Today, we will look at the first two steps to becoming powerful people and putting God back in control.
We were never created to be a powerless people, subject to the happiness or depression of the environment around us. Rather, our source of wholeness is derived from the author Himself.
God is the only one who can offer us love and security regardless of our circumstances. Placing God on the throne of our lives is not rocket science, but it does require diligence and taking the right steps.
FIRST STEP: DO THE WORK OF REPENTANCE
The very first step to reestablish God on the throne of your life is repentance. Repentance roots out inferior and faulty thought processes and replaces them with truth. It’s not only necessary to repent for removing God out of His rightful spot in our lives, but we also need to repent for the reasons why we displaced Him.
It is so important for us to get to the root issues that have caused the faulty thinking in our hearts. This is where most people miss the bus. They are genuinely sorry for their actions, but because they have no idea what is driving them (what the root issue is), they can’t keep their actions and heart in line with their convictions. Therefore, they return once again to their old cycle of thinking.
When we put something in our “God spot,” we must go back and figure out why we chose to do that so that we can truly repent.
SECOND STEP: START THE MESSY CLEANUP
After repentance (changing the way we think), we often have to go back and clean up our mess. For so many of us, there is a huge misconception about what cleaning up our mess really looks like. We have been taught through our childhood experiences that the word “sorry” fixes everything. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The word “sorry” doesn’t fix anything. I know this because I have three kids! On any given day, it’s only a matter of time before one of my children acts out in a “not so fun way” to one of his or her siblings. Usually, it’s some sort of short-lived, spur-of-the-moment flair-up about who is going to get the middle seat in the car, or who is going to consume the coveted last GoGurt in the freezer. Kids can always find something to argue about.
It’s tempting as a parent to stop the argument as quickly as possible and with exerting the least amount of effort; the goal is to restore chaos to a manageable level. In our efforts to restore order, it is really easy to say something like this: “Kids, knock it off! Elijah, tell your sister you’re sorry for being rude to her, or you can go spend the rest of the day in your room!” Now, I’m as guilty as anybody else when it comes to statements like that. However, the problem with just telling my kids what to do and what to say is that it’s not really coming from their own hearts. Therefore, any apology they offer is never genuine enough to change their behavior, so the problem still exists.
If our kids are going to change their behavior, they need to be able to figure out why they choose to be disrespectful and then they must want to choose a different behavior so that their “sorry” is productive. It’s no different for you and me; the goal of repentance is not to simply say the words “I’m sorry,” but rather to find the root of the issue so that we can fix the behavior.
