beatitude #3: how are you trying to make a flourishing life happen?
The Beatitudes are all about Jesus challenging our culture’s approach to flourishing and flipping it upside down. In his third Beatitude, Jesus wants us to wrestle with a key question: how are you trying to make things happen in your life?
"The measure of a man is what he does with power." — Plato
"O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant." — William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
The Beatitudes are all about Jesus challenging our culture’s approach to flourishing and flipping it upside down. In his third Beatitude, Jesus wants us to wrestle with a key question: how are you trying to make things happen in your life?
Jesus knows that behind all of the different tips, techniques, and strategies for flourishing that people employ, there are only two ways to answer this question. Either you can follow our secular culture’s approach, by trying to make things happen through your own power, strength, and assertiveness.
Or, you can follow Jesus’ approach in his third Beatitude, which says:
Flourishing are the meek because they shall inherit the earth.
Jesus’ approach to flourishing seems absurd to us. How can the meek flourish? But Jesus gave us this third Beatitude to cause us to reflect on the question: how are you trying to make things happen?
our secular culture's approach to flourishing
The secular approach tells us that the key to flourishing is to make things happen through your power. It’s up to you to create a thriving life. And so, from a young age, our culture teaches us:
Flourishing are the powerful, strong, and aggressive, for they will make things happen.
This means that if you want to flourish, you have to become the kind of person who can make things happen for yourself. That's the only way to succeed at the secular approach to flourishing, which tells us that the best way to flourish is to build a personal kingdom big enough to satisfy all of your desires.
This approach towards flourishing, that I have to make things happen for myself, flows from three foundational assumptions in our culture. They are:
Life is a competition, where everything is up for grabs, and everyone's competing against each other for a limited amount of success, money, and status. We all compete against each other for the most desirable spouse, college degree, job, neighborhood, and position of status and respect, just to name a few.
This competition is a zero-sum game since more people want these markers of success than are available. We compete against our peers for them, believing that for us to win, someone else has to lose. Only one of us can get the guy/girl, the invite, the paycheck, or the corner office, etc.
The best way to win at this competition is by accumulating power since we need to defeat the people around us to ensure that we win and can lay claim to the scarce and desirable resources, relationships, and opportunities that we all believe we need to flourish. By accumulating and using power, you'll be able to get the date, the interview, the attention, the job, and the success you need to thrive.
While we often hear this system called a meritocracy, the idea that success flows to those who deserve it most, a more accurate term would be a "powerocracy," where success comes to those who use their talents, connections, and opportunities to make things happen for themselves.
why is power so important?
This is why our culture is always talking about power. Sure, we often use gentler-sounding words, such as leadership, influence, ambition, or type-A personality, but make no mistake, those are all power-based terms.
This "power leads to flourishing" message can be found everywhere, especially in self-help thinking, which is always urging you to “unleash the power within” to “take back control of your life” and “stand up for your rights,” all so you can “change the world!”
It also shows up on social media, where so many influencers talk non-stop about “empowering” their followers. This empowerment message follows the same assumption:
You've been minimizing your power, living a small, weak, and timid life, all to fit into the expectations of the people around you. If you want to flourish in this competitive world, you need to be empowered until you're strong, aggressive, and won't back down from anything!
We are constantly told that if you want to flourish, you need to regain your personal agency in the world and use it to make things happen for yourself. This cultural mindset makes power one of the most sought-after abilities in our culture since we believe that it's only through increasing our personal power that we can flourish.
so what is power?
Power is one of those words that everyone understands but no one is quite sure how to define. Think of power, though, as the ability to make things happen.
We all have power in varying degrees, through our natural abilities, our positions, our roles, our resources, and our personalities, just to name a few. You have power to the degree that you can shape the way that the people around you live and think. Power gives us either influence, changing how other people live, or autonomy, resisting other people’s attempts to change us.
Most of us are quite good at pointing out where other people have power, but we're often blind to our own power and influence. We often rationalize our desire for power away, calling out other people’s desire for power, but then develop self-narratives to support and rationalize all of our attempts at greater power: we don’t want power, per se, we just want things to run smoothly.
We all daydream and fantasize about someday having more power. "If I only were _______," we think, filling in the blank with being famous, wealthy, popular, in charge, successful, "Then I'd really be doing well." Power, we believe, will give us the ability we need to make things happen and ensure that we experience a flourishing life.
so how do we try to get power?
We spend our lives trying to expand our tiny kingdoms, hoping we will get more power. While few people ever wake up and say to themselves, "My main goal today is to accumulate more power," subconsciously we're always jockeying for power.
We learn at a young age to outwardly act uninterested in power, afraid we are seen as power-hungry. But behind the scenes, though, we all have a deep desire for power which shows up in every area of our lives: friend groups, workplaces, relationships, and society as a whole.
As we grow up, we observe who has power and who doesn't, causing us to embrace the people, activities, beliefs, behaviors, trends, and opportunities which expand our power, while excluding, hiding, or avoiding anyone or anything that would diminish our power.
And so we spend our lives trying to increase our kingdoms, hopeful that we can get more:
Social power: through our status, popularity, and friendships.
Financial power: through our income, possessions, and wealth.
Cultural power: through our class, neighborhood, and lifestyle.
Physical power: through our strength, health, and athletic ability.
Romantic power: through our body type, appearance, and attractiveness.
Intellectual power: through our degrees and ability to attend prestigious schools.
Countercultural power: through our willingness to reject what’s “normal.”
How does the pursuit of power affect our lives? One of the major ways is in how we use power as the lens through which we evaluate our options and chart our lives.
This quest for power subtly influences everything we do, whether we’re deciding where to go to college, whom to marry, what career to pursue, what neighborhood to live in, how to use our extra money, what clothes to wear, what to do on the weekends, and who to allow into our closest circle of friends, just to name a few.
But once we build personal kingdoms that give us power, how do we hope to turn it into flourishing?
how do we use power to try to flourish?
After we accumulate power, then we use power to get what every human being wants: control. Since flourishing in the secular approach is all about having our desires met, power gives us the ability to control the world around us and impose our will onto other people, places, and things, ensuring that our desires are prioritized and fulfilled.
We believe that:
the more power you have —> the more your desires will be met —> the more you’ll flourish
Why is it necessary to use our power to impose our will onto others? Because since we all want the same things, either tangible (job, opportunities, romantic interests, possessions), or intangible (respect, popularity, approval, comfort, a sense of being successful), we know our desires are going to come into conflict with the desires of our peers.
In our individualistic culture, where everyone is trying to accomplish their own goals, we use power to outmaneuver our peers and make things happen for ourselves, ensuring that our desires are met. We use power to make sure:
The group follows my plan.
The boss praises my idea.
This other person follows me on social media first.
My criticisms are seen as valid and create real change.
I’m chosen and accepted by this other powerful person.
My spouse listens to me first.
I’m able to exclude less powerful people when I want to.
When we accumulate power, we can use it to gain control of a situation and make sure our desires get met. We believe that when we are using our power to make things happen and win at life, we’ll be able to flourish.
what drives our desires for power?
Few people want to use power like this, to impose our will on others, but we all do. Why? Because of fear. We're afraid that if we don’t use power to ensure that our desires are met, we won't flourish, and will go through life alone, unwanted, disrespected, and unworthy of love.
We see how uncertain the world is, and develop a deep fear that we will never flourish. In our hyper-individualistic world, we’re afraid that if we don’t look out for #1 and make things happen for ourselves, then no one else will. We wonder:
What if I never “make it?”
What if I don’t live up to my family’s expectations?
What if my peers are all more successful than me?
What if I’m never able to retire?
What if no one will love me?
These fears drive us and make us radically insecure. Power, then, becomes the way we try to solve these insecurities. The secular approach to flourishing promises that:
“If you accumulate power and use it to impose our will and desires on others, you can create a life of certainty, success, and flourishing through your own efforts.
Deep down, we use power to try to force the world to revolve around us, thinking that if we can just win all of the daily power struggles we’re engaged in, whether it’s at our work, in our marriage, in our friendships, or in society at large, then we’ll be guaranteed a good life.
why doesn't it work?
But the secular approach of trying to flourish by using power to make things happen doesn’t work for two major reasons:
The first reason is because our desires are corrupted. Because of the sinfulness of our hearts, our desires are corrupt and lead us to all kinds of unhealthy and destructive behaviors. We tell ourselves that we are using our power just to help us flourish, but because our desires are corrupted, we go too far, and use power in ways that harm the people and places around us. We don’t see this, though, because we rationalize it away, since we’re getting what we want.
People often think that power corrupts our desires, but in actuality, as the great biographer Robert Caro writes: power doesn’t corrupt a person, but rather it reveals the corruption that’s already there.
The second reason is because no amount of power can give us real security. Since every human being has limited power, no amount of power can ever be enough to silence our fears and solve our insecurities. This means that when we try to fix our insecurities through gaining personal power, we’ll always need more and more power to make us feel secure, leading us to all kinds of obsessive things that cause us to harm ourselves and others. As Henri Nouwen wrote:
Power always lusts after greater power precisely because it is an illusion. Despite our experience that power does not give us the sense of security we desire, but instead reveals our own weaknesses and limitations, we continue to make ourselves believe that more power will eventually fulfill our needs.
Collectively, these two problems with power cause all kinds of destructive behavior. When we abuse power we:
Become controlling: we try to use power to control others, infringing on their lives and forcing them to submit to us, which causes all kinds of brokenness and resentment.
Become angry: we become angry and bitter anytime someone "disobeys" our will and doesn't do what we want. We blow up and call them disloyal and selfish.
Become coercive: we use force to coerce others to conform to our desires. We threaten to damage or sabotage their lives so that they have to obey us.
Become oppressive: we use our power to oppress others, diminishing their lives in unfair, abusive and cruel ways. We exclude them all so that we can succeed.
Become tribal: we use power to only help our tribe, seeing everyone else as a threat against our kingdom, which causes us to hoard our power and refuse to cooperate or help others.
These behaviors flow out of society's belief that the best way to flourish is by accumulating power and using it to get our way. As we try to gain more and more power for our personal kingdoms, we crash into the personal kingdoms of our spouse, friends, coworkers, and peers, creating catastrophic results for everyone involved.
The abuse of power affects all of us, whether we have a lot of power or just a little, and harms individuals, families, communities, and countries, causing so much conflict, pain, cruelty, and suffering.
so what's the root problem?
We should be clear, though, the root problem with the secular approach to flourishing isn’t with power, but rather with how we use power. After all, God used his power for good, to create the universe. He also used his power to create Adam and Eve in his image, and then gave human beings the gift of power in order to create, develop, and rule over the world.
He told them:
Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over...every living thing that moves on the earth.
God saw power as good, healthy, and necessary for humanity to reach our potential, so he gave it to Adam and Eve as a gift, so that humans might use it for God’s glory by bringing all kinds of good things out of his creation. Power was a good thing, something needed for God’s creation to flourish and reach its potential.
The root problem though, is that Adam and Eve didn’t use their power to bring glory to God, but rather to try to take the place of God! When Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he told Eve that if she ate the forbidden fruit, “Your eyes will be opened and you will be like God.” God had given them power, but they wanted more!
But when Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating the fruit, they didn’t become God, but rather rejected God and kicked off a cosmic war against God. Because of the Fall:
We’re all separated from God, resulting in a radical insecurity in our hearts. We were not made to exist apart from a relationship with God, so we can’t deal with the uncertainty and lack of control that floods our lives.
But instead of returning to God, we hate God and use the power that God gave us as a gift not to honor him, but rather to try to take his place. We try to act like God in order to regain a sense of control over our lives by trying to make the world revolve around us.
No matter how much we try to use power to become like God, we’re not God; we're not good, kind, fair, just, and loving. And so when we try to enforce our plans on the world around us, it always causes major problems. We use our power selfishly which oppresses and harms others.
This is why the obsession with power in the secular approach to flourishing doesn’t work. The idea that you can use your power to make things happen and create a flourishing life sounds good at first, in practice, it doesn't create flourishing, but rather wreaks havoc in every area of our lives.
Part 2: Jesus' approach to flourishing
When Jesus came to earth, he entered a culture much like ours, which was built on personal power and the ability to impose your will on other people. But in this Beatitude, Jesus said that it's not the powerful, strong, and aggressive who flourish, but rather taught that:
Flourishing are the meek, because they shall inherit the earth.
This Beatitude puzzles everyone who has ever heard it: how can the meek flourish? When we hear Jesus calling us to be meek, most people assume that he wants them to be weak, submissive people who feel inadequate about everything and let everyone else walk all over them. Is that what Jesus wants us to be?
what does Jesus mean by the word meek?
But this isn't what Jesus means by meekness at all. When Jesus uses the word meek, he doesn't mean weak, but rather surrendered. He used the Greek word praeis, which means a tamed wild animal. A meek person is like a wild stallion who has been broken in and can be ridden. The stallion retains his strength, but now has surrendered it to the command of his rider.
Meekness is not about acting weak, but rather surrendering our power, strength, and ambition to God, in order to use these gifts according to his will and not ours. The meek person has stopped trying to flourish by using their power to impose their agenda onto others, but flourishes because they have surrendered themselves to God and are letting him work on their behalf.
To be meek, as one author put it, "Is not to be shorn of ambition, but to have one's ambition transformed from self-serving purposes to that of serving God." Eugene Peterson said that meekness transforms our power from reckless self-serving energy into sanctified energy; energy that it sets apart to be used according to God’s will.
Human power, like every kind of energy, whether it’s dynamite, electricity, or nuclear fission, must be controlled in order to be used both safely and for good. When Jesus teaches that you have to be meek in order to flourish, he’s calling you to surrender your power to God, so that it can be put to use, not to build your own kingdom, but rather to serve God’s kingdom.
how do you become meek?
Becoming meek is a simple process, but like many simple things, it’s extremely hard. Surrendering our power to be used by God doesn't come naturally, and only happens as the Holy Spirit opens our eyes to how we are using our power to flourish outside of God. But in order to become meek, you must:
Admit that you're not and can't be God: you're not the supreme being at the center of the universe who is all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful. This sounds obvious but until God works in our hearts we can't live this way.
Accept that you do have power: some people go too far, though, and end up absolving themselves of all power and responsibility. That is apathy, not meekness. A meek person seeks to understand where they have power and works to cultivate more of it, realizing that power is a gift from God.
Submit yourself to God's revealed will: When you realize you have power, you search God's revealed will (aka the Bible) and submit your power to his purposes. You commit your ways to God, obeying his will and not your own.
You entrust the outcome to God: when you’re totally surrendered to God, you trust him with the outcome and results of your life. Even when powerful and aggressive seem to be much more successful than you right now, the meek person rests in God’s sovereignty and doesn’t become anxious or angry, even when you experience setbacks and hardships.
We see examples of this process all throughout the Bible, as men and women encountered God, surrendered their lives to him, and lived incredible lives of consecrated power for God's kingdom. We see meekness in the lives of:
Moses: who surrendered to God's will for his life, and was empowered to challenge the most powerful leader of the world to let God's people go, before leading them to the Promised Land.
Gideon: who obeyed when God called him to lead the Israelite army against Midian, even when God reduced his fighting force from 32,000 soldiers to 300. God used this small army to route the Midians and run them off.
Esther: she surrendered her safety to God's plan for her life, first becoming queen and then risking her life to use her power to expose a planned genocide of the Jews before the king.
The Early Church: the early church obeyed Jesus’ command to wait patiently in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. This power descended on them on the day of Pentecost, resulting in 3,000 conversions.
Peter and John: these two disciples boldly preached the gospel in the temple courtyard, even after they were arrested and told to stop. The two men were so surrendered to God, that they told the Jewish leaders that it didn’t matter how much they threatened them, they were never going to stop preaching.
All of these people displayed incredible meekness, but they weren’t weak. They recognized their limitations, but were willing to surrender their lives to God and trusted him to work on their behalf. And as God worked on their behalf, he used their little efforts to make an exponential impact on the world.
so why do the meek flourish?
So why do those who surrender to God and entrust themselves to him flourish? Surrendering our power to an invisible God seems crazy to our culture. How are you ever going to get anything done? But that’s the incredible part of this Beatitude: you don’t have to make things happen, because God has already made it happen!
The key to understanding why the meek flourish is found in the second part of the Beatitude, where Jesus says, “Because they shall inherit the earth.” Inherit. That’s the crucial word. Why? Because it contradicts everything that the secular approach to flourishing believes. Our culture teaches that if you want to flourish, you’ve got to get out there and take over, using your personal power to build your kingdom.
But an inheritance is the exact opposite of that. It is a gift that you receive, not on the basis of what you’ve done, but rather because of a relationship that you have. You can’t do anything to earn an inheritance, it is always based on what someone else has done.
The meek flourish because they receive God’s inheritance, not because of what they've done, but rather because of what Jesus Christ has done. Jesus came to earth, and through his resurrection power, established the eternal kingdom of God, which will culminate at his second coming, when he ushers in God's eternal place of flourishing: the new heavens and the earth.
The meek ultimately flourish not because they create their own kingdom, but rather because they are adopted into God's family through the work of Jesus Christ and receive the inheritance that he deserves. Through Christ we become God's heirs and inherit God's kingdom.
Paul describes how this happens in Galatians 4:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son...so that we might receive adoption as sons. So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
When you surrender to God and entrust yourself to Jesus Christ, you’re no longer an orphan alone in the universe, trying to fight off others to ensure your survival and expand your tiny kingdom, but rather a son or daughter of the King of the universe.
This is why the meek flourish, not because they take over the earth through their own strength, but rather because through Christ they are adopted into God's family and receive his inheritance: eternal life within the new heavens and the new earth.
what does this flourishing look like?
But the flourishing that God promises to the meek isn't just a future flourishing, it's a present flourishing as well. As the meek surrender to God and find their security in God's resurrection power and eternal inheritance, they promote flourishing all around them. Why? Because:
Since a meek person no longer has to make things happen through their own puny human power, but rather are connected to the power and resources of God, who set the universe on its foundation and owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
Since they aren't obsessed over the size of their own kingdoms, they can use their gifts, resources, and time not to dominate others, but rather to serve God's kingdom and work for the greater good.
Since they don't feel the pressure to make things happen for themselves, they don't trample over the rights, feelings, and lives of everyone around them. They are marked by a gentleness, where strength is harnessed by love.
Since they don't have to impose their will on others to make sure they flourish, they help to create communities based around cooperation, not conflict, and working together, which leads to growing, vibrant communities that benefit everyone.
Since they have surrendered to God's will and are trusting him to provide, they don't live cutthroat lives of hyper-competition, and don't need to hoard resources or dominate or oppress their peers.
Since they no longer have to use their own kingdom to create security and safety, they can rest securely in God and his provision for them, driving out all fear.
As the meek surrender their lives to God and use their power in submission to his will, people, communities, and cultures flourish. It's paradoxical to our secular thinking, but God promises that it's the only way we'll ever truly flourish.
so where do we get the ability to surrender our lives to God?
So where do we get the ability to become meek? Surrendering our lives to God sounds good in theory, but it isn't easy in real life. It goes against what feels safe, secure, and natural to us. The key, though, is not to try to force yourself to become meek, but rather to let Jesus' example melt your heart.
When Jesus was out in the desert at the beginning of his public ministry, Satan came to him with the same temptation that he gave to Adam and Eve: "If you reject God and obey me, then I will give you more power and glory than you could ever imagine."
But unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus didn't want his own power, he only wanted to do God's will. So he refused to elevate his will about God's. Jesus lived his entire earthly life in total surrender to God’s will, not pushing his agenda onto God, but seeking to obey God in everything that he did.
By doing that, he did what Adam and Eve were supposed to, but didn't. While in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve said “Not thy will be done, but MINE,” in the Garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus waited to be arrested, tortured, and bear the punishment for our sin, he said the exact opposite: “Not my will be done, but THINE.”
We’re all afraid to surrender our lives to God because we don’t think we can trust him. But Jesus shows us we can. Jesus offered his life up to God’s will, and by surrendering his power to God, he was raised from the dead and now has ultimate power: resurrection power over death.
When we see how Jesus' total surrender was translated by God into eternal glory and power, we can trust that God will do the same for us. A flourishing life isn't found in creating your own kingdom through your own power, but rather in surrendering your life to God and resting in the resurrection power of his kingdom.
beatitude #2: how are you trying to be happy?
As we think about how to flourish, one of the most important topics in our culture is happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, but have you ever thought about how you’re trying to be happy?
“I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.” — C.S. Lewis
As we think about how to flourish, one of the most important topics in our culture is happiness. Everybody wants to be happy, but have you ever thought about how you’re trying to be happy?
It’s a question that most of us never consciously ask, but yet it drives so much of our lives, as we answer it, not through words and thoughts, but rather through our choices.
In his second Beatitude, Jesus confronts the happiness-obsession of the secular culture and gives a very different view on what it means to flourish. He teaches:
Flourishing are those who mourn because they shall be comforted.
This teaching seems absurd to us and a great way to ensure that you’ll never flourish! After all, how can you flourish when you’re mourning? But Jesus gives you this Beatitude to force you to reflect on this foundational question: how are you trying to be happy?
Part 1: our culture's approach to flourishing
When it comes to flourishing, our secular culture believes that if you want to flourish, you need to be happy. Our culture’s version of this Beatitude would read:
Flourishing are the happy because they will never need to be comforted.
That’s the path to flourishing that we all naturally believe. It’s the message that we’re told everywhere we look in advertising, social media, and our cultural norms.
While there are lots of opinions about how to be happy, at its core, our secular culture teaches us that happiness primarily comes through experiencing pleasure. If you can fill your life with pleasure, then you can satisfy your desires and ensure that you will flourish.
And so we orient our lives around pleasure, comfort, and fun, trying to minimize pain and maximize whatever feels good. The theologian D.A. Carson summarizes our culture’s mindset this way: Our world likes to laugh, be happy. The goal of life becomes a good time, and the immediate goal is the next high.
This mindset causes us to pursue pleasure through:
Consumption: through consuming things like food, shopping, new clothes, Amazon deliveries, alcohol, coffee, new trends, new tech devices, redecorating our homes, marijuana, pornography, and drugs.
Experiences: through experiencing things like travel, concerts, adventure, comfort, falling in love, upscale restaurants, vacations, amusement parks, movie theaters, and on-demand convenience.
Achievement: through the thrill of achievement in things like work, money, social media, dating, exercise, status, and gaining social power.
This pursuit of pleasure dominates our lives. We keep a running list of the cities we want to visit, restaurants we want to try, and clothes we want to buy, trying to figure out how to fit as much pleasure into our lives as possible, given our combination of salary, interests, and vacation days. If we plan well and saturate our lives with pleasure, we assume we’ll be happy and will flourish.
so how do you create a life of happiness?
But as we seek this life of pleasure, we quickly find out that it's not cheap! That’s why we need to build a big kingdom of personal success in the secular approach to flourishing; how else are you going to have the money, status, and resources to get enough pleasure to satisfy your desires and ensure that you flourish?
This causes us to subconsciously follow this flourishing formula:
Build a big kingdom —> Use resources to get pleasure / avoid pain —> Flourish!
This is the message of Arthur Brooks, who in his monthly column in The Atlantic on happiness, wrote, “Don’t wish for happiness. Work for it.” And so we work hard to build a big kingdom, hopeful that we'll be able to afford an enjoyable, comfortable, and fun-filled life.
Sure, there are times when we will do difficult things, like work long hours, eat healthily, or save for retirement, but we only do these things because we believe they’ll help us experience even more pleasure in the future. We’re willing to delay our gratification, but hate the idea of denying our gratification.
does pleasure create flourishing?
But does trying to create happiness by experiencing pleasure so that we can flourish actually work? At first glance, most people would say “Of course, look at how happy everyone is! Look at how much fun people are having on social media!”
But, as we all know, social media isn’t real life. We all use our phones to edit our lives, doing everything we can to appear like we are happy and flourishing. But once you get behind the facade and start to hear how people are actually doing, we all have very different lives than the ones we portray on social media.
Adam Grant, the well-known writer and organizational psychologist, recently wrote an article about how much of our culture struggles with languishing, which he defines as:
A sense of stagnation and emptiness…as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield.
So many of us, he observes, struggle with this joyless and aimless feeling, and he believes that it might be the most dominant emotion of our culture today. We’re stuck in the middle, he says, between depression and flourishing, not experiencing either.
I’ve met so many people in New York City like that. When you first meet them you assume their life must be going well, since they’re always so happy and excited on social media. But then, as you get to know them and they let down their facade, you realize that they aren’t happy, but rather are tired, anxious, worried, afraid, and burnt out, while also struggling with debt, hangovers, addictions, emptiness, disconnectedness, hopelessness, and despair.
But don’t we all struggle with these things? None of us want to admit it, at least not publicly, but yet a surprising number of us languish through life, even though we live in the richest culture in the history of the world, with more opportunities for pleasure, fun, and comfort than ever before. We’re not flourishing, even though we’ve done such an incredible job as a culture experiencing pleasure.
But this shouldn’t surprise us, because it’s the same conclusion Solomon came to in the book of Ecclesiastes. In the second chapter, he describes his search for ways to gratify his flesh with laughter, wine, and pleasure, building huge houses, planting vineyards and orchards, hiring singers and entertainers, and accumulating more and more wealth. He became the most successful and famous person of his era, creating a life that was a non-stop party. But even after all these things, he felt empty:
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.
That’s crazy, isn’t it! We all approach life like Solomon, thinking that if we could afford to saturate our lives with pleasure, then we’d be satisfied, happy, and flourishing. So we spend our lives trying to build a bigger and bigger kingdom so that we can afford more pleasure. But then we’re shocked when like Solomon it doesn’t satisfy us, and only makes us feel more empty like we were chasing after the wind.
so why aren’t people flourishing?
But no matter how much time and money you spend pursuing and experiencing pleasure, the secular approach to flourishing will never create lasting flourishing. Why? Because as we try to pursue pleasure in order for us to feel happy, it causes us to:
Become addicted to pleasure: when we try to flourish through pleasure, we soon learn that pleasure never satisfies our desires, it only stimulates our desire for more. This causes us to chase pleasure past healthy boundaries and limits until we’re imprisoned by our desires and addicted to pleasure, ultimately damaging our bodies, bank accounts, and relationships.
Live only for ourselves: when we try to flourish through pleasure, we begin to think that our pleasure and happiness is the only thing that matters. So we become self-indulgent, only seeking our fulfillment and ignoring the common good. Meanwhile, our family, friends, community, and country suffer.
Live disconnected lives: we use pleasure to distract and disconnect from real life, ignoring the hurt, pain, and loss around us. Rather than address the brokenness of our lives, organizations, and communities, we avoid anything that makes us uncomfortable, causing us to shrink away from the real world to live shallow, superficial lives.
Struggle with suffering: the secular pursuit of pleasure appears to work when we’re young, healthy, and have easy circumstances, but it gives us no ability to handle the pain, sickness, and death that touches every human life. If your ability to be happy is based on how you feel, then when you encounter difficult circumstances your “flourishing” will vanish, leaving you feeling empty and without meaning.
Lose hope: while we may be able to use pleasure to deny, distract, and numb ourselves from the brokenness of our lives and the world for a while, eventually we’ll have to face the facts of reality. Pleasure will always fade, leaving us disappointed, discouraged, and unable to deal with the actual circumstances of our lives and world.
No matter how much pleasure we experience, the temporary thrill always passes, leaving us isolated and alone, feeling emptier than when we began. So many young people end up like Edna St. Vincent Millay, the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry, who, after living a wild and pleasure-seeking life, wrote: "I have been ecstatic, but I have not been happy."
So why doesn't the secular approach to flourishing work?
So why doesn't the secular approach to flourishing work? It’s important to note like we mentioned in the second essay, that the problem isn’t with pleasure itself, but rather with how we try to use pleasure. God, after all, created pleasure as a good thing for us to experience and enjoy.
The problem comes, though, when because of sin, we take a created thing from God and try to make it into an ultimate thing. We take pleasure and no longer see it as a gift from God, but rather make it into a god. And so we pursue pleasure, hoping that it will give us a sense of transcendence, meaning, and satisfaction.
Arthur Simon described the difference this way:
Pleasure valued as a gift from God contains elements of joy. Pleasure detached from God and idolized, however, invests itself in sorrow. It seems to promise what will fill our lives with satisfaction, then disappoints us because it cannot do so. It gives us no transcendent meaning and becomes another god that fails.
When we make pleasure our god, we act just like Adam and Eve, who thought that obeying their own desires, and not God’s, was the path to flourishing. So when they saw that the forbidden fruit was pleasing to the eye they ate it, and in doing so, rejected God, choosing instead to worship the god of pleasure and try to flourish by obeying it.
There was just one problem: disobeying God and following their own desires for pleasure didn’t create a flourishing life, rather it destroyed the perfect life they had with God. Now, because of their sin, Adam and Eve had to deal with:
Death: they introduced sin into the world, which corrupted their hearts and created disordered desires within them, resulting in their eventual death.
Loss: they were thrown out of their perfect home in paradise and forced to scratch out an existence in a broken and cursed world.
Alienation: they didn’t just lose their lives and their home, they lost their relationship with God. Now they were alone and disconnected from God.
In our pursuit of flourishing, we’re just like Adam and Eve. We don’t believe that we can trust God to understand human flourishing, so we reject him as God in order to obey our desires and worship our god of pleasure.
And so we now bear the consequences of sin, too, leaving us with a deep sense of loss and incompleteness, both for the perfect world of Eden and the relationship we experienced with God. But we won’t admit this, so we use pleasure to:
Deny and distract ourselves from the reality of our brokenness and death.
Create our own version of paradise without God’s help.
Mask over our emptiness by using pleasure to numb and cope with our pain.
But yet it never works. The experiences of this world can never fill the God-shaped hole in our lives and give us the transcendence, satisfaction, and sense of meaning that we’re all looking for. Like Jeremiah says: we have forsaken God, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for ourselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.
We’ve tried to replace our relationship with God with pleasure, but it isn’t working. No matter how much pleasure we experience, it can’t create flourishing, because it can’t solve the problem of our sin and fill the loss of our relationship with God.
Part 2: Jesus approach to human flourishing
This culture is the one that Jesus confronts in his second Beatitude. He’s challenging our cultural obsession with pleasure and happiness, he shocks our sensibilities by telling us that if you want to flourish, you have to mourn.
Few teachings in the Bible are less popular than this one. Most people assume that Jesus is teaching that you need to be sad and gloomy all the time, like some modern-day Eeyore. They don’t see any way that mourning could ever lead to a flourishing life, so they reject Jesus’ teaching and get on with their pursuit of pleasure.
so what does Jesus mean by mourning?
But when Jesus teaches that it’s the mourners who will flourish, he isn’t saying that we have to always be crying and downcast, he’s telling us that we need to spiritually mourn over our sin. We have to mourn that we are sinners, expressing a deep grief, sadness, and sorrow that we have rejected God and are trying to flourish without him.
But mourning is more than feeling sorrow and grief, it’s being moved to repentance. As the theologian Glen Stassen puts it, a mourner is someone who is:
Deeply saddened to the point of action. When Jesus calls for mourning, he means the mourning of repentance that is sincere enough to cause us to change our way of living.”
Mourning is not just admitting that sin exists in our lives, it’s repenting over our sin before God. Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones described mourning this way:
To mourn is something that follows of necessity from being poor in spirit. It is quite inevitable. As I confront God and His holiness, and contemplate the life that I am meant to live, I see myself, my utter helplessness and hopelessness. I discover my quality of spirit and immediately that makes me mourn.
This is key. True spiritual mourning understands our sin before God and mourns over it. Jesus isn’t talking about all the different forms of counterfeit mourning, where we are sad and frustrated over the problems of the world, but never see them as sin we need to repent of. Counterfeit mourning can appear as:
Self-pity: we’re sad that we have to feel the effects of sin in the world.
Regret: we’re embarrassed and ashamed that our sin was revealed.
Anger: we’re angry and upset that our lives aren’t going according to our plan.
Self-righteousness: we’re mad at all of the problems caused by other people.
When we “mourn” in these ways, we are sorry for the effects of sin, but not for our sin itself. In his book on the Sermon on the Mount, Clarence Jordan describes the difference between counterfeit mourning and spiritual mourning:
We must be really grieved that things are as they are. Those people are not real mourners who say, 'Sure the world's in a mess, and I guess maybe I'm a bit guilty like everybody else, but what can I do about it?'
What they're really saying is that they are not concerned enough about themselves or the world to look for anything to do. No great burden hangs on their hearts. They aren't grieved. They don't mourn.
Jesus isn’t looking for people who will admit that things are bad somewhere, or who but rather that will acknowledge that their real problem is sin and will repent over it before God.
so what does it look like to mourn?
If you want to flourish, you have to reject the casual indifference of our pleasure-seeking culture and mourn over our individual and collective sin against God. You need to mourn over:
Your personal sin: We are to repent of all the ways we constantly disobey God and ignore his commands in our thoughts, words and actions. We are to express sorrow and remorse for how we’ve lived and for all the ways we’ve rejected, offended, and grieved God. We are to be like David, who in Psalm 51 said:
For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.The Church’s sin: We are not only to mourn over our own sin, but also the sin of the Church. We are to mourn over the state of the Church, that we are so full of corruption and disobedience and lukewarm faith, as well as our indifference to God’s kingdom. We are to be like Nehemiah, who when he heard about the sins of God’s people sat down and wept:
I confess the sins we Israelites, including myself and my father's family, have committed against you. We have acted very wickedly toward you. We have not obeyed the commands, decrees, and laws you gave your servant Moses.
The world’s sin: We are also to mourn that we live in a fallen world that has rebelled against God and is doomed to destruction. We are to mourn the violence and suffering and sin that we read about every time we look at our phones. And on top of this, we are to mourn the lostness of humanity and their rejection of God. We are to be like Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem, and Paul, who in Philippians 3:18 shares how he was driven to tears by the spiritual condition of the people around him:
For, as I have often told you before and now tell you again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.
We can only mourn like this as the Holy Spirit works in our hearts, he convicts us of our sin and leads us into repentance. Because of the deceitfulness of sin, none of us naturally mourn over our sin. We don’t mourn over sins destructiveness and how it offends God, or how it destroys our world and ruins lives.
But mourning isn’t some negative, toxic event like our culture thinks, but rather an opportunity to lay aside our self-delusion and admit to reality. Eugene Peterson said that when we mourn, we are refusing to pretend that things are just fine, and instead we confess that we're in trouble and need help.
but why do we have to mourn in order to flourish?
This leaves us with one big question, though: why do those who mourn over their sins flourish? Jesus gives us the answer in the second half of the Beatitude: mourners will flourish because they shall receive God’s comfort.
Mourners flourish because as they repent of their sins and admit their need for God, he comforts them. Jesus is quoting here from Isaiah 61, where Isaiah prophesies about the coming Messiah:
The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me…to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion.
Jesus came to earth, not to teach us how to flourish on our own, but rather to restore our relationship with God so that we could experience his comfort. The Apostle Paul shares in Colossians 1 how Jesus did this:
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.
When we mourn over our sins and trust in Jesus’ atoning work on the cross, our sins are put as far apart as east from west and we are reconciled to God. Our alienation from God is turned to intimacy, and we receive God’s comfort through:
The forgiveness of our sins: we are forgiven of our sins through Christ’s blood and are set free from our burden of shame and guilt. He assures us that he has put away our sins forever and that we can never lose his love.
A restored relationship with God: God invites us into his presence and lavishes his love and attention on us. He fills our sense of loss and emptiness, so we can experience the wholeness and satisfaction in him that we all yearn for.
The indwelling of the Holy Spirit: we are given the Holy Spirit to comfort us when we mourn. He understands our hurt and pain and suffering, and ministers and strengthens us as we live in the midst of a broken world.
The hope of a New Heavens and New Earth: we are comforted by the hope of a future New Heavens and New Earth, where Jesus will make all things new, erasing sin forever and ushering in an eternal paradise.
Mourning is not the reason we flourish, but it is the means to our flourishing, because it is how we participate in a renewed relationship with our Heavenly Father. In the midst of the brokenness, difficulties, and sufferings of this world, God comforts us and we thrive.
why does God’s comfort cause us to flourish?
So why does God’s comfort cause us to flourish? We flourish when we mourn because as God comforts us, we experience a deep and unshakeable joy. When we’re connected to God and live in his presence, we are filled with a supernatural joy that’s greater than any earthly pleasure could ever be.
David writes about this joy in Psalm 16, telling God that:
You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.
When we receive the comfort of God’s presence, we can finally experience the true joy and happiness that we’ve been trying to get through the pursuit of pleasure. We can now live in harmony with God, filling our hearts with the love, acceptance, and forgiveness we need to thrive in this life.
This God-based joy is so different from the pleasure of our world. It isn’t based on temporary feelings or fragile circumstances, but rather on the eternal love we experience through God’s comfort and the life-giving hope we have in God’s coming kingdom.
When we are grounded in joy, we flourish, and create flourishing, because we can:
Enjoy pleasure as a gift from God without becoming addicted to it.
Engage in the uncomfortable work of confronting brokenness and seeking change in our broken lives, community, and world.
Find hope in the future redemption by God, even when you and the people you love experience hard things now.
When we are filled with the joy through God, we’ll be able to flourish on both good days and bad, because our sins are forgiven, our future is secure, and God promises to walk with us every step of the way, even through the valley of the shadow of death.
where do we get the power to follow this beatitude?
So how do we get the spiritual power to flourish as we mourn and receive God’s comfort? It comes through the cross, where Jesus, who had nothing to mourn over, endured God’s total rejection so that we might receive God’s ultimate acceptance.
We can be comforted when we mourn, because Jesus, at his moment of greatest sorrow, received the rejection that we deserve. As Isaiah says:
Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
When we mourn over our sins and receive God’s comfort, he welcomes us into the flourishing life of his kingdom, turning our mourning into dancing and loosening our sackcloth to clothe us with gladness.
NEXT POST: Beatitude #3: How are you trying to make a flourishing life happen?
There’s a great four part BBC documentary entitled The Century of the Self that demonstrates how corporations and governments used psychological understand to create advertising that would inflame our desires and get us to purchase more stuff. I found it fascinating! Here’s the first episode if you’re interested.
Titus 3:3 At one time we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another.
Arthur Simon wrote this in a book entitled, How Much Is Enough?: Hungering for God in an Affluent Culture. It’s a great book with lots of thought-provoking ideas.
“Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
John 14:26 “But the Helper (or Comforter), the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”
I can’t allude to this verse without sharing this song…enjoy! :)
beatitude 1: how do you see yourself?
The beginning of every journey is the most important part. Why? Because your first steps set the direction. And if you start out going the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how far you go, you’ll never get any closer to your goal.
"What’s wrong with the world? I am.” — G.K. Chesterton
The beginning of every journey is the most important part. Why? Because your first steps set the direction. And if you start out going the wrong direction, it doesn’t matter how far you go, you’ll never get any closer to your goal.
That’s why the way Jesus begins the Beatitudes, his plan for human flourishing, is so important. In this first Beatitude, Jesus points us in the direction that we need to go to flourish, by challenging the assumptions of the secular approach to flourishing.
Jesus begins his teaching on human flourishing with a short and strange phrase:
Flourishing are the poor in spirit because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus wastes no time challenging the assumptions of the secular approach to flourishing by telling us: if you want to flourish, you have to see yourself as poor in spirit.
When we hear this first Beatitude it’s hard not to wonder: what does being poor in spirit have to do with human flourishing? But Jesus chose his words carefully, and in this Beatitude, he’s forcing us to reflect on a simple, yet searching, question: how do you see yourself?
part 1: how do we naturally see ourselves?
From a young age, our culture tells the exact opposite of Jesus: if you want to flourish, you need to see yourself as proud in spirit. Why is seeing yourself as proud in spirit so important? Because it’s only the proud in spirit who have enough self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-belief to excel at the secular approach to flourishing.
Our culture does everything it can to make us proud in spirit, thinking that this is the way to ensure that we’ll all flourish. We’re constantly told to believe in ourselves, quit listening to our doubts, and as Henry Thoreau put it, “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!”
And so, our culture tells us that if you want to flourish, you need to be:
Self-confident: you need to believe that you are special.
Self-reliant: you need to believe you know best.
Self-determined: you need to believe that you can do whatever it takes.
Self-sufficient: you need to believe that you have everything you need.
Self-promoting: you need to be your own advocate of how awesome you are.
It’s these people, according to our culture, who are the ones who succeed in life: they make the most money, marry the most attractive people, gain the most status, and develop the power to build large personal kingdoms and live life on their terms.
A recent Apple commercial displayed our culture’s mindset perfectly. The ad, entitled “Greatness,” shows picture after picture of famous men and women, while a narrator describes the traits these people had that made them so successful:
There's a certain kind of person who doesn't take no for an answer. They don't walk in quietly. They parade in. Trailblazing. Eyebrow raising. Status quo breaking. Grazing greatness. Braving hatred. And taking up space. They'd rather defy the rules and amaze. There's a certain kind of person, who doesn't wait for greatness. They make it.
This is our culture’s constant message to us. It’s everywhere you look, whether you’re scrolling through Instagram, listening to a podcast, or reading a popular book, like Jen Sincero’s recent best-seller: You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. This book reads like a proud in spirit manual, encouraging the reader to believe that:
You are the only you there is and ever will be. Do not deny the world its only chance to bask in your brilliance.
The Universe is totally freaking out about how awesome you are.
You need to go from wanting to change your life to deciding to change your life.
This is the proud in spirit message to flourish in a nutshell: if you ever want to flourish, you need to believe in yourself and get to work!
the core beliefs of being proud in spirit
So why is it so important in our culture that you see yourself as proud in spirit? Because of the two core assumptions that form the foundation of the secular approach to flourishing:
You are capable of solving all of your problems on your own: Our culture believes that human beings are capable of all of our problems. That’s why you need to be proud in spirit: you have to believe that you are capable of solving your problems, fixing your life, and flourishing through your own efforts.
Our culture believes that it is on an inevitable march towards progress, and with enough time, money, science, and education, we’re told that we will eventually be able to solve every problem human beings face, including death, and create a flourishing society for all.
Your biggest problem is a lack of self-esteem: since human beings can solve anything they put their mind to, the second assumption states that if you’re not flourishing, then your biggest problem is low self-esteem: you’ve given up, become discouraged, and lost the belief that you are capable of building a big enough kingdom to satisfy all of your desires.
This is why our culture is so obsessed with positive thinking, daily affirmations, and empowering and inspirational content. Our culture tells us that if we could just convince everyone to love themselves and believe in their ability to solve all of their problems, then we could create a world where everyone flourishes. You have to believe, like the poet William Ernest Henley wrote, that “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”
These two assumptions create the utopian optimism in humanity that forms the foundation of public dialogue in our culture. We hear these assumptions from:
Corporations, who tell us that if we work together, believe in the power of human ingenuity, and buy the right products, that there’s no problem humanity can’t solve.
Educational Institutions, who tell us that this coming generation of young people will finally figure out how to solve the world’s problems and create the utopia we’re all looking for.
Politicians, who promise that if we elect them and enact their political platforms, they will lead us into a future age of unprecedented prosperity and flourishing.
Every year we’re told that we’re sitting on the cusp of flourishing and that if we just keep working, we’ll get there soon. But yet, year after year, generation after generation, we’re still beset by the stubborn problems of human existence.
so why aren’t we flourishing?
So what’s going on then? Despite huge increases in wealth, technology, and life expectancy over previous generations, our proud in spirit culture seems to be flourishing less and less each year, as we experience more and more brokenness, conflict, hatred, and pain.
Why is this, though? Because the constant encouragement to be proud in spirit doesn’t help people flourish, but rather enables them to act more boldly on their most unhealthy attitudes and desires.
David Brooks said this about our proud in spirit culture in an essay in The Atlantic:
"Know thyself," the Greek sage advised. But of course this is nonsense. Truly happy people live by the maxim "Overrate thyself." They are raised by loving parents who slather them with praise. They stride through life with a confidence built on an amazing overestimation of their own abilities. And they settle into an old age made comfortable by the warm glow of self-satisfaction. Each of these people is a god of self-esteem, dwelling on a private Olympus.
Brooks pinpoints the ultimate effect of being proud in spirit and why it doesn’t lead to flourishing: it causes us to think we’re a god, the center of the universe, and the only person who matters. This fuels our beliefs that we are all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful.
Contrary to our culture’s opinion, having a proud in spirit, god-like view of yourself doesn’t create more flourishing but rather destroys our ability to flourish. Why? Because it causes us to:
Believe that we always know best: Proud in spirit people become infatuated with the idea that “I always know best,” especially in any self-anointed area of expertise. Whether it’s parenting, personal tastes, or national policies, they think that they possess a unique moral clarity on every issue, and that life would work if all of their beliefs and opinions were elevated into law. They deny that they have any weaknesses, blindspots, or flaws, blaming all of their problems, whether personal or societal, on other people.
This leads to a culture filled with people who are divisive, cruel, and combative towards anyone who sees things differently than them. They reject, belittle, and punish, whether formally or informally, anyone who’s not as enlightened as they are, causing our culture to break down and divide. On top of this, since no one will admit they are wrong, there’s never any headway made towards fixing any of our problems, since “It’s all their fault, not mine!”
See the people around us as competitors and potential threats to our kingdom: Since the proud in spirit see themselves as the center of the universe, the pursuit of our kingdoms is the most important thing in the world. They believe that success is a zero-sum game: others need to lose for them to win. This causes our society to be full of tension, conflict, and war, as our quest to build our kingdoms causes us to battle against each other for superiority, whether that's between two coworkers, two countries, or two people driving next to each other during rush hour.
This causes us to become anxious, worried, and obsessed over how our kingdom is doing, so we spend our time thinking, scheming, and dreaming of how we can beat out others to win in life. Everything becomes a power struggle, creating a toxic culture where people use and manipulate each other for their self-interested gain.
Our morality becomes selective: Since the proud in spirit see themselves as God, they get to personally decide what’s right and wrong. They’ll obey the written and unwritten rules of society when it helps them build their kingdom, but will break them anytime the rules keep them from getting what they want. After all, if our desires are inherently good, the important thing is that we get what we want in life, regardless of what it does to other people.
This thinking causes us to hold others to a high standard of moral behavior, but then have no problem with lying, cheating, stealing, and tearing others down, as long as it helps our kingdom progress. We rationalize our immorality away, telling ourselves “I had no other option” or that “I deserve to catch a break sometime.”
Proud in spirit thinking creates such a toxic, fractured, and combative culture, where people trample over each other in pursuit of their own kingdoms and will do whatever it takes to hold onto their sense of superiority. If we ever want to flourish, both individually and collectively, this way of seeing ourselves has to go.
Part 2: Jesus’ challenge to our proud in spirit culture
Jesus wastes no time, though, confronting our proud in spirit culture by telling us: true flourishing can only be found by seeing yourself as poor in spirit and receiving God’s kingdom.
Every human being naturally hates this idea. We all think that there’s no way Jesus’ teaching could ever lead to human flourishing. Many secular people believe that in this first Beatitude, Jesus is telling his followers to hate themselves and think they’re worthless. They don’t see being poor in spirit as the foundation of flourishing, but rather as psychologically damaging spiritual abuse.
But that’s not what Jesus means by poor in spirit. After all, God tells us throughout the Bible that we’re created in his image with eternal value and infinite worth. So what then does it mean to see ourselves as poor in spirit?
so what does it mean to be poor in spirit?
To understand this first Beatitude, we need to ask what Jesus means by the word poor. When Jesus told the crowd that they needed to be poor in spirit, he didn't use the Greek word for poor that referred to the working poor, to the people who had very little but were able to scrape by.
Instead, Jesus chose the Greek word that was used for beggars. Beggars are more than just poor, they're the broken and the destitute, people who have no possessions, food, money, or home. A beggar is someone who has admitted that they can’t get by on their own, so they do the only thing they can: they beg for help. They’re completely dependent on the mercy of others.
When Jesus tells us that we need to be poor in spirit, he’s telling us that we need to see ourselves as a spiritual beggar. A spiritual beggar is someone who recognizes that they have rebelled against God, made a mess of their lives, and admit that they are broken and helpless. So they do the only thing they can: they beg God for his mercy and love.
The British preacher John Stott described poor is spirit like this:
To be poor in spirit is to acknowledge our spiritual poverty, indeed our spiritual bankruptcy, before God. We have nothing to offer, nothing to plead, nothing with which to buy the favor of heaven.
This is the key. You don’t become poor in spirit by doing something, such as making yourself humble or thinking you’re a terrible person, but rather by recognizing your spiritual emptiness before God. You have nothing of value to offer God to buy his favor or blessing.
the offensiveness of Jesus’ teaching
Let’s be honest. This is an offensive idea to our modern ears. No one naturally wants to admit that we are spiritually bankrupt before God. That’s why human beings spend our lives building our kingdoms; we want to point at our job, education, success, lifestyle, looks, possessions, family, religious virtue, and morality as proof for seeing ourselves as proud in spirit.
But the Bible says otherwise. As Isaiah writes: All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags. Even our best deeds are still stained by sin, and don’t do anything to commend us to God.
The reason for this is because of our sinful hearts, which are full of desires contrary to God. Even when we do good things, because of the deceitfulness of our hearts,
we do them for the wrong reason, to show that we can flourish apart from God.
This has been going on since the Garden of Eden. Like Adam and Eve, all of us tell God: “I don’t need you to flourish.” We chafe at the idea of relying on God, and want to be our own god, so that we can be in total control of our lives and world. As Charles Spurgeon said, “The hardest thing the hardened sinner has to do is admit his utter bankruptcy and unworthiness.”
But while we try to cover up our spiritual bankruptcy through confidence, accomplishments, and the size of our external kingdoms, deep down, we’re all broken. Everybody is sinful. Everyone has evil desires in their heart and experiences emptiness, meaninglessness, and a sense of being adrift.
how do you become poor in spirit?
So how do you come to see yourself as poor in spirit? You have to encounter God and truly experience him. While proud in spirit people compare themselves to others, poor in spirit people compare themselves to God through the:
Greatness of God: poor in spirit people compare themselves to the greatness and glory of the God of the universe. In the same way we feel small when we look at the mountains or the ocean, a true encounter with God will show us his majesty, how small we are, and how wide the gap is between us.
Law of God: poor in spirit people compare themselves to the holiness and purity of God’s law, which allows us to see the spiritual poverty in our lives. When we meditate on God’s requirements, to love him with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength, as well as our neighbor as ourselves, we should see how far we fall short of his law and how we cannot obey his law in our own abilities.
Character of God: poor in spirit people compare themselves to the life of Jesus, the man who perfectly lived out God’s law and character in real life. Comparing ourselves to Jesus keeps us from turning God’s law into an abstract list of commands to keep, and instead shows us how far we fall short of God’s ideal.
It’s only as you encounter and experience the holiness, character, and attributes of God, the Holy Spirit will increasingly convict you of your sin and open your eyes to the reality of your spiritual poverty. This is what happens every time in the Bible when someone encounters God, like with:
David: When God told David that his heir would establish an eternal kingdom he responded, “Who am I, Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?”
Isaiah: When Isaiah experienced a vision of the glory of God, he cried out, “Woe to me. I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”
Mary: When the angel told Mary that she would be the mother of the Messiah she said, “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.”
Peter: When Jesus showed his divine power through a miraculous catch of fish, Peter fell at Jesus’ feet and exclaimed, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!”
Whenever anyone in the Bible encounters the holiness, character, and greatness of God, the reaction is always a recognition of the person’s spiritual bankruptcy.
so why aren’t we poor in spirit?
Unfortunately, many people, even those who go to church, never become poor in spirit. Why? Because instead of comparing themselves to God, they spend their lives comparing themselves to others.
They are like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable in Luke 18, who comes before God and says, “I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector.” He feels quite proud of himself, because he’s kept his life together and is somebody God should like having on his team.
The tax collector, however, refuses to even approach the temple because he is comparing himself to God. Instead of congratulating himself, he recognizes his spiritual emptiness and cries out to God for mercy.
While religious people like the Pharisee will admit they have some problems, they believe that they can fix their problems and can create a flourishing life on their own. They reject Jesus’ call to be poor in spirit, and instead follow their own Beatitude:
Flourishing are the middle class in spirit, for Jesus will help them become proud in spirit.
I’ve heard so many sermons that follow this type of thinking. They use the gospel and the promises of the Bible NOT to help people repent of their sin and be born again, but rather to build up the audience’s self-esteem, so that they can go out and live a great life. After all: you can do all things through Christ who strengthens you!
But this middle class in spirit message has all the pitfalls of the proud in spirit message. It just turns Jesus and Christianity into another system in which you work harder and harder in order to save yourself.
so why do we have to be empty?
You will never truly flourish, though, until you see yourself as a spiritual beggar and admit your emptiness before God. Why? Because if we spend our lives pleased with our own kingdoms, we will never be interested, much less admit our need for God’s kingdom. Dr. Peter Kreeft describe it this way:
If we come to God with empty hands, he will fill them. If we come with full hands, he finds no place to put himself. It is our beggary, our receptivity, that is our hope.
It’s only when you see yourself as a spiritual beggar who is completely empty and powerless that you will cry out to God for his kingdom.
what changes when we become poor in spirit?
While our culture hates the idea, seeing yourself as poor in spirit and receiving God’s kingdom through the new birth is the only way to flourish. Why? Because in order to flourish you have to admit that:
My problems are first and foremost spiritual problems: a poor in spirit person is willing to admit that their problems are more than just social, psychological, economical, or philosophical; at their root they are spiritual problems. All of these other issues are just symptoms of our core problem: that we’re spiritually alienated from God.
We can create more wealth and build nicer neighborhoods and budget more money for education, but no matter what we do we can’t flourish in our own strength, because we have no answer for our fractured relationship with God.
My problems are beyond me: the second thing poor in spirit people are willing to admit is that their problems are beyond them. They reject our culture’s constant message of self-confidence and self-sufficiency and admit they can’t fix the problems in their lives.
Because we can’t make ourselves whole, even our best attempts at flourishing will only wallpaper over the deeper problems of our lives. We must confess that we don’t have the wisdom, knowledge, and power to create human flourishing on our own, and must give up our mirage of self-sufficiency and self-dependence and replace them with God-sufficiency and God-dependence.
When we are willing to admit that our problems are spiritual ones and that we can’t fix ourselves, we have finally started down the pathway to real flourishing. There’s a 180 degree change in direction: we’re no longer trying to flourish by building our own kingdom, but by receiving the flourishing life of Gods’ kingdom.
It’s only when these two things happen that we can receive God’s kingdom and have access to the spiritual resources we need to truly flourish.
So why do the poor in spirit flourish?
Contrary to everything that our culture believes about the world, it’s not the proud in spirit who flourish, but rather the poor in spirit. Like a water sprinkler in the middle of a drought, the poor in spirit help bring about the flourishing new life of God’s kingdom wherever they go. This is because:
Their lives are no longer about their kingdom: because the poor in spirit find their worth and security through receiving God’s kingdom, they no longer have to obsess over their personal kingdom-building building project. They don’t struggle with the anxiety, worry, and fear of either never building a big enough kingdom, or losing the kingdom they have built. They instead experience a deep sense of wholeness through their relationship with God and find a deep joy in living for His glory and not their own. They use their lives to serve in God’s kingdom and not to seek their own agenda.
They admit their need for the insights and abilities of others: because the poor in spirit recognize their limitations and brokenness, they can stop pretending and admit that they don’t have all of the knowledge, abilities, and answers to solve the complex problems of society. They look first to God, and then to others, for wisdom and insight, which helps them be more effective as they address the problems, issues, and opportunities of our world. Also, when their flaws, weaknesses, and mistakes are pointed out to them, they listen and learn, rather than reacting with defensiveness and animosity.
They approach life with a spirit of cooperation, not competition: they no longer approach the world through the lens of competition, where other people have to lose so that they win, because they aren’t worried about the size of their own kingdom. Because of this, they create lives, institutions, and communities around harmony and unity, not conflict and fighting.
They switch from a life of getting to giving: their lives are no longer centered on getting more possessions, money, status, power, the things that put them into non-stop competition and conflict with others. In God’s kingdom, they instead spend their lives giving to others. They use their gifts, talents, resources, and time to help other people thrive, which gives them great joy and a deep sense of meaning, while helping to create communities that flourish.
They rest in God’s ultimate kingdom: they know that regardless of how much money they make or success they achieve, their ultimate security is based not on their own kingdom, but rather because of their citizenship in God’s eternal kingdom. This allows them to live in peace and without fear, as they trust God with their ultimate flourishing, especially when they go through difficult times.
where do you get the ability to be poor in spirit?
Deep down, there’s only one way to break the power of our proud in spirit culture has over us, while also not destroying our self-worth. And that is through Jesus’ death on the cross. The cross is the only way that you can be humbled out of your pride, while simultaneously ground in glory. The cross tells us that:
You were so sinful, broken, and helpless that Jesus Christ had to come to earth and die for you, but yet you are so loved, valuable, and worthy to the Son of God that he was willing to die a death of shame, torture, and exclusion all so that he could spend eternity with you.
It’s only by letting these two paradoxical facts wash over us that we will be able to see ourselves as spiritual beggars, while at the same time remembering that we are sons and daughters of the eternal God. It’s when we hold these two truths together that we’ll be restored into fellowship with God and experience the flourishing life of his kingdom.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
When I cleaned apartments in Brooklyn for six years, I saw this first hand. So many of my customers had everything that you could ever want: high paying jobs, beautiful homes, lovely families, and a lifestyle that everyone would envy. But yet all of these things couldn’t create flourishing lives, because it couldn’t touch what was going on inside of them.
beatitudes: so how you follow the beatitudes?
Before we look at each Beatitudes individually, we need to cover one more thing: how do you actually obey the Beatitudes? If we want to live a flourishing life, it won’t be enough to just talk about the Beatitudes, we have to know how to live them out.
Before we look at each Beatitudes individually, we need to cover one more thing: how do you actually obey the Beatitudes? If we want to live a flourishing life, it won’t be enough to just talk about the Beatitudes, we have to know how to live them out.
Unfortunately, obedience is often seen as a bad word in many Christian circles, and lots of churches treat it as an optional part of being a Christian. Think about it, when was the last time you heard a sermon on obedience?
To many churches, the most important thing in Christianity is to get people saved. So they avoid talking about obedience, afraid that any mention of the need for Christians to obey God’s commands will lead to works righteousness.
what’s the actual point of christianity?
But that’s not how the Bible views Christianity. According to the Bible, the goal of the gospel isn’t just to get people saved, but rather to make them like Christ. In Romans 8:29, Paul says that we are predestined, not to be saved, but so that we might be conformed to the image of Christ.
The Bible teaches that salvation by grace doesn’t make obedience optional, but rather possible. After all, it was Jesus who challenged the crowd, “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, but do not do what I say?” To Jesus, real faith is more just than just agreeing with his claims, it also involves putting them into practice through obedience.
Obedience then should not be seen as an optional part of Christianity, but rather how we grow to be more and more like Jesus. This is what we see in Philippians 2:12, when Paul tells believers to obey by working out their salvation with fear and trembling.
So, if you are ever going to become someone who experiences the flourishing life of God’s kingdom, you can’t just read about Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes and expect your life to magically change, you need to put it into practice through obedience.
part 1: how do we typically approach obedience?
Before we look at how the Bible teaches us to follow the Beatitudes, though, we need to first see how Christians typically approach obedience. Most Christians fall into one of two extremes. They believe that either:
Obedience is by willpower, or
Obedience is by accident.
the 1st approach: obedience by willpower
The most common way for Christians to approach obedience is to think that it’s all up to you. In this approach, obedience is your 100% your responsibility, and occurs through personal willpower and self-discipline.
The fundamental belief that drives obedience in this approach is: Christians are saved by grace, but grow in obedience through their own willpower.
When we approach obedience through our willpower, we think that we can handle our sin through moral conformity: if we can just control our bad habits and suppress our sinful desires then we’ll be able to avoid disobedience.
And so when we come across Jesus’ Beatitudes, we think that if we can just muster up enough energy and discipline, we’ll be able to conform our hearts to follow these teachings. “Good Christians follow the Beatitudes,” we tell ourselves, “So I’m going to do everything I can to make sure I’m always poor in spirit and meek and pure in heart.”
This causes us to take on total responsibility for our own obedience. It’s up to us and our hard work to obey Jesus’ teachings, so we resolve in our hearts to take Jesus seriously and set off feeling confident about our ability to follow through.
the problem with the willpower approach
While the willpower approach to obedience promises to give us the ability to control our hearts, there’s just one problem: it doesn’t work. Regardless of whether you are able to obey or not, the willpower approach is spiritually disastrous.
When things are going well, the willpower approach always leads to pride and self-righteousness. We become proud of our moral record and quite confident that we are somebody special.
Look at how good I am at being a Christian! Sure, I’m not perfect, but I’m pretty close, and so much better than those people who struggle with that.
This causes us to become legalistic in how we treat others: we're constantly judging other people and measuring them against ourselves, causing us to wonder why they can't get their lives together like us?
But then, when either our willpower inevitably fails or our sin becomes noticed by others, our pride and self-righteousness disappear and are replaced by shame and self-hatred.
I’m such a terrible Christian. There’s no way that God could ever love me or want to be around. I’m too flawed and messed up to ever be accepted by God.”
The shame from our failures cause us to withdraw from God and put up an “Everything’s good!” facade around others until we can get our act together again. We then resolve to never struggle with this sin again, and go back to trying to solve our corrupted hearts through external effort.
At its core, the willpower approach will never create lasting obedience because no amount of behavior modification can ever change the corrupted desires that flow out of our sinful hearts.
the results of the willpower approach
When we try to use our willpower to obey Jesus, it creates all kinds of chaos. It causes us to:
Ride the rollercoaster of personal performance: how we feel about ourselves will always depend on our latest performance. When we’re meeting our own standards we’ll be sky-high, but then the moment we fall short, we’ll be down in the depths, wallowing in self-hatred.
Disregard any of Jesus' teachings that we find too hard (like the Beatitudes): Since we’re our self-worth is based on our own moral standards, we shrink Jesus’ teachings into a small list of commands that we find easier to obey, while ignoring anything that doesn’t come naturally.
Create a toxic Christian culture filled with legalism and fear: Our Christian cultures are not built around grace, but rather legalism (God likes me because I’m better than most people) and a performative facade (I have to make sure no one knows that I struggle with sin).
Focus on behavior modification, not heart change: since all that matters is how other people see us, the Christian life becomes about managing our external appearance, not solving the real issues of our hearts.
When we try to follow Jesus’ teachings through our own willpower, the results will destroy us. Not only will we continually struggle with pride, fear, and shame, we’ll ignore the Beatitudes and never experience the flourishing life of God’s kingdom.
When we try and give up, then we lose hope. So we quit trying. Jesus didn't really mean that stuff. And then we miss out, we don't flourish.
the 2nd approach: obedience is optional
As a result of the problems caused by willpower-based obedience, many Christians in their 20s and 30s have left this approach and now attend churches on the completely opposite side of the spectrum. These churches teach that it’s okay to obey God, as long as you never try to.
Their working belief towards obedience is: Since you are saved by grace, you don't need to worry about obeying.
In this approach, to try to obey God would be to diminish grace and to set yourself up for legalism and works righteousness. And so obedience becomes unimportant, something that can happen, but should never be directly pursued.
In this setting, the only “authentic” obedience is what happens naturally and without any overt effort. This means that we obey when it fits us, but when something runs contrary to our emotions (i.e. what feels good), then we don’t obey. If we do obey that’s fine, but if not, there’s grace for that.
Instead, these churches focus almost completely on receiving God’s grace and claiming God’s promises. There’s little time or interest to talk about obedience and how Christians should actually follow Jesus’ teachings.
The most important thing in these Christian circles is not whether you obey Jesus, but whether you’re excited about him. The mark of mature faith is not obedience, but rather having an intense emotional experience when you encounter God. As long as you love God and try to be a nice person, how you live is a secondary concern.
the problem with this approach
For Christians who follow this approach to obedience, the problem isn’t legalism, but rather license: it doesn’t matter whether you obey Jesus because you’re already saved by his grace.
The problem with license, though, is that it leads to hypocrisy. We are so focused on the freedom found in Christ that we never fight against our indwelling sin. They never say no to their sinful desires, which means they never change and never grow.
The root mistake of this approach is that it confuses effort with merit. But as Dallas Willard wrote:
Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.
Because these Christians believe that grace makes effort obedience unnecessary, they never become like Christ. They don’t obey Jesus’ teachings because they never come naturally, and so, over time, they often live no differently than the culture around them.
the results of this approach
When we don’t treat obedience to Jesus’ teachings as important, it creates all kinds of disastrous results. It causes us to:
Exploit cheap grace: when we make obedience unimportant, we live through cheap grace, a grace that only focuses on what we get out from Jesus, but never mentions what he gave to create it.
Never experience the supernatural change of the sanctification: since we don’t have to say no to our sinful desires, we never grow in holiness.
Obey our culture, not Christ: human beings can’t opt out of obedience; you’re always going to obey someone. If that person isn’t Jesus, then we’ll spend our lives obeying other people in our culture.
Reject Jesus’ wisdom: when we refuse to obey Jesus we may think we are “living in grace,” but what we’re really doing is rejecting the wisdom of the Son of God. It’s the age-old temptation to think that we know better than God.
Be our own god: since we get to decide what is worth obeying and what isn’t, our feelings and opinions become our god, one that we judge the real God by.
where this all leaves christians
Both of these approaches causes major problems, and makes it so we avoid obeying Jesus’ teachings in the Beatitudes. When Christians try to obey the Beatitudes through willpower they quickly give up, but when Christian make obeying the Beatitudes unimportant, they’ll never get started.
This leaves us in a tough spot: how do we actually obey the Beatitudes and experience the flourishing life of God’s kingdom?
Part 2: what does the bible say about obedience?
The key to following the Beatitudes is to recognize that the Bible doesn’t teach obedience through willpower or obedience by accident, but rather obedience through spiritual transformation.
Biblical obedience happens when our hearts are spiritually transformed to become more and more like Christ, as we respond to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It’s not doesn’t pit grace and and obedience against each other, but rather calls us to obey by working out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Here are a few ways that biblical obedience is different from both human-centered approaches to obedience:
The foundation of biblical obedience is not anything you can do, but rather the power of Jesus' resurrected life. It's our new life through the power of Jesus' resurrection that makes obedience possible. Like Paul says:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Biblical obedience is the result of a changed heart, not the cause of one: While legalism says you can change your heart and license says your heart doesn’t need to change, the Bible says that obedience will always flow out of a heart that’s being changed by God. Jesus told his disciples:
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit.
Jesus’ resurrection gives our hearts’ new life, but they still need to be formed: Even after a Christian is regenerated, we still struggle will indwelling sin and need to grow as we’re conformed to Christ. Paul writes in Romans 7:
For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do.”
Biblical obedience is not opposed to grace, but rather flows from grace: Christians aren’t saved by grace and then grow through effort, but rather by responding to God’s saving grace and applying it to every area of our lives. This is why Paul can tell us:
Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.
Jesus doesn’t see obedience as optional or unimportant, but rather the natural accompaniment to being his disciple: When Jesus was giving his final words of instruction in the Great Commission, he told his disciples:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.
Unlike every other religion or secular strategy for flourishing, Christianity is not a self-improvement system, but rather a relationship that leads to supernatural change. Spiritual formation isn't just action control, but rather a renewal of our heart and desires.
Obedience through spiritual formation is different from legalistic obedience, because it's us responding through grace. But it's also different from grace-based license, because it requires us to put forth effort in order to grow to be more like Jesus.
The question now becomes, how do we experience the spiritual transformation that leads biblical obedience?
part 3: so how can we actually obey the beatitudes?
While there are lots of passages you could turn to in order to better understand how spiritual transformation gives us the ability to obey, one that I’ve found helpful is Ephesians 4:21-24:
You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
In these verses, Paul outlines the three things that need to happen if you want to grow in your ability to follow Jesus’ teachings. You need to:
Put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires.
Be renewed in the spirit of your minds.
Put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
If we ever want to grow in our ability to obey Jesus’ Beatitudes, this is our roadmap.
1. put off your old self
The first step towards biblical obedience is to put off the old self. The old self is the deceitful desires, attitudes, and patterns of life that make up who we are before we are born again through Christ.
To put off your old self is to renounce your old personality and the desires and values that drove it. Paul reinforces what we talked about in an earlier essay, that because of sin our natural desires are corrupted and driving us towards all kinds of unhealthy behavior.
To do this, you need to examine your life and seek to understand what is motivating you. Where are you being driven by the desires of the world and not by the desires of God? Where are you trying to flourish by building a big enough kingdom to satisfy your own desires, and not entrusting yourself to God's kingdom?
Putting off the old self is more than just trying to kick a few bad habits, it’s a complete and comprehensive change in how you live. It's examining the motives, attitudes, and beliefs that drive your life and renouncing them. It’s not hating who you are or getting rid of everything in your life, but rather acknowledging and repenting of the destructive desires that are in our hearts.
2. be renewed in the spirit of your minds
The next step towards biblical obedience is to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. This happens when the Holy Spirit works in us to renew our minds and make us more and more like Christ.
When we're renewed by the Holy Spirit, God is transforming our hearts, capturing our imaginations, and becoming the most real thing in our lives. Our desires are changed, so that we want the things of Christ and not the things of this world. This is what Paul is talking about in Romans 12:2, when he says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed through the renewal of your mind.”
While being renewed is something that's done to you, you do have a role to play in creating the conditions where it can happen: by dwelling in God’s presence, primarily through prayer and his word. It’s as we let the word of Christ dwell in us, through reading it, memorizing it, and meditating on it, that the Holy Spirit works to change our hearts, not through outside pressure but rather through internal transformation.
3. put on the new self
As we put off the old self and are renewed by the Holy Spirit, we complete the process by putting on the new self. To put on the new self means to become like Christ and live into his righteousness and holiness. We are to put on his beliefs, attitudes, and actions as we seek to follow him in all that we do.
Whenever you put something off, you have to fill the void, otherwise it will always come back. It doesn’t matter how many times you pull the weeds from your front lawn, until you plant grass, they will always keep coming back.
This is the same way with our beliefs and behaviors. In Romans 13:14, Paul tells us to, “Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” It’s only as we live into our new life with Christ that we are able to cast off the secular approach to flourishing and put on Jesus’ approach to flourishing in the Beatitudes.
How do you put on the new self? By preaching the gospel to yourself and reminding yourself who you are in Christ. As we put off our sinful desires, are renewed by the Holy Spirit, and put on Christ, our hearts are changed and begin to bear the fruit of obedience.
Part 4: so what's the result of biblical obedience
When we seek to obey Jesus’ commands through God’s way and not our own, we’ll find that Jesus’ burden is light and his yoke is easy. Biblical obedience through spiritual transformation is the only thing in the world that gives human beings the power we need to make real change and experience supernatural growth.
As we begin next week to look at the flourishing life promised in each Beatitude, I'm reminded of this quote from C.S. Lewis:
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.
But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
God’s plan for us isn’t just to make us a little nicer or friendlier, but rather to make us like Jesus Christ in every way. And as you seek to follow the Beatitudes, you’ll be shocked at the changes that God is making in you.
beatitudes: Jesus’ practical plan for flourishing
So far, we’ve looked at the two ways you can try to flourish. Either by following our culture’s approach, by building a big enough kingdom to satisfy all of your desires. Or, by following Jesus’ approach, by being born again and living according to God’s kingdom.
So far, we’ve looked at the two ways you can try to flourish. Either by following our culture’s approach, by building a big enough kingdom to satisfy all of your desires. Or, by following Jesus’ approach, by being born again and living according to God’s kingdom.
Many Christians want to follow Jesus’ approach to flourish, but there’s one major problem: we have no clue what that looks like in real life.
Because we’ve treated Jesus only as our Savior and not also as our teacher, we assume the Bible doesn’t say much about how to flourish. This causes us to blend the two approaches: we trust Jesus with our eternal flourishing in heaven, but when it comes to flourishing in this life, we spend our lives trying to build a bigger kingdom.
The result? The lives of Christians and churches don’t look any different than the world around them. We’re good at going to church and saying all the right things, but deep down, we’re trying to flourish through our kingdoms, which causes all sorts of conflict, brokenness, and fear.
Jesus’ plan for human flourishing
But Jesus doesn’t allow His followers to take this blended approach towards flourishing. You can’t serve two masters, after all. You can’t expect to flourish if you entrust your spiritual life to Jesus and the rest of your life to our culture’s strategies.
Fortunately, Jesus gave us a set of teachings to challenge our blended approach thinking and show us how to flourish in our ordinary day-to-day lives. This teaching is found in the Beatitudes, found at the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
“Really?” you might be thinking, “The Beatitudes are Jesus’ plan for human flourishing?” We usually see the Beatitudes like an old celebrity from a previous generation: we’ve heard of them, but we’re not exactly sure why they’re famous or what they’re good for.
part 1: how do we naturally see the beatitudes?
If we’re honest, nobody naturally sees the Beatitudes as a flourishing life. They are strange statements that don’t make a lot of sense. That’s why almost everyone in our society sees the Beatitudes in one of the following three ways:
Irreligious people think the Beatitudes are idiotic: many atheists and secular people hate the Beatitudes. They see them not only as not flourishing but as inherently abusive and oppressive towards the human spirit, proving the dangers of organized religion and the stupidity of Christians.
Religious people think the Beatitudes are idealistic: many cultural Christians see the Beatitudes as Jesus’ ideals for human behavior. They believe that things would be better if everyone followed the Beatitudes. But in practice, since the Beatitudes are so uncomfortable and hard to obey, they just become options commands for super-Christians.
Christians think the Beatitudes are irrelevant: many church-going Christians see the Beatitudes as irrelevant in our lives today. After all, we’re saved by grace and not works, so following the Beatitudes is unnecessary. Many churches treat the Beatitudes as unimportant, since it’s all about getting people to understand the cross, and to talk about following Jesus’ teachings could promote legalism.
While each of these groups has different reasons for how they view the Beatitudes, they all come to the same conclusion: the Beatitudes are no longer useful to our day-to-day lives. When we take this approach, though, we, unfortunately, reject the Son of God’s teaching on how much beings can truly flourish.
part 2: why don’t we think of the beatitudes as flourishing?
So why does everyone miss that Jesus’ Beatitudes are actually about human flourishing? It happens because we’ve made two mistakes in how we view them.
mistake #1: we misunderstand the key word
The first mistake we make in understanding the Beatitudes is in translating the first word. Jesus begins each Beatitude with the Greek word makarios, which almost always gets translated as “blessed” in English.
But that’s not what makarios actually means.
When we use "blessed," whether in a casual conversation or on a social media post, we’re saying that we've received an undeserved gift from God. Whether it's a healthy family, beautiful home, or comfortable life, we use blessed to describe when God has given us something we didn't do anything to earn.
There are times when the Bible uses “blessed” this way, like when God promised in Genesis to bless Abraham. But there’s a problem: that’s a completely different Greek word than what Jesus uses to start each Beatitude.
When Jesus chose to begin each Beatitude with makarios, he wasn’t telling his audience, “This is what you need to do if you want to receive God’s unearned favor.” That wouldn’t make any sense.
Instead, Jesus used makarios because he was telling this crowd: this is how you should live if you want to flourish. That’s what makarios means in English. It’s a word, according to Dallas Willard, “Refers to the highest type of well-being possible for human beings. Transcendent bliss.”
Another commentator put it this way:
Makarios isn't happiness in its mundane sense, but rather the deep inner joy of those who have long awaited the salvation promised by God and who now begin to experience its fulfillment. The makarion are the deeply or supremely happy.
Again and again, the Bible uses makarios to describe someone who is in an active state of joy, satisfaction, and flourishing. We see this in Psalm 1 when the psalmist begins the Psalm with makarios:
Makarios is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers.
The psalmist isn’t telling his audience that they will be passively blessed by God if they avoid the wicked. Instead, he’s telling them that this is how you should live if you want to flourish.
Because of this, when Jesus uses makarios at the beginning of each Beatitudes it shouldn’t be translated as “Blessed are…”, but rather as “Flourishing are…” Jesus isn’t teaching his audience what to do to receive God’s undeserved blessing; he’s telling us how we should actively live if we want to flourish.
mistake #2: we misunderstand their format
This leads us to our second mistake. When we translate the first word “blessed,” it causes us to misunderstand the format of the Beatitudes. We think that Jesus is giving us his version of the law; that the Beatitudes are conditional statements: if you are poor in spirit, then God will bless you.
Many Christians avoid the Beatitudes because they think that to obey them would be legalistic: you’d be trying to force God to give you his blessing.
But when Jesus taught the Beatitudes, he wasn’t giving us a new version of God’s law but was using a rhetorical device, the kind of vocal flourish that teachers in oral cultures used to engage their audiences.
In the Beatitudes, Jesus, like other speakers of his day, was using a rhetorical device called a makarism (based on the word makarios). A makarism isn’t a rule that you have to obey to get a reward, but, as defined by theologian Jonathan Pennington, is:
A vision of human flourishing that is meant to effect change in people’s lives by inspiring them to the good and the benefits that come from living a certain way.
A makarism isn’t a law, but rather an invitation to actively live in a new way. Those who follow the Beatitudes don’t merit God’s favor, but rather flourish because they live in alignment with God’s kingdom.
And so, in the Beatitudes, Jesus calls us to act, but not to earn. The Beatitudes are us responding to the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, and don’t teach us how to earn God’s grace, but rather how to participate in it.
Jesus is not saying: "Blessed are the poor in spirit because they will be seen as a good person and thus get the reward that good people deserve." Not at all. Instead, Jesus is telling the listeners: "Because God is gracious, He will deliver the poor in spirit into a state of flourishing."
We are called by Jesus to obey the Beatitudes not to merit our salvation, but to participate in God’s redemptive work in the world through the coming of His kingdom.
the implications
When we understand these two aspects of the Beatitudes correctly, we can say that the Beatitudes are not a roadmap to prove that we deserve God’s blessing, but rather: Jesus' grace-filled invitation into the flourishing of God's kingdom.
And when we correct for these two common misunderstandings, we can read the Beatitudes as:
Flourishing are the poor in spirit because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Flourishing are those who mourn because they shall be comforted.
Flourishing are the meek because they shall inherit the earth.
Flourishing are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness because they shall be satisfied.
Flourishing are the merciful because they shall receive mercy.
Flourishing are the pure in heart because they shall see God.
Flourishing are the peacemakers because they shall be called sons of God.
Flourishing are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake because theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
In the Beatitudes, Jesus is refuting every other human attempt at trying to live a flourishing life and declaring: this is the life of true flourishing, true joy, true happiness, and it's available to you right now!
Part 3: so how do the Beatitudes lead to a flourishing life?
There’s just one problem: how do the Beatitudes lead to a flourishing life? Being poor in spirit, meek, persecuted? If we’re honest, following the Beatitudes sounds like a great way to be miserable!
But the reason the Beatitudes don’t sound like flourishing, is because we read them through our secular approach. We’re come to the Beatitudes and try to fit them into our personal kingdom building approach. But they won’t work that way.
Jesus’ Beatitudes are intentionally paradoxical: they’re meant to challenge our existing framework for what we see as a flourishing life. And if we try to run them through our culture’s approach, like putting diesel in a hatchback, they only lead to misery.
The Beatitudes lead to a flourishing life because they bring you deeper and deeper into God’s kingdom, the ultimate place of flourishing. That’s where they get their power.
Dallas Willard puts this well:
The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings.
No one is actually being told that they are better off for being poor, for mourning, for being persecuted, and so on, or that the conditions listed are recommended ways to well-being before God or man.
They are explanations and illustrations…of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. They single out cases that provide proof that, in him, the rule of God from the heavens truly is available in life circumstances that are beyond all human hope.
The Beatitudes create flourishing in our lives solely because they describe life in God’s kingdom. Let’s be clear: the Beatitudes are not advice on how to build our own kingdoms, but rather the way we participate in the redemptive life of God’s kingdom.
Jesus is not saying, “You’ll flourish because you’re poor in spirit,” but rather that, “The poor in spirit are flourishing, despite their current circumstances and struggles, because they’re in God’s kingdom.
The Beatitudes aren’t Jesus’ eight tips on how to build your dream life. Instead, they are his teaching on what it looks like to live in God’s kingdom, the place of true flourishing, and live according to his Kingdom values.
But why is God’s kingdom a place of flourishing? Because through the Beatitudes:
You align with the coming of God’s kingdom: God’s kingdom was started when Jesus came to earth, and as we follow the Beatitudes, we align with this kingdom and facilitate its coming. As we align ourselves with how God designed the world to work through the Beatitudes, our desires are transformed, our actions are changed, and we are increasingly able to live in peace and prosperity, as individuals, families, communities, and countries.
You anticipate the consummation of God’s kingdom: When we follow the Beatitudes, we flourish because our hope is not in our present circumstances, but rather in the second coming of Christ, when he consummates his kingdom. When this happens he will renew all things and restore the entire creation back to its original perfection.
The reason Jesus can proclaim that anyone who follows the Beatitudes will flourish, is because these people, no matter how the world views them, are the eternal citizens of God’s heavenly kingdom. They flourish not because they have good circumstances or an easy life, but because they are spiritually living in God’s kingdom and looking forward to their eternal home.
Dr. Derwin Gray summarized the Beatitudes in this helpful way:
"The Beatitudes are a description of how God's kingdom enters man's realm and transforms it. The Beatitudes are a picture of what God's people, under his rule and reign of grace, live like on earth. They are the ethos of heaven invading earth."
But this leaves one final question:
where do you get the power to follow the Beatitudes?
At this point, it would be tempting to say, “Go get ‘em!” and rely on hard work and willpower to follow the Beatitudes. But that won’t work. If you treat the Beatitudes as a way to earn God's flourishing you'll struggle. You'll never be able to do enough.
It’s only possible to follow the Beatitudes when we understand what Jesus did to bring us into his kingdom life. We can only participate in God’s kingdom because Jesus came to earth and perfectly lived out the Beatitudes, but instead of receiving a kingdom, he received a crown of thorns.
Jesus was poor in spirit, yet received a kingdom of suffering
Jesus was a person of mourning, yet was not comforted by God on the cross.
Jesus was the most meek person who ever lived, but died with no land, status, or possessions.
Jesus hungered and thirsted for righteousness, but was left unsatisfied as he died.
Jesus was always merciful, yet did not receive God’s mercy.
Jesus was pure in heart, yet his Father turned his face away from him.
Jesus was a peacemaker, yet was crucified like a criminal.
Jesus was persecuted, yet was his only prize was the condemnation that we deserved.
When we see the lengths that Jesus went through so that God might invite us into God’s kingdom, it should melt our hearts. Jesus took our penalty, yet gave us his prize: a flourishing life with God in his kingdom. And as we let Jesus’ love for us change us, we’ll find that we become more and more like Him, increasingly living out his teachings on human flourishing.
beatitudes: what was Jesus’ approach to flourishing?
Every generation, a new wave of young people set their eyes on flourishing, devoting their lives to imitating successful people, working harder than anyone else, and consuming all of the right things. They set their hopes on the idea that someday they can create a big enough personal kingdom to satisfy all of their desires.
Every generation, a new wave of young people set their eyes on flourishing, devoting their lives to imitating successful people, working harder than anyone else, and consuming all of the right things. They set their hopes on the idea that someday they can create a big enough personal kingdom to satisfy all of their desires.
But it never works. The secular approach to flourishing entices us with its promises of personal utopia, stringing us along until we’re old, yet is never able to solve the perpetual problems of life that cause us not to flourish.
So each generation grows up and the cycle repeats itself, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. Unfortunately, though, few will ever admit that this system isn’t working. Why? Because they have nowhere else to go.
That’s why I’m writing this series of essays: because there is somewhere else to go. And His name is Jesus. He and his approach to flourishing are the only place to find true peace, joy, and flourishing.
the answer nobody wants to hear
Jesus? Really? Few people, even among Christians, see Jesus as an authority, much less THE authority on how to flourish. We look at his life, full of difficulty, poverty, and strange teachings, and dismiss the idea that would ever understand human flourishing.
To most secular people, Jesus was a moral person with some interesting one-liners, but not someone you would trust to speak on flourishing. There’s no way someone who lived 2,000 years ago could comprehend our lives today!
To most Christians, Jesus is the Son of God who brought salvation, but few of us want to listen to what Jesus said about life, so we find ways to use him for his salvation while ignoring and avoiding his teachings.
This creates a society where secular people reject Jesus directly, and Christians indirectly. We’ll let Jesus impact our eternal lives, as long as he stays away from how we live our day-to-day lives. His teachings are just too strange, cryptic, and difficult, so we look to everyone but Jesus in an attempt to flourish.
The theologian Jonathan Pennington puts it this way:
When we limit our understanding of Jesus and Christianity to the religious, vertical realm of our lives, we find our faith disconnected from the rest of our practical, daily, horizontal lives. As a result, we look to alternative gurus and worldly wisdom to guide our understanding of emotions, relationships, happiness, finances, and a large variety of other aspects of our daily living.
Why do we do this? Because we’re just like Adam and Eve: we like the idea of God but aren’t willing to trust that He understands human flourishing. So we reject Him and go our own way.
But when we do this, we diminish Jesus’ life-altering teachings on how humans can thrive, which creates malformed and unfruitful lives. But if you want to flourish, you’re going to have to trust Jesus not just as your savior, but also as the greatest teacher and philosopher who has ever lived!
why did Jesus come to earth?
To do this, we have to understand why Jesus came to earth. He didn’t come to earth just to save people to a future salvation but wanted to change how they lived today. Contrary to popular Christianity, Jesus was concerned about more than making heaven crowded; he also wants to make everything on earth thrive!
Consider what Jesus told his audience in John 10: I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. He didn’t say he came so that they’d have eternal life eventually, but rather abundant life right now!
So often, out of good intentions, we so overemphasize Jesus’ role as a savior that we forget that He spent three years teaching, preaching, and explaining life to His followers. Jesus didn’t spend his life on earth waiting around to die on the cross but was constantly teaching, illustrating, and modeling God’s approach to human flourishing.
Jesus’ radical approach to human flourishing
So what was Jesus’ approach to human flourishing? You might think Jesus never talked about flourishing, but that’s only because He was always talking about it! Jesus’ approach to flourishing was woven into everything He did, whether it was teaching in the synagogue, healing the sick and crippled, or telling a parable to a crowd.
In Jesus’ approach to flourishing, the path to flourishing isn’t found in building a personal kingdom big enough to satisfy all of your desire, but rather by being born again, entering into God’s kingdom, and living out of God’s new desires in you.
Unlike every other teacher, influencer, or intellectual in the history of the world, Jesus didn’t come to offer ways to improve the secular “do-it-yourself” system. Instead, he taught a radically new perspective on flourishing that challenges everything we inherently believe about flourishing.
so why is Jesus’ approach so different?
Why is Jesus’ approach to flourishing so different from our culture’s? Because he disagrees with the fundamental cause of our lack of flourishing.
Unlike secular culture, Jesus didn’t see our lack of flourishing as caused by unmet inner desires. He saw the problem completely differently. According to Jesus, the real reason human beings don’t flourish is because our desires are corrupted by sin and need to be changed, not fulfilled!
Not surprisingly, this isn’t a diagnosis anyone likes to hear. We’re constantly told to indulge our desires, do what feels good, and follow our hearts. And so when we hear Jesus’ message, that our desires are corrupted and need to be changed, we all try to get rid of Jesus, whether that means crucifying Him on a cross or just keeping our Bibles closed.
so what’s wrong with our desires?
The reason Jesus and our secular culture disagree so deeply on whether our desires or good or bad, is because they don’t have the same view of the human heart, the source of our thoughts, desires, and beliefs.
Our secular society, following Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believes that:
Our hearts are inherently good.
Therefore, our inner desires are naturally pure.
In our culture’s view, because humans are inherently good, you can trust your inner desires, so long as you are digging deep to find the innermost things that you really want in life. Our culture says that these desires can be trusted, and if followed and fulfilled, will lead you to the good life.
Corruption and “sin,” according to our culture, happen when you allow organized religion, tradition, and society as a whole to restrict the pursuit of your pleasure, happiness, and self-expression. To see your innate desires as corrupt is not only wrong but repressive and dangerous.
Jesus’ view of the human heart
But Jesus taught a different view of the heart and human nature. In Mark 7, Jesus shared his view of the human heart and desire:
Don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn't go into their heart but into their stomach and then out of the body.
What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.
Jesus shows how the secular approach to flourishing breaks down: it’s not what you consume that makes you sinful, but rather what flows out of your heart. Because of this, assuming your desires are pure and then doing whatever it takes to satisfy them doesn’t lead to flourishing, but only every kind of evil imaginable.
James explains how this happens in his epistle:
Each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.
Why are our desires corrupted, though? Because all of us have rejected God and have turned away from Him. As Isaiah says:
All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned—every one—to his own way.
The human heart was perfect when God made it, but due to Adam and Eve’s sin, our hearts have been corrupted by sin. Sin leaves us spiritually dead to the things of God, and like cancer, mutates our desires until they become pathways to destruction, not flourishing.
In Ephesians 2, Paul explains how this leaves us spiritually dead to the things of God, only able to satisfy the evil cravings of our heart:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and followed its desire and thoughts.
We see the foolishness here of trying to flourish by fulfilling our desire. While it sounds attractive, it only leads to brokenness and death, both as individuals and societies.
the failure of the secular approach to flourishing
Generation after generation tries to make the secular approach to flourishing work, but it doesn’t, because it has no way to recognize or solve the problem of our corrupted hearts and desires. And so we struggle, as we try harder and harder to make a broken system do what it can’t.
Our culture’s self-improvement solutions may be great at toning our muscles, building our bank accounts, and creating attractive Instagram profiles, but no amount of success and advancement can address the real issue for our lack of flourishing, which is the sinfulness of our hearts and the resulting corruption of our desires.
are all desires bad?
It’s important to note, though, that Jesus and the Bible never teach that all human desires are wrong or sinful. After all, David says in Psalm 37:
Delight yourself in the LORD and He will give you the desires of your heart.
To be clear, the issue is not that we have desires. There’s nothing wrong with wanting food or money or success or even sex. These desires were created by God and are good.
The problem occurs when, because of our ruptured relationship with God, our desires become disordered. We elevate good desires and turn them into over-desires, idols that we want more than God.
And when we over-desire and idolize a good thing in life, we become controlled by that desire, which compels us to obey that desire at any costs, leading to all kinds of evil thoughts, behaviors, and actions. These over-desires are what create the evil that Jesus, James, and Paul were talking about earlier.
so what can we do?
Given the seriousness of Jesus diagnosis of the human heart, it makes sense that he didn’t come like every other influencer, thought leader, or life coach, merely trying to make slight adjustments to the secular approach to flourishing. But what’s Jesus’ answer to our lack of flourishing?
Jesus’ approach to flourishing looks completely different, because He’s the only one who has a solution for the real reason human beings don’t flourish: our sinful and rebellious hearts.
That’s why Jesus taught such a radically different message than our society does. He taught that true flourishing is found:
Not by following successful people, but rather by following Him. Instead of studying and imitating people who have succeeded according to the world's standards, Jesus taught that the first step towards a flourishing life was found through following Him.
But following Jesus is so different from all of the other people that are trying to get you to follow them and obey their teachings. How? Because Jesus doesn’t give you a new system by which you have to work to save yourself, but rather is the Savior who created salvation for you by living the perfect life.
That’s why Jesus can say:
Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Every human system teaches that if you work hard enough, then you’ll save yourself and have a chance to flourish. Only Jesus can say that the only thing you need to flourish is to admit that you can’t flourish apart from him and rely on Him instead.
Not by satisfying our own desires, but by being born again and receiving new desires: Jesus teaches that the path to a flourishing life isn’t found through satisfying the desires of your sinful heart, but rather is found in receiving a new heart with new desires towards God.
When Nicodemus was trying to figure out this new teacher, Jesus told him:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Jesus’ teaching is clearly: every human being, even the most moral, needs to be born again! The phrase ‘born again’ was Jesus’ favorite metaphor for regeneration, when the Holy Spirit applies the power of Jesus’ resurrected life to our spiritually dead hearts, creating a new heart that is alive to God and desires him.
The new birth doesn’t happen by you trying to improve your old human nature, but rather when the Holy Spirit creates an entirely new human nature in you. Paul described it this way:
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.
When you are born again, you are forgiven of your sin, made alive in Christ, and filled with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As God restores our relationship with Him and sets our hearts free from the power of sin, we respond with repentance and faith.
Not by creating your own kingdom, but by receiving and living in God’s kingdom: When you are born again, you automatically enter into God’s kingdom, setting you free from having to build a personal kingdom big enough to satisfy your own desires.
When God regenerates our hearts with the power of Jesus’ resurrection, we receive the gift of life in God’s kingdom, the place where he spiritually rules and where human beings are finally able to flourish.
As we live in God’s kingdom we can let go of the need to build our own kingdom, and trust Him for our safety, security, comfort, and provisions that leads to true flourishing. Jesus promises that when we seek His kingdom, and not our own, we’ll flourish in every way:
Seek first my kingdom and my righteousness and all of these other things will be given to you as well.
And so, as we live in God’s kingdom, our desires our re-ordered through Spirit-led obedience, creating a world where we live according to God’s plan for humanity, allowing us to live in peace, harmony, and a deep sense of flourishing.
Jesus’ approach to flourishing is the only one that truly works, because only He can re-unite us with God, solve the problem of our inner corruption, and change our desires from bad to good. So, if you want to flourish, you will have to follow Jesus, be born again, and live in God’s kingdom according to His values.
why does living in God’s kingdom lead to flourishing?
At this point, you’re probably feeling the tension. You feel a little guilty that you’re not looking to Jesus for your flourishing, but at the same time, you’re still struggling to see how Jesus’ approach could ever get you the flourishing life that you want.
But we have to clear up a misconception: the abundant and flourishing life that Jesus promises to you is a spiritual flourishing, not primarily a physical, emotional, or even psychological flourishing.
Following Jesus isn’t a guarantee that you’ll get an easy and dreamy life (after all, sin still exists), but rather a promise that you’ll have a deep spiritual source of abundant life, no matter what happens in your life.
So why does life in God’s kingdom lead to spiritual flourishing? Because:
You have a deep source of spiritual life: when you live in God’s kingdom, you have a never-ending access to the spiritual nourishment of the Holy Spirit. You are like the tree in Psalm 1, who flourishes no matter the season, whether there's rain or drought, because you are connected to a deep stream of living water.
This gives you access to the spiritual relationship that will finally satisfy your innermost longings. As David writes in Psalm 16: You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Your fundamental alienation from God that was a result of the Fall has been cured!
You have a joy that circumstances can’t take away: When you live in God’s kingdom, your flourishing is not based on your life circumstances, which are always changing and never stable, but rather on Christ’s finished work. This allows you to find your joy in God’s eternal care for you, no matter whether your life is going well or not.
This is why Paul can say: I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.
You have kingdom security: Your life no longer revolves around having to build your own kingdom, and all of the stress, anxiety, and worry that comes with creating and maintaining a kingdom that will always crumble. Instead, we receive God's eternal kingdom, a kingdom that can never be shaken.
You have an enduring peace: When we live out of our new birth in God's kingdom, we no longer have to fight, scrap, and claw our way to a bigger kingdom, because the purpose of our lives is now to serve in God’s kingdom. This allows us to cooperate with others and live in peace and harmony with our neighbors and friends, because there’s no scarcity or lack in God’s spiritual kingdom. You no longer have to live a life of conflict, tension, and manipulation.
You have an eternal future: even the flourishing we experience in God's kingdom now is just a foretaste of what is to come. When Jesus returns, He will usher in the new heavens and new earth, as God renews every part of creation back to its original perfection.
When that happens, Revelation 21 says that God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” This will be the ultimate state of human flourishing.
It’s only when we leave our culture’s approach to flourishing and instead give our lives to Jesus and His kingdom that we can be set free from the anxiety, fear, greed, conflict, and despair that plagues humanity. This is why Jesus’ approach to flourishing is the only one that works, because only Jesus solves our problem of sin, corrupted desires, and ultimately, death.
one final question
That leaves us with one last question: which way are you going to choose? That’s the question Jesus asks of every one of us: are you going to pursue a flourishing life through the world’s methods or mine?
Each of us gets to choose which way we’ll live. But make no mistake, there’s no way for you to blend these two approaches together. Ultimately, you’ll try to flourish either according to our culture’s way or Jesus’ way.
Most people will take our culture’s approach, what Jesus called the broad road. The broad road is what is easy, popular, and comes naturally. It seems attractive at first, but be careful, because the board road will get harder and harder, and ultimately is bound for destruction.
The narrow road will be hard, unpopular, and uncomfortable, requiring you to live differently than the culture around you and do things that don’t make sense. But the narrow road is the only one that leads to true flourishing, and ultimately to eternal life with God.
Which way will you choose?
I’m writing this intro sitting in a cafe and the song “Someday” by Rob Thomas came on. Its chorus shows the conflicting desires of hope and helplessness that the secular approach to flourishing creates:
'Cuz maybe someday we'll figure all this out
We'll put an end to all our doubt
Try to find a way to just to feel better now
Maybe someday we'll live our lives out loud
We'll be better off somehow, someday
beatitudes intro: how are you trying to flourish?
Everybody wants to flourish. It’s a desire that’s rooted deep within us, both individually and collectively. We want to live personal lives filled with meaning, success, and happiness while living in a society that’s prosperous, peaceful, and safe.
“It is the decided opinion of all who use their brains, that all men desire to be happy." —Augustine
Everybody wants to flourish. It’s a desire that’s rooted deep within us, both individually and collectively. We want to live personal lives filled with meaning, success, and happiness while living in a society that’s prosperous, peaceful, and safe.
Whether you're aware of it or not, most people spend their lives in a sort of constant, low-grade infatuation with the pursuit of flourishing. They’re on the hunt for a flourishing life, so everything they do and experience gets judged against that benchmark. And so we spend our lives asking: how do I get a flourishing life?
It’s such a basic question that most of us have never even stopped to consider it. But it’s the underlying question behind so many of the other questions that we ask, such as:
How can I be happy?
How can I live my best life?
How can I be successful?
How can I reach my goals?
How can I get a job that I actually enjoy?
How do I get a life like his/hers?
These questions all spring out of the deeper, more fundamental question of flourishing, affecting what we live for, what we value, and what we see as good and bad.
But before we look at how we try to flourish as human beings, what does it even mean to flourish?
what does it mean to flourish?
The word flourish can be difficult to define since we each attach our own ideas and expectations to this abstract word. But for the sake of clarity, I'll define flourishing as: a growing, healthy life filled with meaning, purpose, and depth, where you experience peace, satisfaction, and true joy.
This is the life that everyone in our society is trying to get. It’s what drives so many people, from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep.
The key question, though, is not whether we want to flourish, but rather how we try to find flourishing. That’s what we’re going to examine in this series of essays.
so how do you flourish?
Before we look at Jesus’ plan for human flourishing, we first need to examine how our society tries to find a flourishing life. I’ll call this the secular approach to flourishing, which believes:
The key to flourishing is satisfying all of your inner desires.
This is what our culture sees as flourishing, a life of total self-fulfillment. If you are satisfying your desires, then you'll be happy, successful, and thriving.
But how do we satisfy all of our inner desires? The secular path to flourishing teaches us that if we want to satisfy all of our inner desires, then we need to pursue the objects of our desires, which come primarily through external achievement and success.
If you can get all of the right external success, then you'll experience the internal satisfaction that will create a flourishing life.
On the flip side of this, if you aren’t flourishing, then it’s because you aren’t good enough yet at satisfying all of your inner desires. You have unmet inner desires, for things like comfort, success, status, possessions, money, acclaim, pleasure, power, and so on, which are causing you not to flourish.
The way to fix your life, then, is to solve these problems through external achievement. You need a better job, a bigger house, a prettier boy/girlfriend, a better body, nicer clothes, cooler friends, better conversation techniques, better vacations, more social media followers, and on and on and on.
This is the message that reverberates through all of society, whether it’s through advertising, small talk, or social media. If you want to flourish, our society tells us, you need to build up your own external kingdom until it’s big enough to satisfy your every desire.
the steps to flourishing in the secular approach
When we pursue flourishing through the secular approach, we follow three main steps to build our kingdoms and create lives that will satisfy our desires. We learn to:
Imitate the successful: we learn from an early age to admire and obsess over people that our culture recognizes as successful. We follow them on social media, study their life strategies, and listen to their stories on podcasts. We hope that by understanding and imitating the people who have the external lives that we want, then we'll be able to create a flourishing life for ourselves.
This is why we spend hours of our lives consuming content from successful people. We want to know their secrets to success! So we learn about:
A tech founder's morning routine.
A nutritionist's advice on how to eat the ideal diet.
A model's daily skin and hair routine.
An influencer's style tips.
A corporate executive's advice for climbing the corporate ladder.
A stay-at-home mom's plan for managing a busy life.
An attractive person's strategy for dating and relationships.
There are thousands of examples I could have put here, but all of these show how we imitate the strategies of successful people to satisfy our unique inner desires.
Work hard to create your own success: Once you have gleaned the insights and information from people who are more successful than you, then you implement them in your life through hard work, discipline, and focus. We fixate on personal development and self-improvement, hoping that through greater efficiency and productivity we can build our careers, make more money, and reach all of our goals even faster.
This “work harder” mentality shows up in our culture through:
An obsession with hustling and working long hours.
A fascination with productivity and efficiency.
Non-stop talk about things like setting better goals, developing better habits, and using technology to get even more done.
If you work harder, we’re told, then we’ll get a bigger and better personal kingdom, which will allow you to satisfy more of your desires.
Use your success to live a lifestyle of consumption: If you've done the first two steps correctly, then you should have plenty of money, status, and power to create a lifestyle where you can satisfy all of your desires through the consumption of the right products, possessions, and experiences.
Our culture is always promising that if you'll just buy this product, then you can satisfy your desires and live a life of flourishing.
If you eat organic vegan food, then you'll feel healthy.
If you use chemical-free makeup and household products, then you'll feel safe.
If you take the right exercise classes, then you'll feel fit and energetic.
If you have the right clothes and personal style, then you'll feel elite.
If you take the right vacations to the right places, then you'll feel relaxed and one-of-a-kind.
If you live in the right neighborhood in the right city, then you'll feel cool.
If you follow the right dating advice, then you'll find the perfect spouse.
This is why consumption is important in our search for flourishing: it’s how we actually try to satisfy the desires of our hearts. We all find ourselves longingly looking at an ad or someone else’s life and thinking, “If I just had that, then I’d be really happy.”
the ultimate goal
These three steps towards flourishing occupy so much of our lives, as we hope that by building bigger and bigger external kingdoms of success, they’ll be able to satisfy more and more of our inner desires.
Once this happens, then we’ll reach the ultimate achievement of a flourishing life: we’ll be the ones that other people, through social media, conferences, and books, look to to learn how to flourish. If we can just get to this level of success, we think, we’ll have made it.
but is it working?
Whether you're scrolling social media or making small talk at a party, everyone tries to make it look like the secular approach to flourishing is working for them. Look, I’m really happy, content, and satisfied with my life!
But underneath the polished facade, this approach to life isn’t creating a deep sense of real flourishing. No matter what people are presenting in public and online, it’s just not working.
Why do I think this? Because everywhere I look I see the following red flags:
A constant restlessness: people are besieged with constant restlessness. Nothing ever satisfies them for long. They're always looking for the next new thing to them the sense of flourishing that the old thing promised but couldn't deliver. And so they're always trying new products, new techniques, new exercise routines, new jobs, new relationships, new cities, new clothes, new everything, hoping that they can find the missing piece that will finally help them feel like they're flourishing.
An unsolvable angst: When you listen to people share about their lives in private, you quickly realize the deep angst that so many people struggle with. Despite the material and financial prosperity of our culture, our lives are filled with anxiety, fear, emptiness, cynicism, hopelessness, drifting, and loss of purpose, as well as exhaustion and burnout. So many young people have followed the recipe for external success, yet they're struggling with these invisible ailments.
A need to numb: Because of our unsolvable angst, people use all kinds of things to numb themselves from their lack of flourishing, whether it’s alcohol, dating apps, weed, drugs, casual sex, pornography, risky behavior, non-stop travel, constant eating out, social media scrolling, online shopping, or binge TV watching. We all hope these little endorphins hits will numb our emptiness and give us a shot of pleasure.
An industry designed to help us cope: The greatest evidence that our culture's approach to flourishing isn’t working is our self-help psychological culture that’s sprung up. People are hungry for more and more pop psychology techniques, so that they can cope with their lives. But no matter how much you meditate, use mantras, attend yoga, practice positive self-talk, or start following Buddhism, you’ll never solving the real underlying problems.
Our culture tells us that if you follow the secular approach to flourishing you’ll soon be happy. But when you dig into the lives of the people who are most trying to live this way, whether it’s in a big city or a small town, you’ll see that it’s just not working.
Sure, it can create a lot of external success, but it can never give people the peace, joy, and sustained happiness that they are looking for, no matter how successful they are.
why doesn’t the secular approach work?
You can do everything possible to build a flourishing life by trying to satisfy your inner desires by creating your own personal kingdom, but it will never work. No matter how hard you try, no amount of external success will ever create lasting internal flourishing.
Why is that? Because of these three reasons:
You will never be satisfied: No matter what our culture tells you, your external circumstances will never give you lasting satisfaction. You might get a temporary buzz from each new achievement, but you will always need more and more achievement to give you that hit. This will create a state of constant dissatisfaction, no matter how successful you are.
And even if you are successful, you'll soon realize what so many other people have throughout the history of the world: getting the external things you've always dreamed of doesn't actually satisfy the desires of your heart. This is what leads to all kind of quarter life, mid life, and end of life crises: the things I was putting my hope in isn't satisfying me.
The Samaritan woman in John 4 struggled with this. She tried to find flourishing through her appearance, sex, and the approval of men, but yet could never quench her insatiable thirst for satisfaction.
You will never be at peace: if you try to find flourishing through creating a personal external kingdom big enough to satisfy your own desires, then you’ll idolize and obsess over your life, causing you to do whatever it takes to make sure you win.. This will cause all kinds of conflict, tension, and friction with the people around you. This is exactly what James described in James 4:
What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight.
Trying to find flourishing through the size of your own personal kingdom has led to so much death, destruction, and suffering in the world. It’s what’s at the root of every war, conflict, and power struggle. Sure, people can appear nice at first, but if something comes in between them and their kingdom-building project, the ugliness of their true heart will come out.
You will never feel secure: if you base your sense of flourishing on your personal kingdom, you’re building your life on very shaky ground. Why? Because your kingdom is out of your control in so many ways. No human being can avoid financial downturns, job loss, office politics, sickness, disease, accidents, family struggles, and ultimately, death.
When you place your hopes for a flourishing life on your external circumstances, you’ll never feel safe and secure. Even if things are going well you’ll be filled with anxiety, fear, and “what if’s” about what could go wrong if and when you lose some or all of your success. No one can escape the difficulties of life forever, and if you base your flourishing on having good circumstances and plentiful success, you will crumble when you experience difficult times.
so what’s the solution?
Deep down, though, even these problems are symptoms that spring out of the main reason for why the secular approach to flourishing doesn’t work: because no human being can ever find true flourishing outside of God.
That’s because God is the only place human beings can find the satisfaction, peace, and certainty that we need to flourish.
The temptation to try to flourish apart from God has always been with us, though. It’s what caused Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Satan told them:
You know, if you follow God’s path to flourishing you’re going to be miserable. After all, God’s holding out on you. Here’s my tip: if you really want to flourish, then get rid of God and become your own god with your own kingdom.
Unfortunately, the results of this decision has been disastrous. Human beings were not made to find their flourishing outside of a relationship with God, and so when we try, we create all kinds of sin, brokenness, and pain.
This is the problem with every human attempt at flourishing. The more we try to flourish apart from God, the more we experience the sin and misery of life apart from God.
So then, what is Jesus’ approach to flourishing?
why trying to prove your doubters wrong will never work
What are the most hurtful criticisms you’ve ever received? Was it from a teacher, coach, or old boy/girlfriend? You were sharing a goal, dream, or just a part of yourself, and before you knew it, you were met with some type of rebuke, spanning from a raised eyebrow to a sharp critique: “You think you can do that?” “That’ll never work.” “Really, you?!?” These comments cut deep, deflating our hopes, and lodging themselves in our minds.
“Doubters will never achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create.” — Calvin Coolidge
What are the most hurtful criticisms you’ve ever received? Was it from a teacher, coach, or old boy/girlfriend? You were sharing a goal, dream, or just a part of yourself, and before you knew it, you were met with some type of rebuke, spanning from a raised eyebrow to a sharp critique: “You think you can do that?” “That’ll never work.” “Really, you?!?” These comments cut deep, deflating our hopes, and lodging themselves in our minds.
When we get hurt like these, many of us go into “I’m going to prove them wrong” mode. These negative memories accumulate, and by our twenties we each have a list of people who have doubted, discouraged, or put down either our ideas or who we were. While the other person often doesn’t even know the hurt they’ve caused, these brief moments sear themselves into our mind. We’re each tempted to hold tight to these slights, and to use them as fuel to prove them all wrong.
I received my fair share of critiques in my twenties. “You’re a danger to the church,” one pastor told me as I was finishing seminary. “You don’t seem to have any direction in life,” one girlfriend told me as she broke up with me. “You think that will actually work?” more than one “friend” responded when I told them about an idea. These words cut deep, creating wounds that I didn’t soon forget. And so, when I moved to New York City, I used these memories to motivate myself, telling myself I was going to prove all of these doubters wrong.
why you remember the doubters
Why do we all struggle with past slights and critiques? One major reason is because we all have something called a negativity bias, an inherent ability to remember negative situations so much more vividly than positive ones. We all quickly forget most compliments, praise, and situations that go well, but latch onto any criticism, hurtful comments, or rejection that we experience, remembering these negative situations much longer than the positive ones.
But since we’re ‘nice’ people, we never mention anything out loud, and instead try to get back at them indirectly by doing the things they said we couldn’t. Society tells us, and we quickly believe, that the best revenge is a life well lived. So we use the negative comments from our past to motivate ourselves, both to show them how wrong they were, and to punish them for the hurt we feel.
This desire for “achievement revenge” can create incredible motivation, which is why everyone, from pro athletes to Taylor Swift, use it. For me, these past slights fueled my desire to make it in New York, causing me to push myself towards dreams. After a few years, my hard work started to pay off, as my cleaning business took off and I got a job at a big church. “See,” I lectured my past doubters in my mind, “You were wrong; I can do everything you said I couldn’t.” But something still wasn’t right.
a broken solution
I had accomplished what they said I couldn’t, but the pain and hurt of their words still didn’t leave. I felt like I still needed to do more, to punish them for criticizing and rejecting me. At this moment, I realized no amount of achievement could make the hurt go away. For years I thought that if I showed their critique was wrong my hurt would disappear, but now it seemed more entrenched than ever.
And then it struck me: no amount of achievement could ever solve the real problem, which was the anger and bitterness in my heart. Trying to prove my past doubters wrong was only pushing my hurt deeper into my life, not freeing me from it. They all now lived thousands of miles away, and I didn’t have contact with any of them, even through social media.
a better way
Eventually, I realized that instead of trying to get achievement revenge, I needed to forgive them for the hurt they’d caused me. Forgiveness! you may be thinking, there’s no way I can forgive that person. We all naturally hate forgiveness, and want justice for how other people have hurt us. To forgive them, we think, is to let them off the hook without fair punishment. And so we “punish” them indirectly, hoping they’ll get word of how well we’re doing and feel bad.
But Jesus tells a story for people like us. He said there was a manager who owed millions of dollars to the king. When the king came to put him in jail for his debts, he begged for forgiveness, and the king had mercy on him, wiping his debt off the books. Immediately after leaving, though, the manager ran into someone who owed him a small amount, and demanded that this man pay him back immediately. The manager ignored the man’s pleas, and threw him into prison until he could repay.
This is what we do, Jesus says, when we refuse to forgive people from our past. We’re like this manager, punishing everyone else for the tiniest of sins, while expecting Jesus to forgive us for the major ways we’ve rejected him, critiqued him, and wanted nothing to do with him and his way. When you remember how much grace Jesus has shown you, by taking your punishment on the cross and constantly extending forgiveness, it will soften your self-righteous heart and allow you to forgive people from your past.
a positive path forward
Do you have people from your past that you’re trying to ‘punish’ through your achievement, even if you'd never use that word. The forgiveness we’ve been shown in Jesus allows us to quit trying to prove our doubters wrong, and instead compels us to forgive them for the pain they’ve caused. This is the only way to be released from any hatred and bitterness that you still carry in your heart.
And when you stop trying to prove your doubters wrong, it frees you to instead work to prove your encouragers right. Whenever I’m tempted to use past hurts for inspiration, I remind myself to focus on all of the people who have supported me, believed in me, and encouraged me through life. Working to prove your encouragers right gives me so much motivation, as I use my gifts to reach my potential and honor their investment in me.
This shift is so life-giving, as your old wounds melt away and you shift your thoughts to all of the people who want to see you do well. While forgiveness will alway be harder than nursing past bitterness, we experience true freedom when we understand how much Jesus has forgiven us, and extend this forgiveness to the people in our pasts.
pride vs. humility: 50 ways this battle impacts your life
“Pride is the carbon monoxide of sin. It silently and slowly kills you without you even knowing.” — Tim Keller
“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes humans as angels.” — Augustine
Fifty items on a listicle!!! I know, things are getting crazy around here. But if there’s one topic to dig deeper on, it’s pride, since few things will so secretly harm your twenties like pride. I didn’t believe this, so I had to learn the subtle destructiveness of pride the hard way. So to help you avoid my mistakes, here are 50 ways pride and humility affect how you approach life:
Pride says, “I have to be the best.” Humility says, “I have to be my best.”
Pride says, “I’m always right.” Humility says, “There’s more than one way to do something, and each can be right at a different time.”
Pride says, “They’re lucky to have someone like me.” Humility says, “This organization did well before me and it will continue long after I’m gone.”
Pride says, “I don’t need your feedback.” Humility says, “Thanks, that helped me see something about myself I never knew.”
Pride says, “Don’t they know how valuable my time is?” Humility says, “So this is how it feels when I’m late.”
Pride says, “I can solve my own problems.” Humility says, “I think I need some help.”
Pride says, “How can these people help me reach my goals?” Humility says, “How can I help these people reach their goals?”
Pride says, “God, what are you doing?” Humility says, “I don’t understand what you’re doing God, but I trust you.”
Pride says, “I’ve arrived.” Humility says, “I can always get better.”
Pride says, “Look at all my strengths!” Humility says, “Too much of any strength is a weakness.”
Pride says, “I already know everything.” Humility says, “The more I learn the more I see how little I know.”
Pride says, “I never struggle with pride.” Humility says, “Pride marks my life in ways I’m just beginning to understand.”
Pride says, “Has there ever been anyone like me?” Humility says, “In the grand scheme of history, look at all of the people just like me!”
Pride says, “I don’t need to change, because I’m not the problem.” Humility says, “I wonder how I can change to help solve this problem?
Prides say, “The problem is they don’t do it my way.” Humility says, “Maybe their way would work if I supported it?”
Pride says, “I deserve to be praised.” Humility says, “I appreciate the recognition.”
Pride says, “I would never do anything that bad!” Humility says, “I need to be on my guard, because the seeds of that sin are in me, too.”
Pride says, “I deserve a good life.” Humility says, “I’ll work towards a good life, but I can’t say I deserve one more than anyone else.”
Pride says, “How can they struggle with that?” Humility says, “I can understand, because I have my struggles, too.”
Pride says, “If they win, that means I lose.” Humility says, “We’re all running different races in life, so I’m rooting for you to win yours.”
Prides says, “I’ve gotten such a raw deal in life.” Humility says, “If I’m being honest, lots of people in the world would love to trade places and have my ‘terrible’ life.”
Pride says, “The universe revolves around me!” Humility says, “What small part can I play helping the universe go round?”
Pride says, “Why don’t these people recognize my brilliance?” Humility says, “I’m pursuing excellence in this, regardless of whether I am recognized for it or not.”
Pride says, “Here I am!” Humility says, “There you are!”
Pride says, “I have to have more than that person.” Humility says, “I’m good, since I already have plenty.”
Pride says, “God should be glad I chose Him.” Humility says, “I wonder why God chose me?”
Pride says, “When you’re as awesome as me it’s okay to be self-centered.” Humility says, “I still have plenty of flaws. Besides, I find other people much more interesting than myself.”
Pride says, “Look how successful I am.” Humility says, “Look how many successful people have helped me.”
Pride says, “I can go it alone.” Humility says, “I need other people’s support, because I know tough times will come.”
Pride says, “I’m not going to encourage them because I don’t want them to get better than me.” Humility says, “I’ll encourage them so they can get even better!”
Prides says, “I’ve got it all together.” Humility says, “If they only knew my heart.”
Pride says, “I’m the best!” Humility says, “The breaks went my way today, but tomorrow they might not.”
Pride says, “I’m a natural, so I don’t need to practice.” Humility says, “Practice is the pathway to doing my best.”
Pride says, “If it’s meant to be it will always be easy.” Humility says, “Even the best things will require hard work to keep going.”
Pride says, “Look at everything I’ve achieved!” Humility says, “Look at how blessed I am.”
Pride says, “Hey, can you give me a boost?” Humility says, “If you stand on my shoulders you’ll get even higher.”
Pride says, “I’m the master of my life.” Humility says, “I’m glad I can trust someone greater than me.”
Pride says, “I always do everything around here!” Humility says, “Thanks for all of your help!”
Pride says, “What’s taking so long?” Humility says, “It’s ok, I’m not in a rush.”
Pride says, “I can’t trust anyone to do it as well as me.” Humility says, “You try it this time and we’ll get better together.”
Pride says, “I’m always perfect.” Humility says, “Let me tell you a funny story about my biggest mistake.”
Pride says, “Why don’t you see it my way?” Humility says, “Help me understand what you’re seeing.”
Pride says, “I can’t stand how proud that person is.” Humility says, “I struggle being around that person, but only because I want the attention they’re getting.”
Pride says, “If you don’t feel comfortable around me, it’s not my problem.” Humility says, “I remember what it feels like to be the new person.”
Pride says, “The rules don’t really apply to me.” Humility says, “If anyone needs the rules, it’s me.”
Pride says, “God needs me.” Humility says, “How incredible that God would use me!”
Pride says, “I have to be in charge.” Humility says, “How can I offer my gifts?
Pride says, “Let me tell you my thoughts.” Humility says, “Tell me more about that.”
Pride says, “These are my resources; I did the work, after all.” Humility says, “How can I best use what I’ve been given?”
Pride says, “Look how good I am at being humble!” Humility says, “Look how much I struggle with pride.”
Hopefully these give you some food for thought. Unhealthy pride is something we all struggle with, but because of the deception of sin, we often don’t understand how much it warps our lives. Pride will never go away through willpower or effort alone, but rather by seeing how Christ humbled himself, giving up his rights and his agenda in order to love us.
“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing, but taking the very nature of a servant.” (Philippians 2:3-7)
men: the cause and cure of our sexual brokenness
Note: I’ve written this essay so that it is NOT explicit, but it DOES contain mature content. If you’re not a college student or older, you shouldn’t read this essay.
“There’s a lot of ugly things in this world, son. I wish I could keep ‘em all away from you. That’s never possible.” — Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
“The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It happened after practice every Monday during football season. As guys were changing in the locker room, the upperclassmen would start telling stories from Saturday night’s party. Life for many guys in my small Kansas town revolved around three things: football, drinking, and having sex with any girl they could.
The popular guys held court, spinning stories of their latest conquests, boasting about either who or how many girls they’d hooked up with that weekend. After that, it was time to make fun of the guys who didn’t tell stories, either because they’d tried to ‘get laid’ and done something embarrassing, or could only get the “wrong” kind of girl. I was exempt, fortunately, since they knew my dad was a pastor and that I couldn’t come to their parties.
As I’d get ready in front of my locker, I’d overhear who’d done what with whom, recognizing my classmates names. While the stories of what they’d do with different girls were off-putting, coming from a “no sex until marriage” background, I just assumed these things were normal.
the shocking truth
Now, ten-plus years later, as the #MeToo movement has brought sexual violence into the middle of our societal conversation, I’ve realized the brokenness of the things I overheard. As I’ve talked to other guys about their high school and college situations, I’ve realized my locker room experience wasn’t an isolated one.
I’d heard of sexual assault and rape during high school, but assumed only psychopaths did those things, not guys I’d grown up with. The #MeToo movement has destroyed this assumption, showing that sexual crimes aren’t just committed by a few wackos on the fringe, but rather by a wide swath of men, both famous and ordinary. As men, we have to ask why is this the case? Why is male culture so sexually broken?
In the past, sexual violence has only been seen as a women’s issue, with men too willing to shrug their shoulders, blame a few bad apples, and accept our current culture as the status quo. Imagine, though, if a third of men had their retirement savings stolen at least once in their life. How differently men would react to that status quo!
As men, we need to lead the conversation to address the root causes, and not just the effects, of sexual violence. Men, after all, commit the overwhelming percentage of sexual crime in our society. If we truly care about the women around us, we have to ask an uncomfortable question: why do so many young men, from Kansas farm boys to to New York finance bros, commit sexual violence against women?
freshmen sex ed
The class awkwardly giggled, as Mrs McNary, our high school nurse, put a condom on a banana. We were freshmen in high school, in the middle of sex ed, our state-appointed crash course in reproductive anatomy, contraceptives, and STDs. Mrs. McNary spent six Mondays showing us scary pictures, giving us stats, and explaining every contraceptive choice known to humanity. The last day she gave us her motherly “make smart choices” talk, and just like that, twenty-five 14-year-olds were deemed educated about sex.
If we want to understand why so many young men commit sexual violence, we have to explore how young men learn about sex. Officially, teenagers are supposed to learn about sex through sex ed, that American rite of passage at the beginning of adolescence. But while sex ed tells a high school boy about safe sex, no one ever talks to him about healthy sex. This raises the question, where then do young men actually learn about sex? Not just body parts or birth control, but rather what a healthy sexual relationship looks like?
This disconnect creates a gap: on one hand, culture encourages young men, through movies, music, and older peers, to have sex as soon as possible. Yet at the same time, parents either avoid the conversation about sex or assume that what their sons learned in sex ed is sufficient. This information vacuum, combined with a teenager’s natural curiosity, pushes many teenage boys to explore, until he discovers what becomes his real education about sex: pornography.
a new normal
When you read the shocking #MeToo stories from women in high school, college, and beyond, one question stands out: where do guys learn how to act like this? People blame every en vogue -ism, but never mention pornography and it’s role in sexual crime. Why is this?
Both sides don’t like to talk about pornography and its effect on society. Progressives shy away, afraid to talk about sin and have to admit their pursuit of absolute sexual freedom might not be working. Conservatives also shy away from the topic, afraid to talk about sex and have to admit their pursuit of moral purity isn’t going so well. But, if we ever want to understand why so many young men commit sexual crimes, we have to understand how pornography affects them.
While pornography is nothing new, recent technology has exponentially increased its societal impact. The introduction of the VCR in the 1980s first allowed pornography to be viewed at home, a trend that exploded as home computers and the internet became the norm in the 90s. Now, with smartphones firmly entrenched in our lives, pornography is everywhere.
These changes have allowed pornography to rip through high school and college culture. Consider just a few of the statistics:
By age 14, two out of three boys have viewed pornography in the last year.
By age 18, 93% of boys have seen pornography.
By age 18, 70% of boys have watched pornography for more than 30 minutes at least once, and 35% are habitual users, having watched it for at least 30 minutes more than 10 times. (source)
These statistics paint a clear picture; teenage boys across the country are watching more pornography and at younger ages than ever before. Pornography has become the de facto sex education for teenage boys, shaping their beliefs about what normal, healthy, and desired sexual encounters look like.
a sexual miseducation
Despite these statistics, many people downplay pornography’s impact in young men, rationalizing it away as a harmless thrill. They made it through their teens and twenties and didn’t assault anyone, so what’s the problem? But the pornography young men look at today is radically different from previous generations.
As pornography has shifted from pictures to videos, the content has drastically changed. Dr. Norman Doidge, a neuroscientist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself, describes this shift:
“Thirty years ago ‘hardcore’ pornography usually meant the explicit depiction of sexual intercourse. Now hardcore has evolved and is increasingly dominated by sadomasochistic themes...all involving scripts fusing sex with hatred and humiliation.” (source)
In order to keep repeat viewers coming back, the pornography industry has made the content more degrading than ever, playing to a young man’s darkest desires. And while few young men start watching pornography to learn to mistreat women, that’s exactly what it teaches.
Internet pornography makes the man the hero, and normalizes his right to treat women however he wants. A 2010 study about violence in pornography found that men were physically aggressive toward women in 88% of scenes, and verbally aggressive in 48% of scenes (source). Even more shocking, the researchers found that in 95% of the scenes were violence was present, the woman either had no objection or acted like she enjoyed the violence. Young men, having no other knowledge of sex, quickly learn that physical and verbal aggression towards women during sex is normal, healthy, and even enjoyable for them.
what pornography teaches
When young men regularly watch pornography, they spend their formative years soaking up this poisonous narrative. This instills the following beliefs towards sex and women in young men:
Women are objects and subhuman: young men learn that a woman is not an equal human being with thoughts and feelings, but a collection of body parts on a screen that exists for a man’s use.
“Successful” men always get what they want: young men learn that the height of manhood is getting a woman to sleep with you, which causes them to pressure women for sex and to base their self-worth upon her saying yes/giving in.
Men should dominate sexual encounters: Young men learn to think that sex revolves around them and their desires, and that the woman should do everything he wants.
It’s okay to treat women in an aggressive or demeaning way: Young men learn to treat women in dismissive or even violent ways, both because that makes them “feel like a man,” and also because it’s what they think women want.
A woman saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean stop, but rather ‘try harder’: Young men learn that if a woman says no, she’s only kidding or playing hard to get, and actually wants the guy to take more control and try harder.
These are the toxic beliefs that young men absorb through pornography, thinking that this is not only normal, but healthy sexual behavior. And so as young men steep their lives in pornography, we have to ask, what’s this doing to them?
the rewiring of the mind
The harmful effects of pornography, and its factoring in sexual crime, aren’t just from the content, but also from its impact on a young man’s brain. Scientists have recently discovered neuroplasticity of the brain, the idea that the brain isn’t static, but always changing, adapting, and being rewired by its most frequent stimuli.
As a young man watches pornography, his brain releases pleasure chemicals which stimulate the growth of new neural pathways (source). Neural pathways are the mental grooves that the brain uses to create reflexive and habitual action. They give you the ability to develop instinctive behavior, good when you’re learning to shoot a basketball or play a guitar, but bad when you’re watching pornography. When a young man consistently watches pornography, this version of sex embeds itself into his prefrontal cortex, rewriting his subconscious script for how he views both sex and his partner (source).
Pornography doesn’t do this all at once, but little by little, masking its destructive ability. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, since this is what sin always does. Tim Keller, a pastor in New York City, describes the subtle yet deadly nature of sin like this:
“The results of sin are often more like the physical response you have to a debilitating dose of radiation. You don’t suddenly feel pain the moment you are exposed. It isn’t like a bullet or sword tearing into you. You feel quite normal. Only later do you experience symptoms, but by then it is too late. (source)
Pornography, along with hyper-sexualized music, movies, and video games, create a toxic sexual environment for young men that gradually normalizes aggression and violence towards women. Through this, pornography plants sexual landmines beneath the surface of a young man’s life, invisible until they explode.
a sexual crisis
When you look at the impact pornography has in many young men’s lives, it’s almost surprising, sadly, that there isn’t more sexual violence. Fortunately, even as pornography privately affects young men, they are publicly socialized, to varying degrees, to respect and physically protect women. Because of this, many young men do learn to value and treat women well, especially if it’s someone they care about.
This socialization, along with an inherent desire to be seen as a good person, creates a restraining moral wall in a young man’s life, curbing the effects of sin and causing him to suppress any behavior that would tarnish his reputation. Unfortunately, though, this doesn’t remove the inner landmines that pornography has embedded, and only covers them up with moral conformity. This leaves a giant problem, what happens when the conforming forces go away?
what triggers sexual assault?
Most young men who commit sexual violence against women don’t wake up and plan to assault a woman that night. They don’t believe a “good guy” like them is capable of it. But there are two behaviors that break down a young man’s ability to morally conform and allow his subconscious pornography-shaped expectations to play out. When young men commit sexual crimes, it almost always involve one or both of two things: getting drunk or experiencing success.
1. Getting Drunk: Despite our society’s glamorization of binge drinking, nothing besides pornography contribute more to sexual violence than alcohol. Pornography-influenced men and alcohol-fueled parties mix together to create the perfect environment for sexual crime. But why?
Alcohol, as it’s said, doesn’t change a person, it just reveals who they actually are. When a young man gets drunk, the alcohol numbs his conscience and takes away the pressure to morally conform. A drunk guy loses his ability to suppress his subconscious, allowing the pornographic narrative wired into his brain over the years to explode, causing him to act in ways he never thought possible.
This is why so many “good guys” commit sexual crimes. When they’re around their parents and classmates they are good-natured and high achieving, but when they’re drunk, the dark side of their lives comes out. As they reach that crucial moment of choice, they can’t stop, because they’ve already made the wrong choice hundreds of times before.
2. Experiencing Success: A second triggering event for men is success, either professionally, socially, or athletically. Success can warp a young man’s mind, causing him to think he’s above the rules and can do whatever he wants. Success melts away his need to behave, and like alcohol, gives him a feeling of moral freedom that allows him to act on his innermost thoughts.
While this often happens with high-profile celebrities, it also affects young men, specifically athletic and popular types. Since they’re above the rules, they feel free to “be themselves” sexually, which almost always draws on a pornography influenced narrative. Successful men can do whatever they want to a woman in a pornography video, so what should shouldn’t he be the same?
These two triggering events often work in tandem, causing a successful yet drunk young man to both lose all moral constraint and think he’s above the rule. This perfect storm happens so often in today’s culture, and sadly leads to so many sexual crimes against women.
so what do we do?
“How can young men act like this?” many in society are rightfully asking, trying to figure out what needs to change. As the #MeToo movement continues to shed light on the deep sexual brokenness in men, we have to ask, how do we change this? Each side has its suggestions:
Progressives call for increased education and awareness, wanting to teach young men about consent and how to be better bystanders. While these are good things and can help reduce sexual crime, they ultimately seem insufficient, since they still don’t get at the roots of this problem.
Conservatives, if they’re even willing to admit these problems exist, blame loosening sexual mores and call young people to clean up their acts. While not an incorrect diagnosis, this genie has already been let out of its bottle, and simply telling young men to be good people won’t put it back in.
While both of these approaches can help, neither one will ever provide lasting change, because they only address the symptoms and not the source. The answer is counter-intuitive: the reason young men commit so many sexual crimes is because no one believe believes young men could ever commit sexual crimes. Let me explain.
the source of the problem
Growing up, our society encourages young people to have an extraordinary self-confidence about their natural capacity for goodness. Young people are told to see themselves as basically good, and encouraged to follow their desires, find their truth, and above all, to be authentic to their inner selves. Young men become so confident about their inherent goodness, they don’t think pornography, alcohol, and success could ever negatively affect them.
The Bible, however, tells us something different. God warns us to guard ours heart, a metaphor for our deepest desires, thoughts, and beliefs, because its “deceitful above all things, and desperately sick.” Jesus always warns people about the darkness of their hearts, saying that “from within, out of the heart of man, comes evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, (and) adultery.”
The heart, and its inherent desire for sin, is why human solutions remain superficial. Every young man naturally loves the darkness, and is drawn to things he knows are wrong and evil. Young men feel this pull towards pornography, alcohol, sex, and maybe most of all, an innate desire for power. No amount of education or moral restraint can change the heart and its fundamental desire for darkness. We need a solution more radical than just more information or more willpower, but what?
the only answer
The Bible’s King David, while caught in his own #MeToo scandal after using his power to coerce Bathsheba into sex, shows us a different path. He cries out to God, asking not just for new behavior, but a new heart:
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
David knows his sexual problems run to the very core of his being, and that he needs a complete heart transfer if he ever wants to truly change. So, how do you get a new heart?
The answer is simple, but not pleasant: you have to give up your self-confidence and self-righteousness before God, admit the darkness in your life, and cry out to Jesus and ask him for a new heart. That’s not what any young man wants to hear, but remember this: Jesus, as the Son of God, didn’t use his strength to manipulate you for his own power or pleasure, but instead used it to live a perfect life and die for your brokenness. When you get that, you’ll no longer see women as objects to use and control, but rather as sisters-in-Christ to serve and love.
As another generation of boys enter into the locker rooms of life and become young men, what message will we give them? Will we feign ignorance and allow them to pursue sexual brokenness through pornography and drunkenness, or will we teach them about the destructive effects of sin, and point them to the renewing grace and love of Jesus Christ? It won’t be easy, but the safety of our friends, sisters, and daughters urges an answer.
Other Resources Used
The Macho Paradox, by Jackson Katz
How Consuming Porn Can Lead to Violence
NYTimes: What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn
NYTimes: When Did Porn Become Sex Ed?
How Porn Warps Ideas About Sex
The Public Health Harms of Pornography
NYTimes: What Experts Know About Men Who Rape
Statistics About Sexual Violence
Journal Abstract: Without Porn…I Wouldn’t Know Half the Things I Know Now
Journal Abstract: Predicting Sexual Aggression: The Role of Pornography
Journal Abstract: Pornography and Attitudes Supporting Violence Against Women
Journal Abstract: Pornography Addiction and Neuroplasticity
six myths about finding your passion
In the quest to figure out what to do with your life, most young people believe they need to find their passion, that elusive feeling of energy and excitement that’ll happen when they find their life’s work. If can find your passion, common wisdom goes, you’ll love your work and find true happiness.
In the quest to figure out what to do with your life, most young people believe they need to find their passion, that elusive feeling of energy and excitement that’ll happen when they find their life’s work. If can find your passion, common wisdom goes, you’ll love your work and find true happiness.
These promises create high expectations, and lots of young people spend their twenties stressed out over finding their passion. While passion, properly understood, can be a very useful thing, as I’ve gone through my twenties I’ve seen these five myths do damage in my friends and peers’ lives.
myth #1: passion is something you find.
Young people often think they need to find their passion, as in discover it. So they spend their twenties looking and looking, waiting for it to appear. They want a light bulb, eureka moment, where their emotions are set on fire and they know without a doubt that this is the thing they’re supposed to do with their life.
truth: passion is cultivated.
Passion is not discovered, but rather cultivated over time. Instead of waiting around for a fully-formed “passion” to hit you, find something you care about and work to get better at it. Passion flows from the natural process of engaging in meaningful work and doing it well. Passion is almost always a result of success, not the cause of it. So don’t wait around waiting for your passion to hit you. Start trying new things and see what your heart is drawn towards.
myth #2: if you don’t feel extremely passionate about your job, something’s wrong.
Our society preaches that you need to find something you’re passionate about, and if you don’t, you’ll never reach peak happiness. This causes many to spend their twenties afraid, worried that if they don’t find something that makes them feel more emotion about their work, they’re missing out.
truth: everyone has a different capacity for feeling passion.
When discussing passion, society ignores that everyone’s different. The people espousing your need to follow your passions are usually extremely passionate types. Some people are wired to feel passion almost immediately, while others have more steady personalities. Unfortunately, passionate personalities treat themselves are normal and project their experience onto everyone else, marginalizing steady personalities.
If you’re a steady type, it’s okay if you don’t feel lighting bolts racing through your veins as you do your work. God created both types of people to complement each other, since passionate types need steady people during their inevitable lows, while steady people need passionate types to help them push for higher highs.
myth #3: you need to determine WHAT you’re passionate about.
When encouraged to follow your passion, young people are told they need to find a specific job or field to be passionate about. This means young people choose a “what” that they’re passionate about, like fashion, finance, or healthcare.
truth: you need to determine HOW you’re passionate.
What’s most important when picking a career path is not the subject, but rather the process of the work itself. Many people work in uncool fields, such as insurance, administration, or home services, yet still enjoy their work and feel passion for it. How? Because they enjoy the process of the work, not the field it’s in.
If you want to enjoy your work, you need to find meaning in what you’re doing, not just your job title or industry. People who are most happy with their jobs aren’t the ones in the coolest industries, but rather have found situations that fit their working style and strengths. Don’t underestimate how much joy there is in doing your work in an honest and upright manner, making customers happy, and contributing to the greater good.
myth #4: There’s only one thing you can become passionate about.
In trying to find their passion, many young people expect to find one end-all be-all passion that stands out above the rest. They want to find something they get so excited about, they’ll know for sure this is what they should do for the rest of their lives.
truth: you will have lots of different passions in life.
If you’re someone who has a more passionate personality, you’ll have more passions in your twenties than you could follow in your life. The world is full of interesting ideas, big problems, and exciting careers, and if you follow every passion you feel you’ll never stay in one thing long enough to do meaningful work.
Instead of trying to find your one ultimate passion, discipline yourself and focus on one passion that pairs with something the world needs. Be careful with trendy passions, like social media influencer or start-up entrepreneur, because while you might be passionate about designing an app, you may get lost in a see of other similar people following the en vogue passion.
myth #5: if you’re passionate about something, it will always be easy.
So many young people believe that if they’re passionate about something, the world should roll out its red carpet for you. This mindset thinks passion should make it easy to gain skills, take on important projects, and see them through to completion. If you’re passionate about something, after all, it was meant to be, and is guaranteed to happen.
truth: passion doesn’t eliminate the climb, it just gives you a reason to keep going.
At its core, passion is not emotion, but rather conviction. Every meaningful thing in life will take hard work and persistence to accomplish, regardless of how you feel about it. Passion for your work or goal will give you the conviction to keep going, even when you feel like giving up. But passion does not make up for a lack of skill, talent, or wisdom. There are a lot of passionate people who fail spectacularly because they think their passion will magically solve every problem ahead of them. Just because you’re passionate about something doesn’t mean it’s the right time or you’re the right person to do it.
Instead, passion gives you the motivation and encouragement to keep going as you go through the tough work of taking risks, making mistakes, and getting better. Passion doesn’t make life easier, but it will help make you stronger. Layer passion on top of talent, skill, and wisdom and you will set yourself up to thrive. When I’m frustrated, discouraged, and want to give up, I ask myself, “Why do I care about this?” and use that answer to encourage myself.
myth #6: if you follow your passion, you deserve to make money at it.
Many young people are told that if they’re passionate about something, then that needs to be their job. And if your passion becomes your job, they’re led to believe, then you’ll never have to work another day in your life.
truth: while some passions overlap with work, many others are best done on the side.
Fundamentally, you make money at work when you solve a problem that someone else values. It doesn’t matter how passionate you are about something, if it doesn’t solve a problem other people care about you won’t make money. Passion is good, but if you want to get paid for it you need to combine it to create value for the customer.
Every young person in their first job quickly realizes, “I’m not that passionate about this.” This gives you two options: you can either develop your passion on the side until you become good enough to charge for it, or you can keep it on the side as a hobby. Many passionate people started out with a “pay the bills” job while they grow their skills in their area of passion. Other people realize that what they like doing for a few hours a week would become drudgery if they had to do it full time, and are okay pursuing their passions outside of work.
so what now?
Passion is a great thing to have and to develop in life, but don’t let these common misconceptions create unrealistic idealism towards your work and career. Use passion to foster you conviction and to help you persevere through the ups and downs of work, but don’t blindly follow its whims.
seven mindsets that will hold your organization back
What’s the most important thing you need to succeed in your career? Talent? Skills? Connections? While these three things are important, everyone overlooks the role your mindset plays in being successful. So many young people are talented, skilled, and connected, but don’t reach their potential because they’ve adopted broken mindsets.
What’s the most important thing you need to succeed in your career? Talent? Skills? Connections? While these three things are important, everyone overlooks the role your mindset plays in being successful. So many young people are talented, skilled, and connected, but don’t reach their potential because they’ve adopted broken mindsets. I’ve compiled these seven harmful mindsets so that you can be aware of them in your organization, and ensure that you don’t fall prey to the same thinking. Good thinking will take you places that your talent, skills, and connections alone won’t take you.
bad mindset 1: your organization allows a disconnect between what’s talked about (words) and what’s done (actions).
This mindset happens when people talk a good game about what the organization is doing, but none of it ever takes places. Business leaders talk about being innovative, but cannot name the last time innovative product they created. Church leaders will go on about their commitment to discipleship or evangelism or the poor, no one is really being changed. A person will wax poetic about their dynamic leadership, but can’t tell you what they’ve led. Talk is cheap, action is hard, yet most mission statements, goals, and initiatives never make it beyond the word stage. Life isn’t about what you know, but rather what you do consistently.
Why it’s so dangerous: When we talk about things that we never do, it allows you to skip having to do the hard work of putting your words into action. Saying the right words inoculates your organization from any criticism of a lack of action. “Look,” they say, “of course we care about issue X, we talk about it all of the time.” This compounds the problem, because not only is nothing happening, but the organization has deceived itself through its words. This creates situations where:
Most business never become innovative because they already think they they are.
Most churches can never do the hard ministry work (evangelism, discipleship, serving the poor/needy), because everyone assumes that since the leadership talks about it all the time it must be happening.
Organizations lack strong leaders because the leadership positions are full of people who talk about doing the hard things, rather than ever doing them.
What to do about it: Whenever you talk about what you’d like to do, ask yourself or others whether this actually leads to any action. Work to be a person of action, and only say you do something if you have actively done it recently, and not because it is a trendy thing to say.
bad mindset 2: your organization places the blame for failure on factors outside of the organization’s Control
In this mindset the organization believes that the problems it faces are primarily caused by external forces outside their control.
“With the way society is going, you would expect attendance to go down.”
“The economy is tough right now so it’s not surprising things are slow.”
“Our donors are being stingy right now. What’s wrong with them?”
This mindset occurs when you need a scapegoat for a poor situation or performance. When an initiative fails or revenue is down, people need to blame something other than themselves.
Why It’s Dangerous: This mindset makes your organization into a victim of the situation around it. When thinking this way, you forfeit agency over your situation and give it to external factors that you cannot control. It allows you to blame other things so that you don’t have to do the hard work of changing yourself. When it’s not your fault there’s nothing you can do, after all.
What To Do: Quit worrying about the things outside of your control and start focusing on the things that you can control. Don’t fixate on the fixed things outside of your sphere of influence, and spend your time and energy changing what you can control. Always ask, “Since I can’t control those things, what could I control that would help improve this situations?”
bad mindset 3: your organization believes everything can stay the same yet the results will get better.
In this mindset, the organization knows it has problems, but keeps waiting for them to fix themselves. People expect things to magically get better the next time around. You can find this mindset whenever there is a lot of hoping and wishing: “I hope that more people will come next month,” or “Hopefully in the future our budget won’t be so tight,” but there is no action or even acknowledgement of the need for change. Different results always require different actions.
Why this is so dangerous: Hope is important, but hope is not a plan. When you are only hoping things will get better, you can avoid the messiness of having to actually figure out why things aren’t working. Change is a scary process, and weak leadership will avoid it because digging into an organization’s brokenness may reflect poorly on them. People use this mindset to sugarcoat their situation, and so that no one ever has to be the bad guy. But when this happens, organizations just slowly atrophy and die.
What to do about it: Do the hard work of admitting the root causes of why the failure is happening. Then, come up ways to address these root causes and implement them. If you are a leader and the thing you are leading is not working, be willing to admit that you may be part of the problem and need to change. Leaders often shut these conversations down because they know they will involve a discussion of their leadership decisions.
bad mindset 4: your organization keeps waiting for a more opportune time to act.
In this mindset, an organization decides to delay an initiative or change in hope that there’s a future time when it would more easier. You hear things like “This is a really busy season for everyone, let’s wait until things calm down.” or “I’d like to have more money saved up before we try this out.” Individuals struggle with this one a lot, saying things like, “I’d like to start exercising now, but it will be easier once it’s spring so I will wait until then.”
Why this is so dangerous: Waiting for an opportune time isn’t about patience, but fear. You are afraid that your idea won’t work, so you keep pushing it off into the future, maintaining how great it’ll be once it happens. Secretly, though, you’ve never dealt with your fear that it won’t work. This is dangerous because years will go by and you’ll have never expanded into a new market, never planted a new church, or never made the career switch that you wanted to.
What to do about it: Do two things: first, figure out the crucial steps to the success of your idea. Then throw your energy into these important steps that will actually move the needle, not just making you feel better about procrastinating. Secondly, recognize that you will never be able to remove all of the risk from a situation. Eventually you just have to jump in and start swimming.
bad mindset 5: organizations assume that since they excel at one thing, they must do everything well.
Every organization has something that they excel in, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. They have a great product, friendly service, or attractive marketing, just to name a few possibilities. But in this mindset, an organization will use a strength to immunize itself against criticism of any of its weaknesses. You can tell this exists when an organization uses an unrelated strength as an antidote to why criticism is unfounded.
Why this is dangerous: Your strengths help you grow, but your flaws left unchecked can cause you to blow up. Kodak is a classic example; they took such great pride in being the leader of film-based camera equipment that they closed themselves off to the fact that their customers were switching to digital cameras.
What to do about it: When someone brings up a weakness or criticism of your organization, don’t respond by shifting the focus to your strengths. Understand that other people and organizations have strengths that you can learn from, even if they are weak in areas that you are strong.
bad mindset 6: your organization labels anyone who disagrees or critiques something as uncommitted or misinformed.
When an organization begins to dismiss any disagreement or critique as examples of disloyal behavior, it is in danger of putting its head in the sand about key problems that it’s facing. There’s an attitude of, “If you were really with us, you would see that everything is great.”
Why this is dangerous: There are a lot of organizations that are not great, and need to change if they want to survive. This mindset silences dissent and rewards blind agreement, which leaves the organization vulnerable to groupthink and overconfidence. It also negates one of an organization’s biggest strengths, the ability for an array of perspectives and experiences to contribute to solving a problem.
What To Do: Recognize that no one in an organization has all of the information needed for it to succeed. Leadership, employees, and customers/members all have unique types of knowledge that are valuable to decision making. Also, leaders and managers need to see critique not as personal attacks on them, in most cases, but rather different strengths complementing each other.
bad mindset 7: organizations believe that since it’s worked to this point, so it will continue to work in the future.
Many people and organizations are lulled to sleep to the idea that the world isn’t changing. This happens because the physical world around them looks the same; they work in the same office, drive the same streets, and live in the same house. Because everything appears the same, they downplay how much the emotional and intellectual world is changing around them. Yet every 20-25 years there is a new generation with different attitudes, goals, and beliefs about the world. New technology and techniques create different challenges and opportunities that must be acknowledged and adjusted for.
Why this is dangerous: Most organizations think that if they ever decline, there will be warning signs which give them plenty of time to make adjustments. But life rarely happens that way. A new competitor springs up and everyone flocks to them. A church goes through a rough patch and in six months half of their members leave. Assuming what you’ve done will always work gives your organization permission to be out of touch with its customers and/or members.
What to do about it: Strong organizations gather feedback about what works and what doesn’t in order to understand cultural changes while they are still small. This allows the organization to make incremental changes that keep it healthy. With this in mind, organizations need to constantly analyze ways they need to grow or change with the future in mind. Also, keep in mind Steve Jobs’ advice that people rarely know what they want, so it is on the organization to create what they don’t even know they need yet.
conclusion
There’s nothing easy about changing these mindsets. But unless they are acknowledged and addressed, they will continue to plague your organization and disrupt your efforts to succeed. If you do the hard work of digging up and replacing these rotten mindsets, you’ll see your efforts rewards for years to come.
five things you need to quit in your twenties
Every young person knows they need to grow in their twenties. The question, though, is how? Most young people assume you grow by adding new skills and behavior to your life. While that’s one way to grow, don’t forget you also need to grow through subtraction, by getting rid of negative attitudes and behaviors.
Every young person knows they need to grow in their twenties. The question, though, is how? Most young people assume you grow by adding new skills and behavior to your life. While that’s one way to grow, don’t forget you also need to grow through subtraction, by getting rid of negative attitudes and behaviors.
It’s easy to underestimate how much your negative behaviors sabotage your strengths, tainting your positive attitudes and abilities. So if you want to see sustained growth, you need to quit these five behaviors that hold so many young people back. I write as someone who has and currently struggles with all of five of these things. But as you become more aware of them, you’re life will be healthier. So in your twenties, you need to quit:
1. ...complaining:
It’s easy to go through your twenties complaining about the world around you. Since you’re at the beginning of your career, you’re not in control of many situations, which causes many young people to respond by complaining, grumbling about their dissatisfaction or annoyance with the way things are.
Why you need to quit this: Even though complaining feels good in the moment, it never does anything to improve the situation. Complaining makes you feel like you’re actually doing something, but it actually causes passivity, since the problem, after all, is their fault, not yours. Complainers take on a victim mentality, and forfeit all responsibility to ever find a way to improve a situation. Complaining poisons workplaces and friendships with a spirit of negativity and hopelessness, and makes you a drag to be around.
What to do instead: If you want to quit complaining you need to do two things. First, ask yourself, “How am I contributing to the situation I’m complaining about?” You always have a role to play in the problem, even if it’s the fact that you’re not doing anything. Secondly, since almost all complaining happens to a third party, you need to either drop the complaint or initiate a non-accusative discussion with the person you have a problem with. Quitting complaining doesn’t mean you ignore problems or sweep them under the rug, but rather forces you either to forgive the problem, or take action to solve the root cause. No more passive grumbling to other people.
2. ...criticizing:
While criticizing is similar to complaining, unlike complaining, it comes from a place of moral superiority. The critic believes they know best, and so they look down on others with pride as they point out other people’s flaws and mistakes.
Why you need to quit this: Young people often become critical because they’re overly idealistic about the possibility of perfection. While it’s good to have high standards, life is complicated, and no matter how hard you try, there will always be problems and things that could be improved. Critics often use their intellectual ideals to tear down the people who are actually out there doing the hard work, albeit imperfectly. Critics, because of their pride, imply the underlying message, “If I were doing this, it would be better.” It’s easy to point out flaws and problems, but hard to do things well. While criticism is offered under the guise of being helpful, it always damages relationships and freezes progress.
What to do instead: Before criticizing someone, why don’t you step out of your bystander role and actually try to do what you’re critiquing better than that person. If you do, you’ll recognize you underestimated how difficult and complex the job or task is. And if you really want to see improvement, stop criticizing and start encouraging. While criticism feeds your prideful ego, encouragement gives people the life they need and establishes a relationship where you can actually influence them in a helpful way.
3. ...comparing:
As you go through your twenties, every young person looks for yard-markers to judge yourself against. While it’s okay to know where other young people are at, comparison is all about getting your identity from whether you’re ahead or behind your peers.
Why you need to quit this: Young people use comparison to search for a relative identity, finding their value in being ahead of others. The problem with comparison is that when you compare favorably, you’ll look down on others, and when you compare unfavorably, you’ll look down on yourself. And since there will always be young people ahead and behind in life, you’ll fluctuate between subtle arrogance and hidden despair, always struggling with insecurity.
What to do instead: Instead of finding your identities according to how you compare to others, you need to find your identity in Christ and what He has done. This allows to be trust God and find joy in who He has made you to be. God’s created everyone differently, giving each young person a different starting point and a different life to live. To spend your twenties comparing yourself to others devalues how God creates a diversity of gifts and callings to accomplish His plan for the world.
4. …avoiding:
Avoiding is when you know what you should do, but you put it off because it’s hard or uncomfortable. Many young people avoid difficult conversations, decisions, endings, or new beginnings, all because the status quo offers short-term security. When you avoid, you prioritize short-term comfort over long-term health.
Why you need to quit this: It’s easy in your twenties to ignore the negative and focus on the fun, pushing any problems out of mind. Ignoring a problem, though, never makes it go away, and instead allows it to fester until its even bigger, requiring more time and money to solve, while creating more pain along the way. If you don’t learn how to take on uncomfortable things, you forfeit your ability to solve an issue when its small and on your terms, and instead will have to deal with it as it blows up at the worst possible time.
What to do instead: Get in the habit of regularly asking yourself, what is one thing I’m avoiding right now? Maybe it’s responding to a tough email, engaging in a hard conversation, or even just looking at your credit card statement. Gulp. Remind yourself how good it will feel to have this behind you, and then either complete the task at least take the first step towards completion.
5. …waiting to be asked:
Most young people, despite their desire to have an impact, won’t do something unless someone asks them. Everyone waits around for an older adult to ask them, thinking they need someone’s permission to get started.
Why you need to quit this: If you wait around for someone to ask you, it will probably never happen. Most middle-aged people are so busy with their own issues, they don’t have time to read your mind and hand-pick you for a certain opportunity. So many young people never get started because they passively wait for an adult to pick them, never doing the thing they care about. Meanwhile, middle-aged adults wait for young people to show initiative before they give them responsibility. This often happens for two reasons: either you lack the confidence in your gifts and God’s leading, or, you don’t want to do the hard beginning work, and would rather have the glamor of being put in charge.
What to do instead: Don’t wait for someone to choose you, choose yourself instead. If God has put something on your heart, find a way to get started. Volunteer with an organization, ask someone how they got involved, or build a cheap website and go for it. Find a small way to begin and trust that if you are faithful in the little things, over time you’ll grow in your responsibilities. Yeah, it might be a little scary, but the best things in life always are.
what now?
Your life and your opportunities will expand as you quit these behaviors and begin to take responsibility and initiative for your life. The great thing about these five behavior is that it doesn’t take any money or talent to quit them. So get out there and start quitting!
do you feel too busy? it’s not due to a lack of time
Do you feel like you never have enough time for everything you need to do? If you’re like most people, you struggle with busyness. You rush through your days and weeks, trying to pack just a few more things in. Your days fill up with work, meetings, social events, and friendships, before you jam grocery shopping and errands into the few remaining openings.
“People are often so busy living they never stop to wonder why.” — Terri Pratchett
Do you feel like you never have enough time for everything you need to do? If you’re like most people, you struggle with busyness. You rush through your days and weeks, trying to pack just a few more things in. Your days fill up with work, meetings, social events, and friendships, before you jam grocery shopping and errands into the few remaining openings. Your life often feels like a hamster wheel; you’re doing more and more, but other than the occasional vacation, there never seems to be an end in sight.
So what can you do about busyness? Most people don’t want to be busy, it just happens slowly over time. They say yes to more work, another friendship, or a new opportunity, and after a few years they’re lives become hectic and stressful. No matter how much you get done, though, you still feel behind. But yet to not be busy feels irresponsible, like you’re wasting your life and your potential. So what should you do? How do you solve the problem of busyness in your life?
why you live in a busyness culture
Before you can solve your busyness problem, you have to understand why it happens. Lots of people try to attack their busyness, never understanding that busyness is only a symptom of their lifestyle, not the cause. If you ever want to change, you need to understand the two underlying cultural beliefs that create busyness in your life. They are:
1. The desire for unlimited progress: our culture fixates on the idea of progress, and the desire to always be moving forward. Think about when you are happiest; it’s almost always when you are getting things done, whether it’s at work, school, or just around the house. Progress, and its culmination, achievement, drive our society, from the high school student wanting to get better grades to the Fortune 500 CEO wanting to increase earnings.
Progress isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. God, after all, wants you to cultivate the gifts and resources He’s given you. But progress becomes a problem when you begin to believe in unlimited progress. When you think you’re entitled to unlimited progress, you’re never satisfied with what you’ve done, and feel like you should be getting more and more done.
When you expect unlimited progress, you’ll find it hard to ever stop, driving harder and harder to get more done. Our culture’s beliefs that there is no limit to the amount of progress you can make creates a never-satiated thirst for more, whether it’s to do more work, see more friends, or have more experiences.
2. An unlimited amount of opportunities: While ours is not the first culture to pursue unlimited progress, it’s added a new feature: unlimited opportunities. Due to the internet and globalization, the world appears like a never-ending place of opportunity. Get on instagram and you’ll be met with an unlimited number of people to meet, restaurants to try, jobs to do, and places to travel. Every you are presented with enough options, information, and opportunities to fill up ten lifetimes.
The perceived existence of an “infinite world” creates a pressure to experience it all. You feel the need to do more and more, all in an attempt to experience a greater percentage of the world. But the problem with this, is that the more you do, the more you realize how much you haven’t done. And so you get stuck in a never-ending cycle, the more you pursue opportunities, the more you realize you need to do more in order to experience all of them.
when these two combine
When you combine a desire for unlimited progress with an unlimited amount of opportunities, you create the unstemmed busyness that so many people struggle with. This is the root cause of the busyness problem. These two things, while independently and in moderation are good, feed off each other to create a high-strung drive to experience and do more and more. When you try to integrate a desire for unlimited progress and the availability of unlimited opportunities with your limited time and energy, you get the current busyness problem.
Given this tension, most people try to solve their busyness by increasing their efficiency. “If I could just get more done,” they think, then they wouldn’t feel so busy. So they ratchet up their effort, at work, at home, and in all of life. But in a world that desires unlimited progress and opportunities, the time saved by greater efficiency always gets used to pursue more things, rather than to ever stop being busy.
Think how many time-saving things have been introduced over the last 100 years: electricity, indoor plumbing, washing machines, dishwashers, computers, smartphones, and the million time saving things these advances bring. Our culture has adopted so much time-saving technology, but we’ve only gotten busier because we’ve never addressed our underlying appetites for unlimited progress and opportunity. It doesn’t matter how efficient you are, if you won’t stop trying to jam more things into your limited time and energy.
the right solution
Because of this, the answer to your busyness problem is not time-management, multi-tasking, or increased efficiency, but rather focus. Repeat after me: busyness is not a lack of time, but a lack of focus. Since every human has a limited amount of time and energy, you need to focus, limiting the amount of progress you attempt to make and the number of opportunities you pursue.
Limits! This sounds terrible to the modern mind. Limits sound like you’re giving up, like your accepting mediocrity and inferiority. But unless you focus on the few things that are most important, you’ll chase so many things you’ll never do any of them well.
Busyness is not a prerequisite to modern life, but rather a decision you choose to make when you refuse to focus. An unfocused life tries to pursue everything, which is an attempt at an unlimited life. You may get by for a while, but eventually, if you live above your limits, you’ll crash. Healthy people ignore our culture’s cries for unlimited progress and its fascination with unlimited opportunity, and instead focus on making steady progress on the opportunities you’ve been called to.
why busyness is actually laziness
See, at its heart, busyness is caused by laziness. No, not physical laziness, but mental laziness. Busy people are too mentally lazy to do the hard work of both figuring out what their priorities are, and then saying no when unimportant opportunities present themselves.
In order to live a meaningful and impactful life, you’ll have to cut out lots of good things, so that you can focus on the main thing. If you don’t, you’ll live a frantic and scattered life. People with no focus might appear at first like they are getting a lot done, but their inability to respect their limits and maintain one direction, prevent them from investing in one thing long enough to ever make a meaningful impact. If you try to do everything you’ll never have enough time, but if you pursue what God has created you for, you’ll realize life is just the right length.
The reason unfocused people never reach their long-term potential, is because of how much time and energy it takes to build deep friendships, valuable skills, and meaningful wisdom. If you ever want to solve your busyness problem, you have to admit you can make as much progress or experience as many opportunities as you’d like. Everyone overestimates how much they can do and experience in one lifetime, and busyness is the result. You need to admit you have limits, define your priorities, and focus your time and energy on these few things.
why you fight your limits
Admittedly, to do this is hard. Your heart hates limits and the focus it requires. Because of this, the only way to truly solve your busyness is to let the Gospel shape how your heart views our culture’s two unlimited desires:
1. Your desire for unlimited progress points to Christ’s work: when you pursue unlimited progress, it’s because you’re looking to create your identity from your own achievements. You have to work longer, harder, and make more progress than everyone else in order to be worthy of love. The Gospel says God loves you because Christ’s achievements have been given to you. When you rest in that, you can take a break from having to do more and more, because your identity in Christ is not based on how much you achieve in one lifetime.
2. Your desire for unlimited opportunities point to heaven: your pursuit of unlimited opportunities shows that your heart yearns for a world where time will never limit you, where you’ll be able to see and experience all of the things in the world. The Gospel says this is your heart desiring to be in heaven with God, where you’ll spend eternity with people from every tribe, nation, and language, experiencing the richness of every part of the whole world. This allows you to say no to things in this life, because you know you’ll be able to experience them for all eternity in the new heavens and earth.
so what now?
If you’re struggling with busyness, look at your life and find where you’re trying to do too much. When you find these areas, figure out if it’s because you are trying to use them to build an identity outside of Christ, or if you are forgetting that this life is short compared to the eternity with God that awaits.
If you let these two Gospel truths seep into your heart, it will allow you to embrace your God-given limits and learn to focus on the specific career, community, and opportunities He has called you to. While this won’t be easy, you can become content in your focus, knowing that God loves you regardless of how much you get done, and wants you to spend eternity with Him, experiencing every good thing that He’s created.
why you aren’t growing spiritually, and what you need to do about it
Have you ever had a moment where you realized the gospel was the most important thing ever? Maybe it was a weekend retreat, or a mission trip, or just time alone with God that ignited a faith that view everything differently. You had a fresh view of God’s grace and love for you, and couldn’t wait to use your life to serve God.
Have you ever had a moment where you realized the gospel was the most important thing ever? Maybe it was a weekend retreat, or a mission trip, or just time alone with God that ignited a faith that view everything differently. You had a fresh view of God’s grace and love for you, and couldn’t wait to use your life to serve God.
But as the years passed, your excitement for God faded, leaving you going through your cultural Christian routine. You still go to church, hang out with Christians, and try to read your Bible, but your current Christianity feels more social club than spiritual force. So what happened to that excited young Christian who was so committed to a Christ-centered life?
why your problem isn’t what you think it is
Admittedly, it’s easy to become spiritually flat. You’re grounded in your faith, but your previous excitement for God’s Kingdom seems a long time ago, and you don’t feel the same spiritual connectedness to God. And yet you’re not sure why. Sure, life is busy, but you followed your church’s programs and teachings, avoiding the bad and pursuing the good, but even with that, your relationship with God feels flat.
Jesus knew the challenges of maintaining a vibrant relationship with God, and in the parable of the sower, He warns you of the major pitfalls surrounding your spiritual life. He specifically uses the third soil to illustrate what so many of us struggle with, this slow fade from excited for God, to merely existing for Him.
In the third soil, the seed that gets planted grows into a plant, but thorny weeds grow up alongside it, and choke the plant before it can produce mature fruit. While Jesus’ general teaching is clear, the key question becomes, what are the thorny weeds that choke your relationship with God?
so what are the thorns?
When I moved to New York City, I had heard the hype of the spiritual dangers here. Christians warned me about the secular culture, the negative influences, and the different lifestyles that could draw me away from God. So my guard was up against everything that was “bad,” careful to not become another “Christian loses his faith” scare story.
This is how we naturally teach this parable. In our minds, the thorns that choke out faith should represent the “bad” things of our world, a secular city, atheist professors, or immoral people. But Jesus’ explanation surprises; the thorns don’t represent the bad things of life, but rather the good things: the cares, riches, and pleasures of life. What? It doesn’t make sense. Why does Jesus call things God created good dangerous to your spiritual life?
If you look at the three categories, the things Jesus calls thorns are all necessary and good parts of life:
Cares of life: these are the ordinary concerns of life: your physical needs, such as food, bills, housing, but also you emotional needs and concerns, such as friendships, relationships, and community.
Riches of life: this is more than just money, including how you make your money (work, career, and promotions), as well as how you spend your resources, (possessions, lifestyle, and social capital).
Pleasures of life: these are the things in life you enjoy: friendships, restaurants, travel, movies, TV, sports, recreation, concerts, hobbies, relaxation, and comfort.
There’s nothing overtly evil about any of these things. In fact, lots of Bible verses calls these things blessings and encourage you to pursue them. So why does Jesus flip the script here?
why are good things bad?
Jesus doesn’t call these good things thorns because they’re inherently evil, but because of what the human heart does with them. Jesus knows you get so busy pursuing the good things in life that you get distracted from the best thing, Him. And when the good takes away from the best, it becomes bad.
During my first year in New York, I had so many good things to do. I had to figure out this new city, meet new friends, and build my cleaning business. Soon I had real money for the first time ever, and I had almost unlimited opportunities around me to do fun and interesting things. And so I became busy, filling my life with the cares, riches, and pleasures of life. So how did these good things go wrong?
why good things go bad
Like always, Jesus wants you to examine your heart, especially its inability to ever be satisfied.
As we saw in a previous essay, every young person inherently thirsts for more, thinking they’re just one thing away from finally reaching real happiness. But when you get that, you’re happy for a while, but eventually the shine wears off and the thirst returns.
Since these good things can never satisfy your heart, they’ll grow until they take up all of your life. The human heart struggles to say, “Enough,” instead, wanting more and more every year:
“I’d like to be more comfortable, so I need a nicer apartment.”
“I’d like to have a nicer lifestyle, so I need to work longer hours in order to get ahead.”
“I’m stressed from working all the time, so I need another vacation.”
This game of addition requires more time, attention, money, and mental energy to manage. And before you know it, once good things dominate your life, stealing all of the nutrients away from your relationship with God.
why this is so dangerous?
After I’d lived in New York a few years, I realized I my relationship with God had atrophied. I was going through the motions of Christianity, but I’d lost my earlier excitement to live for Christ. I was going to church every week, my closest friends were all Christians, and I wasn’t do anything bad, but something was off, and I couldn’t figure out why.
The problems was that I didn’t understand this teaching from Jesus. My life was so full of good things, of the everyday needs and desires to enjoy life, that they choked my relationship with God. I had no time to connect with God, to pray to Him or listen to His voice. And as the initial shine of the good things wore off, the emptiness of being disconnected from God began to set in.
why this happens?
There’s a story in C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where an older demon counsels a younger demon on how to get people to resist Christianity. He tells the younger demon to never argue with people about Christianity, as that gets them thinking about it. Instead, the best way to stunt a Christian’s growth is to distract them, to keep them so preoccupied with the ordinary things of life that they never think about meaningful spiritual things.
And that’s what Satan does with Christian young people. Satan distracts you with the daily concerns of life, so that you never have time to spend with God. This is a dangerous trick, since Christians use the “good” label to justify their wholehearted pursuit of these things. It’s easy to inoculate yourself against conviction, since you can always say that travel, or money, or comfort is just a sign of God’s blessing, and you shouldn’t reject God’s blessings, right? Satan gets you to rationalize away your over-desires away, explaining to yourself that you’re just doing what’s normal.
how do you know if you struggle with this?
If you’re not sure if you the good things are choking out the best thing, Jesus gave a litmus test for you: are you producing mature fruit? In the parable of the sower, the good soil produces an abundant harvest of ripe fruit, while the plant in the weedy soil only produces small, green, unripe fruit.
Like plants, God created you, when you’re spiritual healthy, to produce fruit. If a healthy plant receives sunshine, water, and nutrients, it always produce a harvest. In the same way, if you’re connected to Christ, you will always be producing mature spiritual fruit. So, if you aren’t producing ripe, mature fruit, something’s wrong. Your relationship with God isn’t getting the nutrients it needs.
That’s how I knew something was off in my New York City spiritual life: I fit the outward appearance of being a “strong Christian,” but I wasn’t producing mature fruit. I never outwardly rejected God, I just never had time for Him. And so I would always push Him off until tomorrow, so that I could pursue more “good” things today.
So take a moment to look at your life. Are you producing mature spiritual fruit? I think for most young people, you’ll find that you’re much better at producing societal fruit, such as career success, a comfortable lifestyle, and exciting vacations, than spiritual fruit, like self-denial, sacrifice, and obedience.
how do you get rid of these weeds?
There’s good news, though. God is gracious to you, and He loves you not because of the fruit you’ve produced, but rather because of Christ’s fruit, His righteousness, applied to you. But Jesus wants you to evaluate your relationship with God, to make sure you’re connected to Him. Getting distracted from God is a part of being human, but like the Good Shepherd He is, Jesus will always work in your life to draw you back to Himself.
When God shows you your weeds, you’ll be tempted to try to yank them out. But if you do that, another weed will soon grow up. The problem, remember, is not the good thing, but how your heart elevates the good things above God. Satan tells you it’s on you to get yours, because you can’t trust God to care and provide for you. Because of this, the only way to get rid of the weeds is to start trusting God in each of these areas:
Cares of life: You need to give up your illusion of control over your life, and instead trust that true security is only found in God. Jesus calls you not to be anxious about the cares and concerns of your life, but to instead cast your cares onto your Heavenly Father.
Treasures of life: You need to stop believing that value comes through physical wealth, and instead believe that true riches are only found in God. If you grasp this, you’ll stop trying to store up heaven on earth, and instead trust God to give you what you need, knowing that you have an eternal inheritance that can never fade away.
Pleasures of life: You need to stop believing that happiness is getting what you want, and instead believe that true joy is found in God’s presence. Earthly pleasures are good, but their fleeting nature points you to the eternal joy provided to you through your relationship with God.
moving forward
If you’re feeling spiritually stuck, you need to find the weeds that are choking off your relationship with God, and trust Him to be your greatest treasure and source of joy. The Christian life is not getting more good things, but rather getting the best thing, God Himself.
And so, if you feel like your relationship with God has grown distant, set aside some time today to reconnect with God. Pick a time to spend with God, even if it’s just to say, “God, I’m not sure how I’m doing.” And like the Heavenly Father He is, as you find your delight in Him, He will give you every good gift when you need it.
Four Steps to Sharing the Gospel in a Post-Christian Culture
"Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread." — D.T. Niles
People say sharing the gospel is hard. I used to believe them, but then I realized it was because they weren't sharing the gospel with people, but rather confronting them with it. Most people turn the good news of the gospel into bad news, confronting the other person until they became defensive. "No wonder nobody ever shares the gospel," I'd always think, "This is uncomfortable!"
But as I went through my twenties, just through meeting new people, I stumbled upon some simple steps that make it easy to share the gospel with anyone, even post-churched young people. I’ve found that when I share the gospel through this approach, many people actually thank me for talking to them! Kind of crazy, but it just shows how deep down everyone’s attracted to grace.
First, though, two general thoughts towards my approach:
I’m just sowing seeds: I’m never trying to force someone to make a decision for Jesus, but rather see most initial evangelism as a time to build a friendship and sow seeds.
I never force the conversation: when you use this approach, lots of people will talk about religious things. But even then, occasionally someone won’t, so if I sense they’re not comfortable, I never force anything. I just change the subject and move on.
Having said those things, here are four steps to help you share the gospel with anyone. The goal with these steps is to create a spiritual conversation where you can talk about grace.
1. Identify with Christianity
Most people struggle to share the gospel because they can never create a spiritual conversation. It can be difficult to move from everyday subjects to spiritual ones, which is why it’s import for you to figure out how to bring up your faith in everyday conversation. Here are just a few examples of how to identify with Christianity:
What did you do this weekend? (Oh I went to church and then hung out with some friends…)
How did you meet your friend/roommate/etc.? (I met him at church... )
Where you went to college? (a small Christian school...)
What you did you do after work last night? (I went to a community group, it’s like a Bible study...)
There are plenty of others, but the key is to let the other person understand you’re a Christian. People are always surprised, since they didn’t assume a normal person like you (you are normal, right?) would be a Christian, and often ask a follow-up question. Here’s the key difference from classic evangelism: after you’ve answered their question, don’t bring up your faith. Instead, move to step 2.
2. Ask if they have any religious/spiritual background
This question allows you to get to know what they believe, and, if they’ve asked you a question, it’s actually just polite to do the same. So I always ask, “Do you have any religious background? (If they seem more of a spiritual type I’ll use that word, and may even say experiences rather than background).
I’ve found that people actually love to answer this question. Why? Because we all love talking about ourselves! People will share all kinds of things about themselves, including their family religion, their own experiences with religion, and things they find hard/confusing about religion. I just let them talk, occasionally asking a clarifying question. It’s important to note, this question works for me because I love meeting people and am curious about them. I don’t think it would if they thought I was setting them up to bash them with some Christianity, which I’m not.
3. Share the gospel about yourself
As they talk about their background or experience with religion, they’ll be sharing pain points, difficulties, or misconceptions they have about religion in general or Christianity. I’ll try to pick one of these that I can identify with, and then show how the gospel solves that problem in my own life.
This is another key difference: I never share the gospel about someone else’s life, but only about my own. Why? This lets them understand the story of the gospel without putting them on the defensive. When you share the gospel about yourself, you get to speak strongly about sin (yours), while keeping them engaged to the end of the story (grace). If you try to share the gospel while applying it to someone’s life when they don’t understand it, you’ll always get stuck on, “Why are you saying I’m such a bad person?”
I always try to share about my brokenness in things that I’m guessing the other person will relate to. Old-school evangelism always fished for the “worst” sins they could find (are you sleeping with your girlfriend?), but I always look for sins we probably have in common. Here’s an example:
Guy (sharing about his religious background): It just seems like religion is full of a bunch of hypocrites trying to fake like they’re perfect.
Me: Yeah, that’s definitely hard…I think we all do that because we naturally want other people to think we’re better than we are. That’s one thing I find different about true Christianity, is that I don’t have to fake it anymore. On the inside I know I’m messed up and I know I’m not the person I should be. I mean, you think you’re a good person and then some girl breaks up with you...that shows you really quickly you’re not as nice as you think. But that’s the thing about Christianity. It’s actually not about trying to be perfect, but rather accepting that Jesus lived a perfect life in place of me. It sets you free from trying to fake it.
Them: Hmm, I’ve never thought about it like that before.
Every person has had rejection and not handled it well; it’s universal. So find sin in your life that you think the other person will relate to, and then show what the gospel does with that sin. Sharing the gospel about yourself lets you talk seriously about sin (your own), but also gives them low-pressure space to work through the gospel.
3b. Emphasize grace
Whatever happens in step 3, the main thing is to explain grace, in normal, everyday language. Everybody in the world thinks Christianity is about being a good person so that God will let you into heaven, so your main goal is to get them to understand grace, how Jesus lived the perfect life we couldn’t to restore our relationship to God, and now gives us salvation as a free gift. When you explain grace people can start to look at you quizzically, since it’s so different than anything they’ve ever heard. And just like in the Bible, people are always attracted to grace.
4. Acknowledge you’re just there to help
As we finish talking, I always tell them some variation of: “Hey, it’s been great talking, if you ever have any questions just let me know...I just enjoy helping people think through the big questions of life.” I want them to know that I’m just a friend who wants to help them, not a cult leader trying to recruit more members to his group. At this point, people always are really thankful for our conversation, since they’ve gotten a new perspective on Christianity/religion to think about.
Final thoughts:
Can you imagine that post-Christian young people would ever be not only not offended but actually thanking you for sharing the gospel with them! That is the power of being friendly, open with your own failures, sharing about grace, and rooting for the other person. Young people are still hungry for help with the spiritual questions of life, and they appreciate when someone can give them a little bit of help.
I don’t have any instant conversion stories to share, but that’s not what I’m after. With more and more young people knowing nothing about Christianity, the first step these people need is to meet a normal Christian and understand grace a little bit better. Becoming a Christian is a process, and God is the one orchestrating all of the little conversations to accomplish His ends. I’m not perfect, and I don’t share the gospel nearly as often as I could, but I hope this approach helps you see how you can scatter the seeds of the gospel in a non-threatening way.
your twenties are the capstone of your life, but rather the foundation
If you’re like most young adults, under your happy exterior you often struggle with feeling like you’re on a never-ending race against yourself, your expectations, and your peers. You’re worried about when you’ll get married, or when you’ll get a better job, or when your life will finally feel together, all of which causes you to push harder and harder, trying to achieve your goals faster than ever.
“Eventually I realized that success is not about big hits. It’s actually in the opportunity to improve." — Paul Ford
If you’re like most young adults, under your happy exterior you often struggle with feeling like you’re on a never-ending race against yourself, your expectations, and your peers. You’re worried about when you’ll get married, or when you’ll get a better job, or when your life will finally feel together, all of which causes you to push harder and harder, trying to achieve your goals faster than ever.
If you struggle with this kind of thinking, it’s because you’ve adopted what I call the capstone mindset to your twenties. This mindset sees your twenties as the culmination of your childhood, high school, and college years, which forces you to try to prove to everyone that you’re a success. This need to achieve in your twenties to show that you’re a somebody is what creates so much of the anxiety, tension, and pressure that young people struggle with today.
But there’s an alternative to seeing your twenties through the capstone mindset, what I call the foundation mindset. This approach treats your twenties not as a final exam for your growing up years, but rather as a time to build a strong foundation for your adult life. While this distinction sounds subtle, each approach creates a drastically different environment for this key decade in your life.
the capstone approach
When you take a capstone approach to your twenties, you look at this decade as the final piece of your childhood, a time when all of your hard work should come together into real achievement. Long ago, every stone building had a capstone, the final piece that held everything together and show that the building was finished. For most young people that think this way, the goals of your twenties are to achieve the following:
Get a high-status job and start to climb up the corporate ladder.
Make good money and live a comfortable and fun lifestyle with other similar people.
Get married, buy a home, and then have children.
These goals become the benchmarks against which you measure your twenties, and if you can complete them all by the time you’re thirty, then you’ll have finished your life and shown yourself, your peers, and your parents that you’ve arrived. You’ve justified all of the hard work you’ve put into your life so far, and can now rest easy, knowing that you’ve made it.
This mindset causes young people to approach their twenties like a final exam, a decade-long test to show whether their lives are a success or failure. If you reach these goals, then you get an A, but if you don’t, you get an F that will stay with you the rest of your life. And since your twenties go by quickly, the key value in the capstone approach is speed, so you spend these years striving, willing to work hard, play longer, and spend money you don’t have all to prove you’re a somebody.
the problems with the capstone mindset
I lived my twenties in this capstone mindset, feeling both internal and external pressure to do more and achieve it faster. And while the things I was pursuing weren’t inherently bad, my mindset twisted these desires into unhealthy things, so I was basing my self-worth off of how far along I felt. I was scared that if I didn’t achieve fast enough, I would be a failure. This mindset created three major problems in my life:
1. The need to constantly compare: I spent my twenties constantly comparing myself to both my peers and my own expectations, checking to see if I was ahead or behind where I “should” be. All around me my peers seemed to be ahead: some had better careers, others had more money, whiles others were married with children.
This caused me to spend my twenties anxious about my level of achievement, always struggling to feel like I was falling behind. And like I wrote about in "You Can't Have It All," no matter how much effort I gave I could never catch up to all of the different people I felt behind.
2. Preoccupied with the external: the capstone mindset caused me to put too much focus on the external appearance of success at the cost of internal growth, since I had to prove I was somebody special. This focus on the external caused me to spend time trying to appear successful, rather than building the character, self-discipline, and growth that will actually lead to true success.
Capstone young people learn to perform and fake “success,” all to appear that they’ve made it. When I was advancing in my career, status, and relationships I was happy, yet if I ever felt stuck I became scared. So in your external life you work to appear effortlessly happy, excited, and accomplished, but in your inner life, you struggle with emptiness, dissatisfaction, and feeling disconnected.
3. Take shortcuts to “success”: Because of this pressure to show you’re successful, young people take shortcuts to act like they’ve made it. Instead of taking time to explore who they are and what they’ve been created to do, many blindly follow society’s script towards whatever’s considered successful in their circles, which almost always involves more money and status.
In this mindset, young people choose a blueprint for their lives that’s safe, relatively easy, and can be accomplished quickly, all so that they can be successful as soon as possible.. They gravitate towards prestigious career paths with either large salaries or enviable lifestyles, eschewing anything that will require years of training, a long-term commitment, or lifelong obscurity. The goal is to be successful, rich, or famous, all by the time you’re 30.
The capstone mindset, and it’s desire to prove yourself, is what creates the current high-stress, pressure-filled race that is your twenties. I followed this mindset for most of my twenties, always putting more pressure on myself achieve faster and faster. Eventually, though, I realized that there was a healthier way to approach my twenties.
a different approach to your twenties
The foundation mindset to your twenties completely flips the script on the capstone mindset, saying that your twenties are not the culmination of your life, but rather a time to lay the groundwork for the rest of your life. The goal for your twenties changes from trying to prove your a somebody, to taking the time to build a strong foundation that can support the coming years of your adult life.
The foundation mindset rejects the idea that the goal of your twenties is to sprint to achieve as much as possible, and instead encourages you to view your twenties as a time to prepare for the marathon of life. The foundation mindset exchanges short-term thinking for long term thinking, replacing speed with patience. Patience is what will allow you to do the daily work of building a foundation for a healthy, stable, and truly successful life. These are the four major ways the foundation mindset differs from the capstone mindset.
1. You can find the right blueprint for your life: Rather than blindly following society’s “get status and money” script for your twenties, you can patiently figure out which life blueprint best fits you, and then take the time to get equipped with the skills, tools, and resources that you’ll need as you build your adult life. By knowing what blueprint you’d like to follow with your life, you can use your twenties to get the right degrees, experiences, and mentors need for the journey ahead.
2. Build your life on bedrock: Since every young person’s life starts as a swamp, full of bad habits, character flaws, and mistaken perspectives, the foundation approach says that you need to spend your twenties more concerned about getting down to bedrock by developing good character, self-discipline, and a knowledge of ultimate truth, than building tall achievements. While internal growth isn’t as flashy as external achievement, if you don’t build on bedrock values, your life will collapse when difficult times come.
3. Be willing to start small: Because so many young people in the capstone mindset expect their twenties to be full of their lives’ crowning achievements, they grow disillusioned when they don’t experience success quickly or easily. The key to building a meaningful life is patience and perseverance, and if you are willing to start small and get a little better every day, you can accomplish so much over a lifetime . Many young people refuse to do something unless it happens quickly, and so they cut themselves off from the power of incremental growth.
If you follow the foundation approach to your twenties, there will still be times that you feel behind your expectations and your peers. But when you use your twenties to build a healthy foundation for your life, you will be preparing yourself to continue growing for many years to come. Rather than peaking in your twenties, you will be equipped to grow to new heights for the rest of your life.
why everyone follows the capstone approach
Most young people, however, struggle to treat their twenties as the foundation for their adult life, and instead return again and again to the capstone approach, trying to rush their way to success as soon as possible. While everyone is different, this usually happens for three major reasons.
1. Self-doubt: because of self-doubt, most young people spend their twenties feeling like they need to prove their worth, both to themselves and others. And so you take good life goals and force them to happen, all because you’re afraid you’re failure if you haven’t reached them all by the time you’re thirty. This causes young people to make rushed decisions, doing something not because it’s a good fit, but just to justify their existence.
2. Fear of the unknown: it’s easy to rush into a decision (job, marriage, grad school, career path, where to live) not because you know what decision you should make, but rather because you are tired of living with the unknown. It’s not wrong to achieve or advance during your twenties, but you should do these things when they are the right decision. Many young people force bad decisions to happen, all so they can keep up with all of their peers on the “my life is perfect” circuit.
3. The lure of consumerism: in our consumerist culture, lots of young people care about getting a certain lifestyle of experiences and possessions more than building a meaningful life. Because of this, they spend their twenties chasing money and status, always needing more of it to satiate their growing financial appetite. This causes them to spend their adult years stuck jobs and lives they don’t like, all to so they can keep their head above water on all of their monthly payments.
conclusion
The foundation approach, at its heart, is about being patient to gain the skills, wisdom, and internal strength to be ready to grow throughout your adult life, rather rushing to get the right external achievement, status, and appearance. If you feel behind in your life and discouraged at how your twenties are going, let go of your self-imposed deadlines and remember that your twenties aren’t a final exam, but rather a time to build a strong foundation for the long journey of your adult years.
five ways your relationship with God needs to change
As you grow in faith, every young person develops ideas and expectations about God that are more cultural than biblical. A crucial part of your twenties is discovering your misshapen views about God and replacing them with truth.
As you grow in faith, every young person develops ideas and expectations about God that are more cultural than biblical. A crucial part of your twenties is discovering your misshapen views about God and replacing them with truth. The following five changes are ones that most young people struggle with, and making each switch is key to developing a healthy relationship with God that’ll last the rest of your life.
1. from getting saved to getting God
Most Christians first encounter with Christianity is through the lens of needing to get saved. You know the lines: You messed up, so God is angry with you. Trust in Jesus and you’ll avoid Hell and God’s punishment. From this message, many young people put their trust in Jesus, but only out of an understanding of their brokenness and fear of God’s judgment. Then, once they’re saved and the threat of judgment goes away, they often ignore God, doing the bare minimum in order to feel good towards Him.
This is how I spent my life through my early twenties: since I was saved, I was free to get on with the rest of the things I wanted to accomplish in life. So I did the minimum to ensure I felt like a “good Christian” (church every week, tried to follow God’s rules, friends with other Christians, occasional Bible reading, prayer when things went crazy), but never prioritized a meaningful personal relationship with God. After all, who would want to spend much time with an angry, punishment obsessed God who says you can’t do anything fun
The ultimate goal of the gospel, though, is not to get saved, but rather to get God. Being saved from judgment is a great benefit of salvation, but the reason Jesus died for you was to restore your relationship with God. If you just use God for salvation and avoid true friendship with Him, you’re missing the true prize of the gospel. God saved you because He wants to spend time with you and see you delight in Him. So as you grow in your faith, understand that salvation isn’t just a “get out of hell free” card, but rather an invitation to enjoy an intimate relationship with your God.
2. from trying to please God to trusting God
Once we’ve believed the gospel, many of us learn that Christian growth is a matter of obeying God’s rules and avoiding sin. So we set out trying to please God through our obedience and self-discipline, hoping that if we are good enough God will be pleased with us. But eventually we all sin, and so we hide our sin from God and others, hoping to avoid the shame of being a “bad” Christian.
It’s easy to go through your twenties putting on the “everything’s great” face, while struggling beneath the surface, feeling like God’s disappointed and unhappy with you every time you sin. This causes you to isolate from God and resolve to work harder until you can be good enough to make God happy. But willpower just suppresses sin, and eventually it will come back, causing your relationship with God to ride the roller coaster of moral performance, leading you to isolate again out of shame and guilt.
But the gospel is never about pleasing God, but rather always first trusting Him with who He says you are. You are righteous in His sight, which allows you to take off your “good” person mask and trust that God accepts you through Christ and not your own moral performance. This means that when you do sin, you can bring your sin to Him without shame or judgment. Trusting God is about working on your sin together, as He work in your new heart to supernaturally change you. God is most pleased when you trust Him to change you, rather than trying to perform for Him through your own willpower.
3. from living your story to living God’s story.
As you enter your twenties, you have big dreams for where you want your life to go. Due to American individualism, we all learn at an early age to view the world from the lens of self, which causes us to think we are the most important person in any situation. The universe revolves around us, and so we learn to spend our time, energy, and resources pursuing our own version of a happy ending. God then becomes a supporting character in your story, providing the power to make your dreams happen.
In this perspective, your life is successful when your story goes according to plan, and a failure when it goes off-script. And when your life starts to veer off your pre-approved script, you grow discouraged with yourself and start blaming your supporting cast, especially God. If you approach your life this way, then every setback, failure, and disappointment will potentially crush you.
But life in God’s universe is the exact opposite; Jesus is the hero, not you. He’s the one who came to earth and defeated death. Because of this, God calls you to give up your illusion of being the lead, instead assigning you a supporting role. When you are willing to do this, you now are a part of God’s story, His renewal of all things for His glory. Now the brokenness and setbacks in your life aren’t signs that the stories wrong, but rather that Jesus is being glorified in your life. When you understand that the universe revolves around God, and not yourself, you will have long-term peace about your life, even when your own personal events don’t go as you’d like.
4. from telling God what to do to listening to Him
If your life is about getting your ideal story, then you will spend your time with God telling Hims what you’d like Him to do for you. Many Christians in their twenties treat God like Santa Claus, hoping that if they let Him know what they want and are good enough, they will get their list. And so you go to God with our plan for your life and a bargaining attitude: “God, I’ve done what you told me to do, so now it’s your turn to do what I’m telling you to do.” Prayer isn’t about fostering your friendship with God, but rather telling God what He needs to do in order for you to be happy with Him.
But the posture of a mature Christian isn’t telling God what He needs to do for you, but rather listening to what He wants to do with you. The Bible makes it clear over and over again: you don’t know what’s best for you, and if you got what you wanted, your life would be a disaster. Your pride causes you to think you know what’s best, but God will chip away at your self-reliance until you start listening to His will for your life. Prayer then becomes a time where you quiet your heart and listen to God’s direction, rather than pushing your agenda onto Him.
5. from blaming God to fearing God
Many young people, thinking life is about their story, love God when life’s great but begin to blame Him if they hit some bumps. After all, He’s not giving you what you “deserve.” God’s actively against you, you assume, since you’ve done everything He’s asked and He’s still not making your life perfect.
And so you go through your twenties blaming God when your dream life doesn’t quickly come into focus. “If He’s really all-powerful why doesn’t He just do something to fix this,” you might think. At this point many young people walk away from their faith, since they assume that a God that doesn’t meet their expectations must not care about them. This is the problem with the Santa Claus view of God: when He stops giving you the good life you won’t have much use for Him.
When you face difficulties, though, the Bible tells you not to blame God but to fear Him. No, not to be afraid of Him, but to stand before Him in awe and reverence, understanding that you’re just a little speck in His universe. If God is truly God, His ways will be far above your finite and limited thinking. Blaming God suggests that you are more wise and powerful than Him, while fearing God recognizes that you are created by and reliant on Him. Fearing God won’t make life easy, but it will let you trust that He is working for your good in ways you’ll never comprehend.
conclusion
These five shifts in thinking won’t happen all at once, but be on the lookout for how God uses everyday events to grow you and your relationship with Him. Now that you are aware of a few common misconceptions of God, you can catch yourself whenever you enter into those false narratives, and re-orient yourself through biblical truth.
hungry for hope
The January wind bit my face as I emerged from the subway onto the empty streets of lower Manhattan. It was 5:28 on a Monday morning, and I was on my way to volunteer for the first time at the New York City Rescue Mission. A friend had signed up to serve there through Hope for New York, an organization that supports non-profits like the rescue mission with funding and volunteers.
The January wind bit my face as I emerged from the subway onto the empty streets of lower Manhattan. It was 5:28 on a Monday morning, and I was on my way to volunteer for the first time at the New York City Rescue Mission. A friend had signed up to serve there through Hope for New York, an organization that supports non-profits like the rescue mission with funding and volunteers. He asked me if I would help serve breakfast, too. “Sure,” I said at the time, now questioning why I wasn’t still asleep at home.
“We got plain oatmeal or oatmeal with peaches,” the crew leader posed to each person. “Which one ya want?” “Peaches,” a tired voice mumbled. Gloop. I dipped the ladle into the deep pot of oatmeal and dished out a bowl. “Here you go.” My friend gave him a day-old bagel from a local shop and he disappeared to go eat. The next face stepped and the questions was repeated. “I’ll have the peaches.” Gloop. “Gimme a plain.” Gloop. “That got any sugar in it? Then give me a peach one.” Gloop. A hundred and sixty bowls of oatmeal later, I scraped the dregs out of the pans, swept and mopped the floors, and left that world to go back to my normal one.
I served the coffee the next week. “Good morning," I'd say, trying to be friendly but not glib, "Would you like some coffee?" Unlike the oatmeal line, everybody loved the coffee guy. “Oh yeah, gimme some of that good stuff!” “That’s my fuel, I love it!” “Man, you made it GOOD this morning,” they’d say as they came back for refills. Making other people happy made me happy, so I continued to go back every Monday morning to serve this new community.
Each week, participants in the mission’s programming served alongside the outside volunteers. Hesitant hellos and awkward introductions characterized our introductions at 5:30am. The participants hung back, to size us up, their eyes asking, “Can I trust you to know me and still accept me? Or will you reject me when you realize I don’t measure up?”
But slowly, walls came down. One morning, as we wrapped forks and spoons in napkins, different volunteers shared things they enjoyed about New York City. During a long pause, a voice from the far end of the table whispered, “I like the architecture.” It was a young woman, silenced by shame for the previous three weeks, testing the spirit of the group. Later, as we served the food, she began to open up, telling me about her family, her childhood, and her college degree in architecture. Every Monday at the mission broke down more and more walls between my new friends and me, as I listened to their stories of who they were and what they loved.
But as the weeks went by and I served the same oatmeal to the same people, my idealism began to deflate. Was I actually doing anything meaningful? As I reflected on this question, I realized I had confused my role. When we volunteer, we often want instant results, to be saviors who come in and solve people’s problems. But volunteering is not about lifting others up to our level, but to create a foundation for them to stand on themselves. My new friends didn’t need someone to fix them, but rather someone to help provide a stability for them to build off of. From there, I could encourage them as a peer, by listening to where they’d been and affirming where they wanted to go. The people at the rescue didn’t need someone to solve their problems, they instead needed hope, to activate their own gifts and abilities. And hope is a funny thing, because you can’t give it to people, you can only help foster it in them.
As I walked by a deli recently, I watched a homeless man scratch off a handful of lottery tickets. “What a waste of money?” I caught myself thinking. It dawned on me, though, that he didn’t play the lottery because he was bad at math, but rather because it was the only source of hope in his life. Hope that things could be different; hope that his life could get better.
You and I look down on public lotteries because we’ve already won a different one, the cosmic lottery. Out of all of the potential time periods, countries, and families we could have been born into, we’ve hit the jackpot. We’ve been born into a society of unlimited food, comfortable homes, and strong social and financial safety nets, blessed with the talent, encouragement, and opportunities to reach the upper echelons of the winners.
But if you’re a Christian, you know there’s no such thing as a cosmic lottery. Your life isn’t randomly assigned, but rather chosen for you by God. He’s blessed you with talent, resources, and opportunities that you did nothing to deserve. Unfortunately, our natural reaction isn’t to use those blessings for others, but to pursue more wins for ourselves.
God’s blessed us with so much hope, yet we fixate on getting even more. I hope I have a better weekend, a better job, a better apartment, and an overall better life. We've turned God's Kingdom into an individualistic pursuit, where we're content as long as He's giving us what we want. And in this obsession with our hopes, we lose sight of the many people around us who don’t have hope, and feel trapped in their current hardships.
Jesus’ life, though, cuts a radically different path. He left his comfortable life in heaven to sacrifice everything for you, to pursue you when you were broken, hurting, and without hope. How can I be glad Jesus gave his life to give me hope, but be unwilling to sacrifice to give that hope to others? So take a moment to ask yourself, “How can I use my gifts and resources God has blessed me with to cultivate hope in my community?” You might be surprised how God answers that question. It turns out I’m pretty good at serving oatmeal. Gloop.
jobs in your twenties are a means, not an end
As you grow up, you can’t help but absorb expectations for your life. Work and career are at the heart of these expectations, and as young people, we get caught up in the optimism of having our entire working lives in front of us. This optimism leads to a confidence that your dream job is just around the corner and you will soon be making a major impact on the world.
“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” — Debbie Millman
stuck in the doldrums
“Why am I here, God?” I thought. “Why doesn’t anyone see my potential? I’m supposed to be a somebody, with good grades and a bright future, and here I am working at a dog food factory? What’s going on?” It was the summer going into my sophomore year of college, and as my friends went off to their corporate internships, I settled into the only job I could find, a line worker at a nearby dog food factory.
The trial-sized bags of dog food spewing out of the packaging machine interrupted my grumbling. One, two, three, I started to count, putting twenty-five in a box and sending it through the taper. The only thing worse than the work was the smell of the cooking dog food, and I spent most days trying not to throw up. The clock taunted me on the wall as the minutes crept by. I hated the work, but needed the money, so I worked in the un-air conditioned factory all through the hot summer.
Eight years later, I was long past my dog food factory summer. I had slowly worked my way into better, gotten a masters, and was now in a gleaming midtown Manhattan skyscraper. But I still felt the same way about my work. Despite all the outward differences, my complaints hadn't changed at all. “Why doesn’t anyone recognize my potential here?” I thought. “Here I am, 28, and the only thing I do is send out emails and complete basic tasks.” I stared out of the window every day, frustrated with my role. I was nearing thirty, and felt haunted by the fact that an entire decade had almost slipped by and I still hadn't found the type of meaningful work I was looking for. Will my life make an impact, I wondered, or will I be stuck doing monotonous work forever?
the question underneath our expectations
As you grow up, you can’t help but absorb expectations for your life. Work and career are at the heart of these expectations, and as young people, we get caught up in the optimism of having our entire working lives in front of us. This optimism leads to a confidence that your dream job is just around the corner and you will soon be making a major impact on the world.
You expect you’re twenties to be one quick elevator ride to the top of your career. But after a year, you realize you somehow got on the stairs. Then after five years, it feels like the stairs go down more than up. Your unmet expectations begin to burden you, and you wonder why nothing is happening? Just a few years ago your dreams and desires felt so attainable. Now, they seem distant and almost dead. You wallow in frustration and disappointment, both at yourself and God.
This is how I spent a lot of time in my twenties. At the heart of my frustration was this question: If I want to use my life to do something good, and God says He wants that good thing to happen, then why hasn’t He used me to do it yet? It’s a common frustration that gets at the heart of the way God works in your life. We spend our twenties wondering, how do you align desires to make an impact and do important work with the reality of the low-paying jobs with little responsibility that most of us have?
letting go of unhealthy expectations
Many have the good desire, to varying degrees, of using their career to do meaningful and significant work. While this is a healthy desire, our hearts twist these goals into self-centered measuring sticks for success. Our minds feed off of the examples of 25-year-old tech CEOs, and we dream of following in their footsteps. Not that we need to be worth millions of dollars, but we all just want to be one step above our peers.
We secretly hope we’re one of the special ones, a young person who comes up with a genius idea and effortlessly succeeds. These world-changers are admired by everyone by their abilities, achievements, and aspirations. If every generation has their prodigies, maybe that could be us?
But while Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg possess a powerful mystique, they distract us from how most people make an impact in life. In his book, Originals, Adam Grant distinguishes between the two ways people achieve success. There is the conceptual thinker and the experimental thinker:
Conceptual thinkers: These people make fresh insights through a-ha moments, yielding brand new ideas and technology. Conceptual thinkers often peak in their twenties, when they are still protected enough from established viewpoints to see new ways of doing things. Our society gives great value to this type of person, since they display genius behavior. Einstein, startup CEOs, and other phenoms fit this category.
Experimental thinkers: this type of person doesn’t yield fast insights or immediate accomplishment, but only creates important work after years and years of growth. Experimental thinkers don’t rely on flashes of insight, but instead progress incrementally through their life, building deep reserves of knowledge in their field. They achieve their best work later in life, when they have enough knowledge and wisdom.
Unfortunately, our society worships the first type, causing us to forget that most of us will travel the second path towards important work. We all eat up the ideas of overnight success, instant results, and painless growth, hoping that could be us, too. As the years go by, we grow discouraged that we haven’t had our flash of insight, and begin to believe that we’ll never find meaningful work.
life takes more than talent
This expectation to reach peak success in our twenties comes from a wrong belief that talent and ability are the major ingredients for achievement. This flawed assumption turns our twenties into a proving ground where try to show we have enough talent to be special. And so we live in a constant state of worry, afraid that if we don’t get our dream job soon, we’ll prove that we're nobodies and be doomed to a life of mundane work.
This attitude causes us to overemphasize talent in our twenties, not realizing that wisdom and acquired skill are much more important towards creating a successful career. Talent looks flashy, but wisdom and is much more important for long-term success. While Steve Jobs is revered as a genius in his twenties, his immaturity and flaws caused him to be fired and almost destroyed Apple. It was only in his forties, as Steve matured and grew, that he was able to pilot Apple to its full potential.
We're all so fixated on trying to prove our talent, that we won’t take the time for the slow accumulation of wisdom and skill. While talent is important, the number of talented people that never fulfill their potential shows that it’s not enough. Wisdom, whether it’s called soft skills, people skills, or emotional intelligence, is crucial in every line of work.
wisdom drives success
Despite being needed more than ever, wisdom is overlooked in today’s job world. While passion, youthfulness, and fresh thinking are good things, you need wisdom to navigate the complexities of a globalized world, whether it’s interacting with coworkers from different cultures or spotting new competitors in an environment that moves faster than ever. Companies full of talented people go bankrupt every day, not from a lack talent, but because they didn’t have the wisdom to build a profitable business.
This happens because most work decisions are not black and white, but a complex series of tradeoffs that create a lot of gray area. Wisdom is the ability to know what to do when there is no clear answer. Anyone can code a website, but it takes wisdom to know what features to include and which ones to leave out. Wisdom is needed in every field, to understand the complex problems that face each business and to know how to best solve them. The best business and organizations thrive not because they have the most innate talent, but they use their wisdom to apply their talent to tackle and solve the right problems.
it takes patience to get wisdom
It’s easy to grow restless when you feel stuck in mundane work, watching older coworkers miss opportunities and misread situations while your talent doesn't get utilized. But before you throw your hands up and leave, understand that your boss probably isn’t insulting your talent or ability, but instead giving you the time to build the general and specialized wisdom necessary to succeed.
General Wisdom: this type of wisdom refers to your ability to interact with and work with other people, especially those different from you. Many people struggle in their jobs because they aren’t able to do things like empathize with others, resolve conflict, connect with strangers, or even something as simple as showing up and working hard all day.
Specialized Wisdom: this type of wisdom refers to having knowledge of your specific industry. When you’re young, you don’t know much about the history of your company, sector, or business in general. It’s important to avoid the arrogance of thinking you’re better than people in the past, and to be diligent to learn what mistakes have been made in the past so you can avoid making them yourself.
In today’s world, where something built over decades can be destroyed in a single tweet, wisdom is more important than ever. If you want to do good work in your career, avoid the chatter around innate talent and focus on building up your general and specialized wisdom. Be patient, though, and give yourself the time it takes to accumulate this wisdom. It won’t happen overnight, but comes through slow and steady daily growth.
being patient doesn’t mean passive
Being patient, though, is very different from being passive. So many young people spend their twenties pouting and feeling sorry for themselves, instead of using that time and energy to become a wise and thoughtful worker. Sadly, lots of people passively wait to get better, and it never ends up happening. While wisdom does take time to build, here are a few ways to speed up the process:
Figure out where you’re not wise: the first key to becoming wise is recognizing that you don’t know very much. You have to be humble enough to admit you don’t know, before you can be open enough to learn from others. Ask yourself: what am I ignorant of in life?
Seek out older, wiser people to talk through decisions with: When you realize you don’t know everything, start looking for trusted friends and mentors to help you work through decisions. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, but the first step towards wisdom.
Study the past: Even though businesses and jobs were different, you can learn from the mindset and ideas of past business leaders. Understand that you’re not the first smart person who has tried to tackle a set of problems before, so read, study, and ask questions so that you will repeat the good decisions of the past and not the bad ones. Keep in mind that one of the greatest lessons of the past, though, is to not be chained to it.
Take advantage of being able to make mistakes while the stakes are small: every person makes mistakes, but a major benefit of your twenties is being able to make yours while the ramifications are still small. If you learn from your mistakes, they will provide so much wisdom when you are later in your career and have more responsibility.
your current job is part of the journey, not the destination
As I went through my twenties, I grew more and more frustrated that I hadn’t gotten my dream job yet. But understand that the role of your twenties is not to arrive, but to focus on the process of getting better. Every job you have is an opportunity to learn, grow, and develop the wisdom that you will need to be successful down the road.
It’s tempting, instead, to get frustrated with God. To think He is holding you back from what you deserve. We get angry, asking God why He’s so stingy and disinterested in our jobs and careers? After all, doesn’t He promise our best?
But as I wrestled with these feelings I realized that God knew how I felt. Jesus, God himself, spent all of his twenties sawing wood and sanding furniture as a carpenter in a little family business in an obscure village. The Bible says that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, not by going to fancy schools or being his society's version of a 25 year-old tech CEO, but rather through mundane, yet maturing, work.
Realize that every year and every job is a stepping stone towards your future. Drop your expectation that your current job has to be your dream job, and commit yourself to the incremental progress of getting better at every job. When you do this for years and decades, you will be amazed at the opportunities that will slowly open up as you go through life. Don’t let desire for status or short-term success distract you from growing in wisdom and understanding as God carries out His long-term plan in your life.
“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58