If pride is not dealt with, it will introduce into our lives, a bolder and more arrogant emotion called pretension. It's what pride becomes when we start believing we are invincible and don't need God. Pretension is when an inflated sense of self-importance takes over our lives. It is what strongholds are made of, which can eventually lead to addictions. This is why we need to cut pride off as quickly as we can. Humble people are never pretentious. Pretension is dangerous because we begin to believe all the good things that have happened to us have been created by our own determination and hard work.
God doesn't care if I am fat. He wants me to enjoy my life. He wants me to live, love and be happy. Food makes me happy so I'm just doing what He wants me to do. That was just an excuse and at its core it is untrue. God really doesn't care about our outward appearance. When I weighed over 430 pounds God still loved me, but He was very concerned about my health. I was going downhill fast. Many I know have died of heart issues. A heart issue was the thing that caused the cardiac surgeon to stamp an expiration date on my body and that hurt really badly. He gave me five years to live if I didn't lose weight and keep it off. That's the bad news. The good news is that was 22 years ago. By changing what I ate and still eat, I extended my life by 17 years and counting.
My family won't eat healthy. This is an excuse that I understand, and yet I think it is one of the poorest excuses. When we are blaming our bad eating habits on our families, we place all the responsibility for what we've done to ourselves on them. That is not fair to them. Blaming our weight gain on our family's eating habits is just crazy. If we are the cooks, we have the control over what we serve. We can change how we feed our families. If our families won't eat healthy, it is our fault. Not theirs.
To say we have no voice or say in what happens in our lives is an excuse for not surrendering to the Holy Spirit. We do have a voice, but it means we are just living by every whim we have and not by God. Galatians 5:16 (TPT) tells us, "As you yield to the dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life." This lets us know that our voices will be dynamically powerful or marked by continuous productive activity, and change in an energetic way when we make sure we have left behind our desires and cravings which seem to lead us down the wrong paths.
Many of us have a fear of success, which keeps us stuck. We are afraid of moving forward because we might succeed and then have to continue the hard work that we think success will take. We are afraid of what success might do to us and how it will change us. I have been coaching since 2014, and in that time, literally thousands have come through my coaching groups, courses, and free programs. Many have lost weight and kept it off. Others, though, have left because they finally understood the level of commitment required to lose weight and keep it off.
What do you crave? Is it something God doesn't want you to crave? Is it more important to you than God? If you want it just because you want it, you may be living by following your desires and cravings rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. Galatians 5:16,18 (TPT) tells us, "As you yield to the dynamic life and power of the Holy Spirit, you will abandon the cravings of your self-life. When your self-life craves the things that offend the Holy Spirit you hinder him from living free within you! And the Holy Spirit's intense cravings hinder your self-life from dominating you! .... But when you yield to the life of the Spirit, you will no longer be living under the law, but soaring above it!"
Growing up, I had one primary prayer request: my mother's healing from her emotional illness. As early as I can remember, this request topped every prayer list I ever made. It was the subject of every spoken and unspoken prayer request in church and Sunday school, the thing Grandma and I prayed for each time I spent the weekend with her, and what Dad prayed for every night. With this much prayer going up on her behalf, I knew one day God might just get fed up with hearing her name and answer our prayers, so we'd all move on to something else.
For most of my life, I have struggled with identifying my purpose in God's kingdom. As such I have been a doer and an achiever, always trying to get things done for God because I wanted Him to value me. This is the same issue that Martha had with Mary. If you remember the story, Jesus basically told Martha that she needed to take a lesson from Mary and chill out. Well, that's my interpretation. I knew that but I still had this drive to achieve and be identified by what I did. I was a writer, then an editor, and finally a publisher. I thought I had arrived, but then everything went south with the newspaper industry, and who was I?
What is truth? Where can we find it? I love words. So, I went to the dictionary to find out what truth means to people. It tells me that truth is five things. It is: 1. the body of real things, events, and facts; 2. the state of being the case; 3. a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true; 4. sincerity in action, character, and utterance; and 5. a transcendent fundamental or spiritual, God, the supreme ruler of ultimate reality. The problem we have today is that the first four definitions can be skewed as to what we want to think. Notice, what we think is not on the list of what truth is.
Is God good? We say, "Yes! Of course, He's good," until something happens that we disagree with and blame God for. The other day a woman asked me on social media why did her husband die of cancer. I told her I was sorry for her loss and then simply said death entered the world through Adam and Eve, so we will all experience natural death at some point. She said she understood that but didn't understand why her husband wasn't healed because she had faith that he would be. This is a much deeper issue than could be worked out in a few words on social media. However, asking "Why God" is never the right question. Asking Him where do I go from here or what do You want me to do now are valid questions.
Follow Up
