A good exercise: Who do you want to BE??

We spend so much time in our lives (and culture) focusing on what we want to DO with our lives. This is a prevailing question young people ask themselves as they navigate their way through college and their twenties (and even thirties and forties and fifties too:) It is interesting though, that who we are to our core so significantly impacts what we do, how we do it, what we say, how good or bad our relationships are, and how we live out our Christian faith and life on the whole. Who we are matters so much more at the end of the day than what we do, because who we are is the stuff of eternal value when we stand before King Jesus one day. So why don't we spend more time truly caring about and thinking about who we want to be and what the true condition of our heart is despite what others see or think of us? Someone once asked me to do an exercise where I was to write down the answer to two questions: Who do you want to be? And what is at stake if you are not each of those things? After going through this exercise, it was quite illuminating all that was at stake if I did not possess each character quality that I genuinely desired to be. The following was one example, and I want to challenge you to do this exercise too!

I want to be Humble: what’s at stake if I am not? I will be in bondage to my ego; I will be judgemental because I will look at my own sin with a telescope and the sins of others with a magnifying glass (in this way I will also be a hypocrite without even knowing it); God will not be able to use me as much, and his anointing on my life will not be as strong; I will quench the Spirit and not have ears to hear Him; I will be more unapproachable; I will have worse relationships with others; I will cut myself off from God and His grace because His grace flows to the humble in heart; I will prove that I don’t know God because if I did, I would not be prideful; God will have to humble me because he exalts the humble and humbles the proud; I will get defensive with others and hurt relationships; I will subtly set myself up as God and want to live for my own glory, which will be like building my house in heaven with wood, hay, and straw; I will miss out on so much of the abundant life that Jesus came to bring because He pours his Spirit out on those who desperately need Him and are humble about their need for Him (and his Spirit is the key to the abundant life since His Spirit is the source of everything good: victory over sin, ability to love God with all of our heart, ability to love others as He loves, the anointing for ministry, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control, power to be like Jesus, power to have the gifts of the Spirit that will bless and edify the Body of Christ and the world around us. Without the Spirit we are impotent.)