Thursday, April 15, 2010

Recalibrate

I got a ton of comments about my message this past week. I think one of the things that struck a chord with so many of us is how self-oriented we all are. I know I am. (I’ve already used the I/my word 5 times in 2 sentences!)

One of my favorite meetings each week is our SAT (Strategic Advisory Team). We start off the meeting with a Life Group type section where we share life with each other, laugh, pray, laugh, share how God is speaking to us through His Word, share struggles, laugh and generally practice healthy team relationships. This past week we got talking about how rampant self-orientation is in our society. Everywhere you turn, you are trained, tempted and taught to believe that “it’s all about you.” Each of us admitted that our default mode is to look at life through self-oriented glasses. American society is known for its individualism and it has infected all our life including our marriages in very ugly ways. We actually are offended when God doesn’t make everything work out the way we think it should be. This may be our biggest struggle in becoming like Christ. Jesus lived a thorougly God-oriented life; everything revolved around the Father. Our self-orientation is so deeply ingrained that living a thoroughly God-oriented life seems strange if not impossible.

Try this experiment. Monitor how you react to people and situations the next couple of days. Listen to your thoughts; notice how often you receive and interpret life around you from a self-oriented perspective. Don’t do it any longer than a couple of days as it only reinforces self-orientation. Then begin an experiment where you seek to intentionally see life, what happens to you, how you interact with people, everything, from a God-oriented perspective. Throughout the day, ask God to recalibrate your thinking to a God-oriented way of thinking. Ask him, point blank, “how do you see this, Lord; what’s your perspective on this; what do you think about this?” When you get hurt, or something happens you don’t like, immediately ask him for the grace to see this from his perspective; how can he use this for his purposes. Tell him you belong to him and you want to live surrendered to him. Tell him “it’s not about me, its all about you, Lord.”

Then write me and tell me how it went!

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