I have said for years, “My who is completely different than my do.” In other words, who I am in Christ is one thing, and what I do in myself is a completely different thing altogether. We are to become examples of righteousness.
When we are born again, we receive new identities; God makes us His children, just as when my children were born, they became Meyers. They will never be more or less Meyers than they were on those days. In one moment of time, each became forever and completely a Meyer. Did they always act like a Meyer? Did they always act the way we would have liked our children who represent us to act? Of course not, but they were nonetheless Meyers.
Religion frequently teaches us to do things right (follow rules and regulations) to prove we are right with God. True Bible Christianity teaches the opposite: we cannot do right until God has made us right with Him, which He does at our new birth.
Second Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (NIV). We suddenly become new creatures. I like to say we are new spiritual clay. We have in us the stuff we need in order to learn how to act the way God wants us to act.
It is vital for us to understand these things if we are to ever accept ourselves. We must believe that even though we are not where we need to be, neither are we where we used to be. We are, this very moment, perfect in God’s eyes and on our way to perfection.
SELF-ACCEPTANCE IS A FOUNDATION FOR PEACE
We have no foundation of peace if we don’t have peace with God and ourselves. Peace with God should take us to the foundational principle of having peace with ourselves. If God loves us unconditionally, then we can love ourselves unconditionally. If He accepts us, we should be able to accept ourselves. Peace within ourselves, which is self-acceptance, is based on God’s having made us perfect and righteous in Christ; it is not based on our own works and behavior.
In His Word, God refers to us (His believers) as being “holy.” Romans 12:1 says to offer our bodies a living sacrifice, “holy” and acceptable unto God. First Corinthians 3:17 explains that God’s temple is “holy,” and we (believers) are His temple. Ephesians 3:5 speaks of God’s “holy apostles (consecrated messengers) and prophets.” These Scriptures, and others like them, clearly show that God views us as holy, perfect, and righteous. We either accept it or we reject it, and the choice we make greatly affects how we view ourselves.
We are the house of God; we are His home. He has come to live in us; we are His new base of operation, so to speak. He works through us (His born-again children) to draw the world unto Himself.
He wants peace in His house! Have you ever screamed to your children, “I want some peace in this house”? I have, and chances are you have too. Hear God gently saying that to you right now, and come to terms of peace with who you are.
Accept yourself right where you are, and let God help you get to where you want to be. He loves and accepts you each step of the way. He is changing you from glory to glory (see 2 Corinthians 3:18). Get into agreement with God, and you will see new power in your life unlike anything you have experienced before.
Being at peace with yourself in light of who God is transforming you to become will give you a firm foundation upon which to build a good life. Remember, Satan wants you weak and powerless; God wants you to be strong and powerful, ready to enjoy life, so He canuse you for His purposes on earth. But we cannot grow spiritually and become perfected for His use until we are at peace with ourselves.
ARE YOUR FAULTS DISTRACTING YOU?
To make spiritual progress, we need to keep our eyes on Jesus instead of ourselves. Hebrews 12:2 teaches us to look away from all that will distract us from Jesus, who leads us and is the Source of our incentive to have faith, and who will bring our faith to maturity and perfection.
When we keep our eyes (our thoughts) on everything that is wrong with us, it prevents us from paying attention to the Lord. We need to see everything that is right with Him and believe He is working to reproduce it in us rather than taking a continual inventory of all of our faults. We should not have our eyes on other people, comparing ourselves with them; we should have our eyes on Jesus. He, not other people, is our example to follow. We will eventually stand before God, not people, and give an account of our lives.
And get your eyes off yourself; don’t meditate on everything you think you do right, or everything you think you do wrong. Focus on who God says you are.
The Holy Spirit will convict you in areas where you need it, and when He does, your response should not be to feel condemnation. It should be appreciation that God cares enough about you to send His Spirit daily to help you stay on the narrow path that leads to life.
When I learned to respond to God’s correction (conviction) with appreciation instead of condemnation, it closed a door to Satan that I had allowed to remain open all of my life. We cannot grow without conviction of our sins, yet if we always respond with condemnation, that also prevents our growth. God intends that conviction of sin lift us up and out of wrong behavior, but condemnation presses us down and holds us prisoner to the sin. We can never get beyond something we stay condemned about.
VERBALIZE YOUR ACCEPTANCE OF YOURSELF
Many people have a bad habit of saying negative, downgrading things about themselves. This is dangerous and wrong. Words are containers of power; they carry either creative or destructive influence. Proverbs 18:21 states that the power of life and death are in the tongue, and those who indulge it will eat the fruit of it for life or death. In other words, I can speak death or life to others, my circumstances, and myself.
Previously in my life, I had a bad habit of saying ungodly, negative things about myself. What was in my heart came out of my mouth, just as Matthew 12:34 confirms, and I saw that truth operating in my life. I had a bad attitude about myself; I didn’t like myself, so I said things that were proof of what was in my heart.
I frequently ask in conferences where I am teaching, “How many of you regularly say negative, downgrading things about your own self out of your own mouth?” Most in the audience raise their hands.
Negative self-talk is a big problem that we need to seriously address. If you don’t understand the tremendous power of words, please obtain and read my book entitled Me and My Big Mouth.
As I gained revelation from God’s Word, I began to see how devastating this bad habit of speaking against myself was, and I slowly began to replace those bad things I said with good things. It was initially a step of faith, because I felt foolish standing around by myself, saying good things about myself. I started doing it when alone because I certainly did not have the boldness to say anything complimentary about myself in front of anybody. Instead of saying, “I am so stupid” when I made mistakes, I changed my response to “I made a mistake, but God loves me unconditionally, and He is changing me.” Instead of saying, “I never do anything right,” I said, “I am the righteousness of God in Christ, and He is working in me.”
I am not suggesting that we form a habit of telling people how wonderful we think we are—that would be prideful and unacceptable behavior. But we should say good things rather than bad things when the occasion arises.
For example, if someone asks you what your gifts, talents, and abilities are, don’t say, “I don’t have any. I’m really not very smart.” Say, “God has gifted me to do many things,” and then describe the things you are good at.
Perhaps you are good at encouraging people; that is a gift from God. Or you may love simply to help people, and that is one of the greatest gifts God gives. I don’t know what I would do in life if I did not have people who just help with whatever needs to be done. You may not have gifts that are “showy,” but that does not make them any less important.
Ask God to forgive you for all the times you have said negative things about yourself, your life, and your future. Make a decision to start speaking in positive terms to everything in your life, including yourself.
Say out loud several ti
mes a day, “I accept myself. God has created me with His very own hand, and I am not a mistake. I have a glorious future, and I intend to go forward and greet each day with peace and joy.”
For years, I wished I were just a little thinner, that my voice were not so deep, that I didn’t talk so much, that I were not so straightforward in my approach to people, and so on. I have since discovered that many of the things I didn’t want were the very qualities I needed in order to do what God has called me to do.
How can we ever have peace within ourselves if we always want to be something we’re not? How can we have peace if we are mad at ourselves because we are what we are, or under condemnation because we are not perfected in behavior?
I recently read a statement by Watchman Nee that blessed me; he said that “we shall forever be what we are.” He did not mean that God isn’t changing us in behavior as we grow in Him, but he did mean that God has given each of us a specific temperament, and we shall always be, at the root, those persons God made us to be.
God gave me my bold voice and personality. I can learn not to be harsh and rude, but I will always be bold and aggressive. I am a preacher and teacher of God’s Word. I am a mouth in the body of Christ, so to speak. God uses my mouth. I will always talk a lot. I can learn not to enter into idle talk, which we will discuss later, or say things that hurt people; but I will never be a quiet, soft-spoken person.
You will always be you, so accept the basic you and let God be God in your life. Stop wrestling with yourself, focus on your strengths, and enter into peace.
PEACEKEEPER #10
Focus on Your Unique Strengths
Part of self-acceptance is realizing that you are unique in yourself and will never be exactly like someone else. God wants variation, not boring sameness. Actually, if we look around, we see that God is extremely creative. We enjoy different flowers, trees, birds, weather. It seems that a lot of what God has created has many varieties, even people.
Don’t struggle to be a carbon copy of someone you admire. You are unique, and there is something you can do that nobody else in the entire world can do exactly the way you can. God had to teach me the all-important lesson of not comparing myself with others and competing with them or their abilities. He had to teach me to “be free to be me” before He could use me the way He had planned.
I taught home Bible studies for five years, and then for one year, God sort of sat me on a shelf and I did nothing. During that year I decided I needed to settle down and live a “normal” life. I decided I needed to be a “normal woman.” I had always thought my hopes and ambitions were out of the ordinary, but Satan was tormenting me with thoughts that I was really weird and something was wrong with me.
I kept my house clean and neat but had no real interest in decorating to the degree that many of my friends did. They went to craft classes and had home-decorating parties on a regular basis. I could hardly sew a button on my husband’s shirt, while one of my friends made clothes for her entire family. I felt destiny calling me while they were totally content doing things that really bored me. What they were doing was important also, it just was not what I was called to do.
I began to think that I just needed to straighten up and be what a woman “ought to be.” I wasn’t sure exactly what that was, so I tried to pattern myself after other women I knew. One friend was really sweet in nature, so I tried to speak softly and be sweet like her. Another had a garden and canned vegetables, so I tried that. I also took sewing lessons and attempted to make some clothes for my family. I was miserable, to say the least. I had forced myself into a mold that God had never designed for me.
All of these carnal ideas were birthed out of deep-rooted insecurities left over from my abusive past. I was insecure in who I was, I felt deeply flawed, and I had a shame-based nature, so I kept trying to reshape myself into what seemed acceptable to the world.
Woman preachers were not exactly at the top of the list of what the world applauded, especially in 1976 when I began, and even more so in the denomination we were part of. I am sure these fleshly efforts of mine grieved the Lord, yet He allowed me to go through the process of comparing, competing, and being miserable until I finally realized I was not weird, I was unique. Something unique has value because it is one of a kind, whereas something just like many others is not as valuable.
I was comparing myself to wonderful women who were operating in their natural, God-given abilities. They were happy because they were doing exactly what God had assigned to them. I was unhappy because I also was trying to do what God had assigned to them to do. God patiently forms each of us in our mother’s wombs with His very own hand. When you consider your strengths, remember this verse:
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be. (Psalm 139:13-16 NIV)
We are not accidents, not something that just got thrown together with no forethought. Each of us is here on purpose, chosen to live in this particular time period on purpose. Fighting yourself is like fighting God, because you are His handiwork, predestined to good works (see Ephesians 2:10).
When Paul was converted, he certainly had heard about the great apostle Peter. I am sure Peter was someone everyone looked up to because of the great way in which God used him and the strong gifts he expressed. Peter was a leader among leaders. One would think that Paul would have sought out Peter for approval and friendship, yet we see just the opposite. Paul went away into Arabia and remained there for three years first, then he finally went to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Peter. Then, after a period of fourteen more years, during which he ministered where God led him, he went to Jerusalem again to meet with Peter and some of the other apostles (see Galatians 1:17-2:12).
Paul had confidence in his call and did not feel the need to compare himself with Peter or anyone else. We see evidence of this fact in other Scriptures: In Galatians 1:10, Paul stated that if he had been trying to be popular with people, he would not have become an apostle of the Lord. Why? Because following people rather than God can get us on the wrong paths for our lives. God does not want copies—He wants originals. Paul was an original, not a copy of Peter or the others, and that is how God wants it.
In the beginning of my ministry, I tried to get into several different groups of well-known preachers. I wanted their approval, and I wanted to compare what I was doing with what they were doing to see if I needed to change anything. Although I made improvement the year I spent “doing nothing” (except struggling to be what I thought was a regular woman), I still had insecurities and would have become a carbon copy of someone else if I had had the opportunity to do so.
I was quite frustrated when God would not allow me to have friends in ministry at that time, but I didn’t understand that He was training me personally and did not want any interference in those early days of preparation for my calling.
Insecure people are not good at saying no! They are not good at being different; they usually bend in the direction everyone is going, rather than following their hearts wholly. When God was ready to promote our ministry to a more visible platform, one of the things I often heard was, “You are a breath of fresh air! You’re unique, not like everyone else out there.” That does not mean all the others were not wonderful and needed, it simply means we need variety.
Paul’s message was the same as Peter’s, yet with a different emphasis, and that is the way it should be in order for people to mature spiritually. We often fear being different; we are bored with sameness, yet somehow we feel safe
with it.
Comparing ourselves with others and trying to be like them will definitely steal our peace; it is one of the most frustrating things we can go through. Beware of comparing any aspect of your natural or spiritual life with anyone else’s—it will produce only turmoil.
SPIRITUAL COMPARISONS
I remember hearing one preacher talk of how often he saw Jesus. I had never seen Jesus, so I wondered what was wrong with me. Another person I knew prayed four hours every morning. I could not find enough to pray about to keep praying for four hours and always ended up bored and sleepy, so I wondered what was wrong with me. I had no gift to remember large portions of Scripture like someone I knew, who memorized all the Psalms and Proverbs as well as other entire books of the Bible, so I wondered what was wrong with me. I finally realized that nothing was necessarily wrong with me because I could not do what they could. The fact was, I was preaching all over the world, and none of them were doing that.
Whatever we cannot do, there are many other things we can. Whatever someone else can do, there are also things they cannot. Don’t play the devil’s game any longer. Don’t compare yourself with anyone in any way, especially not spiritually. We can see other people’s good examples, but they must never become our standard. Even if we learn from them how to do something, we still will not do it exactly the same way.