

He is with us. He sees every intimate detail of our lives.

Let us run to Holy Strength and be healed. The God of all comfort. 

 

God Hacks for Living – Part 3

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Oh Lawdy. Take a deep breath. We have been talking about Life Hacks and their suggested better ways to do life. Meanwhile, God, because He is so smart, has been dropping some pithy truth bombs that will actually change our life trajectory. Today’s God Hack has to do with being stuck, paralyzed, frozen, or (ouch) comfortable.

Getting unstuck means we must live a different life.

For those of us who loooove our comfort zones, this one makes us squirm. 

If I coddle my excuses and my story, which is often a very sad story, then I get to shed my personal power and expect no forward motion. I don’t have to change anything. Because, I am, after all, stuck.

If I am stuck and willing to remain so, I can talk about the problem ad nauseam, but never take the next step of correction.

If I never spend the time with God to discern the truth about the lie that binds me, I will roll around in that denial for months. Or decades.

If I know the truth but never actually take the steps to change the course, or far worse, never follow the Lord’s instructions about how to get free, I will give days, years, and seasons of my precious life to an enemy whose intent is to keep me immobile, ineffective, silenced, and unproductive.

Listen. I love to soak in the Lord, but I rarely experience time with Him without coming back to this world fired up to do my part in bringing heaven to earth. The love of God, His big picture of restoring His beautiful world drives me, and you, forward into action.

“Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in deed and in truth.” 1 John 3:18

Getting unstuck means doing whatever it takes to let go of lies, unforgiveness, stinking thinking, bad habits, sinful choices, or easy excuses. Your destiny is a stake.

Almost certainly it means receiving help from others. We may have to humble ourselves and admit we need any variety of counsel, money, creativity, or accountability. Some of us literally need a swift kick in the ass like a spiritual defibrillator to shock our hearts into beating again. All of us need a plan of action to live a life that is Unstuck.

The stuck people that Jesus unstuck in the gospels had to learn how to do life completely differently. The blind man, the lame man, the possessed woman, the leper, all of them had created life patterns around their stuck places. Now that was gone. That old identity was gone. They had to deliberately create new habits for this new unstuck life.

I speak from personal experience. I kept running in this toxic mental circle. Think hamster-wheel devised by the evil one. I would tell the Lord about this wonky feeling. The Lord told me, after I had ignored it for a month, you need to name it. I made a lame attempt and said it feels like a worth issue. (That sounded noble.) Back and forth, thinking, praying, musing, and massaging. Still no progress.

Don’t miss this. If I didn’t really know what it was…I didn’t really have to change.

But God. He told me to call a coaching friend. Not a soft, squishy friend who cares about my warm, fuzzy feelings. No, this friend told me I was full of shit. “That’s not what the problem is at all. The problem is people pleasing.”

I was so offended. Or was that exposed?

People pleasing is a sin problem. And sin ALWAYS has a remedy.

Maybe, just maybe, we would rather be people who have wounds so we can be victims. Rather than be people who have sin issues that need a Savior.

Whether we have legitimate wounds or blatant sin, we can get unstuck!

God reveals the truth. And the truth sets us free. We don’t have to live in gray, unnamed, can’t-pin-it-down spaces. This works in one of two ways. God either names so it can be healed. Or He reveals it as a demonic attack. In that case, we break the agreement and the assignment to confound us and replace it with His truth. Either way, getting unstuck is part of our operating system.

Humans are born forward. The reason we dislike being “stuck” in the first place is because something deep inside of us knows we can be and should be advancing. It is at the core of our being.  Let’s get used to unstuck. Let’s get used to different. 

More God Hacks for Living

 

God Hacks for Living – Part 2

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The ever-popular life hacks offer us new and improved ways to do daily life. However, God digs a little deeper to shape and correct us from the inside out. Lately, He has been giving me these pithy phrases. I call them God Hacks.

And unlike the life hacks, these phrases make me stand up and take notice. Remember the definition. Pithy: concise and forcefully expressive. Here’s my second truth bomb.

True confidence produces great humility.

Please tell me it’s not just me. But I get so annoyed by the blow-hard braggart who tries to sell me on his fabulous skillset. These people are like Kung Fu Panda saying “There is no charge for awesomeness or attractiveness.” Snort. People who boast often doesn’t actually have skills, or certainly not at the level they believes they have, but they attempt to cover the lack with smoke and mirrors. Can we all just agree the more a person grabs the spotlight, acts superior, and name-drops, the more insecure she is?

On the other hand, what do we Christians and other counter-prideful people do instead? 

We grovel. 

We mistakenly think that the solution to pride is to be a doormat or deny value and expertise. Ouch. Heaven forbid that we just let our work speak for itself. Our results will be a testimony to our level of mastery. Since all of us are constantly growing forward, we look to who we are becoming. Not who we were. Is this needed?

The false humility, aw-shucks posture is almost as annoying as the deluded puffer fish.

So what does God mean by this pithy ditty about authentic confidence and humility?

Let’s look at Jesus. We consider Him to be the most capable and yet the most humble.

There is a world of difference between God-confidence and Self-confidence. The goals are different. The first speaks of dependence on and honor to Someone else, Someone greater. The latter reveals a focus and reliance on self for the good of and the glory of self.

The word confidence means “with faith.” So I don’t know about you, but I want my faith to be in someone bigger and better than myself. I want to level up into Jesus. We wear the wristbands, “What would Jesus do?” and it’s a great question. But make it real. 

How would Jesus like to express His life through me for His glory?

Straight talk here. I have done things WITH Jesus that I could never, ever accomplish on my own steam. This beautiful awareness eliminates any question about who gets the credit. Besides if I did try to grab it, Jesus would look at me and say, “Babe, who are we kidding here?”

Enter Great Humility. The more we hang out with heaven and see heaven in action in our very small, little lives, the more we understand the generosity of God. Jesus said in John 17:22-23,  “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.” 

Maybe go read that whole John 17 chapter again. It is the perfect breakdown of true confidence produces great humility.

We don’t have to puff up or grovel. We do have to learn how to carry glory.

Here is the final picture God gave me regarding this revelation. In each of us, exists a divine calling and purpose, like a holy acorn. As we encounter the love and truth of God, we grow into a tree. A tree doesn’t take credit for producing fruit, it simply does what it was planted to do. It is grateful for the sun and soil and the good Gardner who makes life possible. As the tree goes through seasons of trials and storms, the roots go deeper into the earth for security and stability..

Grasp the picture. Our confidence grows up and out in God like a tree grows taller and broader. Our humility grows down and strong in God as a tree’s roots drive deeper. 

“Apart from Me you can do nothing.”

With Him, we can rock the world. 

God Hacks for Living – Part 1

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Do you get sucked into the Life Hack videos? I sure do. From cooking to planting to storage, all these slick memes and reels show me an extraordinary way to do my ordinary life. But here’s the catch. I may watch them but do I actually do them? Real talk, I hardly remember the new and improved way when I go back to my regular-rut-of-doing-it-the-same-old-way.  Still, the maxim holds true. When you know better, you do better. 

 

 

I guess this is why God has been giving me these pithy phrases.  And unlike the life hacks, these phrases sting and sear. Note the definition.

Pithy: concise and forcefully expressive.

Ah, even in this writing I understand better His intention. We are inundated with thoughts, words, and pictures. Listen, the other day I picked up my phone to look at social media for a specific purpose. In a scant one minute, my emotions ranged from disgust over a certain recipe, to outrage over the face of a child being trafficked, to sheer delight over an intricate flower photo. I was so barraged, I forgot why I even got on in the first place. Ughhh.

But when God gives you a thought, word, or picture it’s different. It’s weighty and lasting because it’s meant to go deep into your being. Not just tickle (or exhaust) your emotions for a moment.  Forcefully expressed.

Let these thoughts hit the mark.

  • Ownership: freedom from enabling and entitlement

This one is packed. Enabling is when we take on someone else’s problems instead of empowering them to handle their own. Enter the rescuer and the victim. People who enable, and people who leech off enablers (wow, what a picture) both need a big dose of personal ownership. Whether it is parents who enable their should-be-grown children, lovers who enable each other, or employers/employees who enable, we all need a wake up call to be personally responsible for ourselves, our choices, and our consequences and allow others to do the same. 

We reflect God’s heart when we honor free will in ourselves and others.

“Each one should test his own work. Then he will have reason to boast in himself alone, and not in someone else. For each one should carry his own load.”  Galatians 6:4-6

Entitlement is when we falsely believe that we are owed something, should be exempt from, or try to escape hard work and effort. Entitlement in short is “You should do the hard work for me because I am special.” We hear lots of funny jokes about millennials and what they think they need to survive. The reality however is our nations are full of people who are either family rich or family poor and they believe that someone else’s labor should support them.

This is counter Kingdom. God views work as holy. It is part of His gift to humanity that we work the garden He has given to us to steward.

When we were actually with you we gave you this principle to work on: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.” 2 Thessalonians 3:10

I could literally write a book about enabling and entitlement. But let me say to us all, get out of the way and let each person stand, or fall according to their choices.

Can you see how enabling and entitlement are the yin and yang of unhealthy relationships? The cure is ownership.

What can I own about my life and outcomes?

What can I acknowledge as direct results of MY choices or lack thereof?

What steps/directions/actions will I own to have a better life?

Jesus paid a high price for us to have personal power. Don’t waste it. Ownership is when we shoulder personal responsibility, self-govern, and acknowledge our actions, beliefs, and choices. We determine our lives without blaming or being codependent on someone else.

This is freedom.

“I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.”