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Showing posts from February, 2013

I Am My Relationships

Last week I wrote you about identity in achievement. While God calls us to be fruitful and productive, could it be that you've looked to your success to provide identity, meaning, and purpose? Achievement alone is not an evil thing, but once that false identity begins to define who you are, you're in danger of compromising who God has called you to be. Here's a second area where we might find a replacement identity: Identity in Acceptance God created us to be social beings. His plan, from day one, was for us to live in meaningful community with one another. Our relationships are so important to God that He positioned the command for us to love one another as second only to the call to love Him (Matthew 22:37-39). Those relationships must be a very high priority as we make our daily decisions. Yet, in our sin, many of us look to other people to do the one thing they were never designed to do - give us identity. If we're parents, we tend to try to get our identit

I Am My Success

When I was in junior high, I became obsessed with cars. I found a Whitney auto parts catalog, and I was amazed with its size. Page after page was filled with replacement parts for nearly any car on the road. Just like that catalog, our fallen world offers an endless catalog of identity replacements. None of us are free from their seduction. Each of us will turn a page in life and find one that's attractive to us. I've found in my years of counseling that these identity replacements tend to fall into four major clusters. We'll look at the first one this week. 1. Identity in Achievement God calls us to be fruitful and productive. We should be concerned about our harvest and the return on our investments. But the minute we take on our achievements as an identity, we become slaves to a never-ending stream of potential success. This is the profile of a workaholic. He (or she) gets purpose from the next notch on his belt, so he's unable to say no and unable to slow