Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ~Matthew 6:33
Do you ever have those moments when God speaks something to your heart about where you’ve been missing it and you just want to fall on your bed and just cry? That’s where I was when God was dealing with my life about building my kingdom versus building His. I’ve learned a long time ago that if I’m for real when I tell God, “Lord, I’ll go where you want me to go, do what you want me to do, say what you want me to say” then I’m going to have to allow Him to mold me into the man of God He called me to be. Often times our refining process occurs through discipline.
Hebrews 12 tells us that God disciplines those He loves…it then goes on to say that No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening – it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way (v.11).
So when I was going through this – I had to look inside at be totally honest and vulnerable about the motives of my heart.
These are some hard truths I had to confront within me:
I cared more about pleasing people than pleasing God: I wanted people to see how great I was! Again, I wanted to build the Kingdom of Bubba, not the Kingdom of God. I was constantly trying to impress people with where I was spiritually, physically, and mentally.
I had an inaccurate view of success: I thought success was when you are in the spotlight, popular, and everyone thinks of you as a mighty man of God!
I thought I could get everyone to like me: I don’t deal well when people don’t like me – so I would do anything to get people to like me. I would often pretend to be things I’m not in order to get people to like me.
I was focused on me instead of others: I said that I wanted to add value to people, but really – I wanted to add value to myself.
I thought I could promote myself: I was naive enough to believe this – I tried climbing the ladder of success on my own instead of realizing that promotion comes from God.
Now – I am pretty hard on myself – I don’t want you to think that all the motives in my heart were wrong because they weren’t. A ton of them were perfectly fine – I’m just showing you some of the lies I bought into through this journey of becoming Kingdom Minded. Tomorrow I’ll cover the truths I’ve learned through the journey.
When is the last time God’s disciplined you and brought out some of the lies you’ve been buying into? Were you open to them? Or did you say, no that’s not me…I’m not like that? I encourage you to take some time and write down the areas in your life God has been dealing with you in… be open and vulnerable and realize that if you’ll be willing to walk through that journey that in the end – you’ll be at an entirely new level spiritually!
