Life is a gift even when it is uncomfortable or difficult, and because of the Father’s presence in it with us, we can always be growing into more abundant life. Greater life is not found outside of us, but from connecting in a greater way with the flow of God’s life through us. Increase comes when we clear the path for it to flow freely as we learn to deal with things rather than letting them deal with us. We can have faith for this process because the nature of God in us is that of an overcomer!
Day by day we can chose to be victorious. The choice is between fear and love. 1 John 4:18 says that there is no fear in love. Feelings of insignificance and insecurity reveal areas where we don’t feel safe and loved. The underlying internal issues where these feelings are rooted must be dealt with for us to experience a greater flow of God’s abundant life. Challenges we face bring these issues to light so that we can bring them to the Father. Through the process of addressing them we grow in feelings of significance and security because of the Father’s love and, as a result, experience a greater flow of heavenly life, which makes us greater vessels of God’s love to the people around us.
If we do not love the people that He has placed in our lives then we do not truly love God (1 John 4:19-21). To grow in love and increase in life we must allow the Holy Spirit to touch our internal attitudes, hurts, assumptions, motives, emotions, criticisms, judgments, thoughts, lies we have believed and whatever else may be hindering our ability to grow.
This Process is:
* uncomfortable
* requires active pursuit on our part
* includes choosing to be intentional about dealing with our “stuff”
Two Keys to this Process are:
* Self-Awareness – key to identifying our issues
* Solitude – key to understanding what is going on internally and hearing God for clarity and direction, Jesus withdrew often – Luke 5:16 & Mark 1:35
Things that Hinder this Process:
* seeking to be comfortable and avoiding work of change, emotional growth
* numbing our emotions in order to avoid “bad” ones
* over-sharing our problems with people rather than a trusted few and drawing apart to hear from God
* settling for being a “nice” Christian vs. allowing deeper internal work of the Holy Spirit in our life
* being controlled by a sense of insignificance and insecurity, or fear rather than love
What we do with our challenges determines our growth and as we grow our capacity to engage in and enjoy life increases.