Day 9: Loving yourself & your gifts.
Ephesians 2:10 “ For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”
When you come to Christ, you are instructed immensely to do things like “Die to yourself daily” and “forget your fleshly desires”. Those are things that you must remember in order to not get caught up in the ways of the world, but when you begin to dig deeper into this, sometimes you can lose yourself in who God created you to be. For myself personally, once I started to focus more on Christ, it wasn’t a bad thing, but I stopped dressing as nicely as I used to desire, because I saw it as a negative thing to focus that much on my appearance. I also stopped having confidence in the love that I had for myself. I was so focused on making sure that my mind, will, and emotions understood just how vain they could be, that I was inherently tricking myself into thinking that I was “bad”.
The narrative of receiving the gospel of Jesus Christ, starts with the acknowledgement that you are in sin, and pleads with you for a call to repentance, from there you grow in an unbroken fellowship with the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and God The Father. What happens when that acknowledgement of sin goes too far? Have you ever felt like you just couldn’t stop having negative thoughts? Or maybe you realized that your confidence was so low in yourself due to your understanding of how deep in sin you were? Don’t think that you are alone in this feat. It must become a delicate balance of you loving yourself on end while understanding that your flesh is enmity (hostile) against God.
You ae not bad. Your sin nature is bad. You are not foul. Your flesh is foul. Once you accept the good news of Jesus Christ, you are immediately opened up to a new bloodline which transforms into you becoming good in everything that you do. I once had a friend make this revelation plain to me. We often think of ourselves as children of God trying to manage our sin in the midst of the righteousness we receive from Him, when in actuality, we are children of God that are managing our righteousness we receive from Him, and it handles our sin.
Everything God put on the inside of you is there to serve a purpose in the Earth, we know according to Romans 8:28 that even the things that the enemy means for Evil are a part of the good that we can out into the Earth. The only way to find out what God put in you, or what was deposited maliciously that He will use for His good is to do one simple thing: Talk to Him.
He is a good good Father and He loves to have conversations with us about the things He has planned for us! We just have to make it our business to talk to Him about these things. So today, as an exercise, take 30 minutes and sit and have a CONVERSATION with God. I put emphasis on the word conversation because often times when we pray, we don’t give God the time to respond. We just speak, and speak, and speak, and speak. Begin to invite Him into your presence by lifting up praises and thanksgiving to how great He is. From there, go into asking Him “God, In 1 Peter 4:10, you discuss that each of us has gifts and should be using them what are the gifts you have given me?” and write what you hear. Keep asking Him about things that you feel called to. Even things that you have a desire to do, but aren't familiar with them.
Write down everything that you hear the Spirit of the Lord saying and begin to love yourself and your gifts today.