Have you set an intention for the year?
Is Jesus in the center of your pursuits?
Why is a surrendered life the best life to pursue?
In this episode, I remind you how obstacles and problems can become opportunities to deepen our faith. Sharing tangible ways to let go and trust God, from having daily quiet moments with Jesus to sharing our journey with others and making declarative actions, we'll explore the importance of seeing ourselves as worshippers. When we focus on Jesus, our thoughts and mindset become more like His, drawing us closer to the one thing that can fully satisfy us.
If you are ready to become the woman God says you already are, you have to join me in Clarity+Courage, my cost-effective coaching group for Christian women.
Learn more and enroll at www.myhappyvault.com/clarityandcourage
Questions? Email Jill directly at Jill@thehappiestlives.com
Have you set an intention for the year?
Is Jesus in the center of your pursuits?
Why is a surrendered life the best life to pursue?
In this episode, I remind you how obstacles and problems can become opportunities to deepen our faith. Sharing tangible ways to let go and trust God, from having daily quiet moments with Jesus to sharing our journey with others and making declarative actions, we'll explore the importance of seeing ourselves as worshippers. When we focus on Jesus, our thoughts and mindset become more like His, drawing us closer to the one thing that can fully satisfy us.
If you are ready to become the woman God says you already are, you have to join me in Clarity+Courage, my cost-effective coaching group for Christian women.
Learn more and enroll at www.myhappyvault.com/clarityandcourage
Questions? Email Jill directly at Jill@thehappiestlives.com
You are listening to the Happiest Lives podcast with Jill Lillard, episode number 35. Welcome to the Happiest Lives podcast, where you'll learn to think better, feel better and become the woman God says you already are. Here's your host, jill Lillard. Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1:I hope everybody had a wonderful Christmas season, celebrating the birth of our Savior and spending time with friends and family and maybe slowing down the pace a little bit. I don't know, maybe some of you. The pace was sped up and busy during this time. I know Christmas brings up all sorts of emotions and feelings sometimes loneliness, loss. It can be a bittersweet time, but I hope, at the heart of all of it, that you were able to celebrate and remember the true meaning of Christmas that Christ is here with us.
Speaker 1:So we are getting ready for a new year to start. It's just a few days around the corner and when I think about going into a new year, I always like to set sort of an intention for the year, to reflect on what has happened in the past year and the direction that I'm going. And when I started 2023, I had the goal to be transformed. I'm reading this off okay, my goal that I wrote down at the beginning of 23 was to be transformed day by day into the likeness of Christ for the glory of God. Now, that's actually probably really the goal of my whole life. I think that's the goal of all of our lives as believers. If we slow down and think about it. Our goal like there's not a more worthy goal than to become more like our Creator. We were made in His image and he is perpetually sanctifying us, restoring us, making us more like Him so that God can be glorified.
Speaker 1:And that transformation, we want it to take place. I want it to take place in my mind, in my attitude, in my will, my willfulness, what it is that I want and desire, and in the actions that I take. And I think the way it manifests itself is the stewardship of all the things that he has given me. How do I spend my time? How do I spend the talent, the giftings that he's given me? How do I spend my money? We all are given a finite number of resources to our day, which we measure in numbers hours in the day, money in the bank, energy, all of that. And so I want to be a good steward of what he has given me. I want to invest it in, for it to produce a harvest.
Speaker 1:And I think another thing when I consider that transformation is I want to abide in love and in greater relationship with the body, with other people, with other humans, with other believers, where Christ is the head, and so that all the parts of the body are working together to glorify Him, and so I am part of that machine, that bigger entity. I'm part of a greater whole, and so that's really how I would visualize myself in terms of my purpose and my ambition. And so, to do this, what is required to be able to become more like Christ, to better reflect the image, to better be the person that he made me to be, what is required of me? And the thing that I came up with is a surrendered self. When I align my will with God's will, when I trust Him and obey Him and seek after Him, then I am transformed. And I love the prayer a friend shared with me your will, your way, your time and that is a transformative prayer when we ask God to make our will, our desires, his will, that they would match up more and more each day when our self takes over and gets out of alignment with God's will and purpose, with the Spirit's will and purpose, then we are going to see an exacerbation of our problems. The pain that we experience is going to become greater. The gap between who we really are and what we're experiencing is going to be larger. All of the problems of human living come out of self-centered living, and so the more self-centered we are, the more problems that we are going to experience.
Speaker 1:When you think about the unsurrendered self, let's consider the unsurrendered self. There are various motives and resources. The unsurrendered self goes against God and it places self as the center of life. Christ wants to be the center of our life. We want to have Jesus in the middle of all of it, and self seeks to be on the throne and to be the centered. The unsurrendered self is guided by self-determination and selfish desires. It's self seeking. It is estranged and out of harmony with the greater whole, where Christ is the head. In contrast, the surrendered self shares Christ motives and Christ resources. When we surrender ourself, we actually can know ourself more and we can accept ourself and we can express ourself in the best way possible.
Speaker 1:And when I think about surrender, we're not surrendering to a problem, we're not surrendering to our circumstances, but we're surrendering to the love, the abundance, the faithfulness, the goodness of God. We're trusting in a God who is good and a God who is in control of everything, who is sovereign. Overall, we're surrendering to the person and deity of Jesus, who led the way for us. He led the way and surrender as he laid down his whole life, and he's not even asking us to do what he hasn't done. We can think of Jesus in Gethsemane, where he asked if this cup could be taken from him, but he concluded with not my will, but yours be done. He surrendered himself to God. He surrendered his will, even though he was in agony, really anticipating it, and even when he was on the cross, he cried out God, why have you forsaken me? He felt forsaken, but all of this preceded his death, but then the resurrection, his glorious resurrection.
Speaker 1:So how do you stay connected to this goal, if this is your goal too, to become more like Christ, to reflect more of him, to be who he says you already are? What are some practical ways? I like practical ways. How can you make this happen? How can you nurture this?
Speaker 1:The one thing that comes to mind first is having a quiet time each day, a prayer time, and prayer is just having a conversation with God. We are sharing our heart with him. We are looking to understand his desires and we're sharing with him our desires. Our prayer really is sharing our desires with him, things that we long for and want. We're sharing our hurts, our thoughts and feelings and we're listening. It's a two-way conversation. We're listening for his voice and we're laying down our own will for his will. And in that quiet time we're really doing this process that I teach all of you of exposing, renewing, engaging. We're engaging with the Lord. We're asking him to search our hearts to show us any offensive way and to renew our minds and show us what is true.
Speaker 1:Another way that I think we can stay connected to that goal of being transformed more and more into the image of God, to become more like Christ, is sharing with others. When we build up and encourage one another, when we look not just to our own needs but to the needs of the greater whole, then we can stay connected with this vision for our lives. We're not just becoming self-consumed, we're seeing ourself in this bigger picture and I love the idea of taking Declare actions. We are declaring truth. We're speaking it out loud, we're singing it through music, through worship music. And we're taking daily and hourly actions. We're pressing on, despite unwanted emotion, and so we're not just reading God's word, we're declaring it and we're taking actions that are going to express that faith. So Declare actions.
Speaker 1:I like to think that your life is a summation of your most used beliefs and repeated sentences, the things that you're thinking on the regular, the things that you are believing. That becomes your life when we commit to becoming who we already are. We are no longer trying to become more worthy, we're not trying to be good enough, we're not trying to increase our value. We recognize when the Holy Spirit came to live inside of us, we became brand new. We already are. Nothing can make us more lovable, nothing can make us more worthy. We already are. And so when we live in the abundant and the promises of the new woman, the new human, the new us, who is redeemed, set free and has all that we need, then we are stepping more into being who God says we already are. And I encourage you to commit to be a worshiper, that you see that as part of your identity, because we were made to worship. And when we focus on Jesus and make him the center and we're worshiping him, our thoughts and our mindset and our emotion and our will become more like his. John 738,.
Speaker 1:Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, will have rivers of living water that will flow from within, and so our part is to believe and receive. When we believe and receive, the Holy Spirit does the transforming he flows within us. When we declare who God is, we can declare who he says that we are, we can declare what he says he will do, and so you could take those sentences that are running your life on the back burner, that are serving you they're not producing and leading to actions that are edifying. You could replace one sentence at a time with a biblical truth, and so sometimes, when we replace a sentence, when we try to believe something new, sometimes we can just offer ourselves a new thought and we're going to believe right away. It won't take any effort. We just have to redirect our brain. And other times we have to practice that truth over and over again.
Speaker 1:And sometimes I think that God can use coaching, he can use counseling, he can use people outside of us to help us process through those areas where we feel stuck, where we feel like we're struggling, and so that's why I am such a fan of coaching, which is really someone asking you questions that are helping you process through your thoughts and helping to redirect you to where it is that you want to go. So how do we believe new things? This is where we surrender. And what are we surrendering? We are surrendering our right to be right. You know, sometimes we feel like we have to be right in all the situations, and that's why conflicts arise between us, because it's the battle of our ego, the battle, battle of our will. So when we're willing to be wrong, it's like we're setting down the tug-of-war rope. We're no longer playing tug-of-war.
Speaker 1:I Think surrendering how you think life should be. Life isn't always how we think it should be, people aren't how we think they should be, situations and circumstances don't always fall in line with our expectations, and so we can surrender that to the Lord. We can surrender our selfish wants, our vain conceits, desires that May not edify the greater whole. We can surrender what others think of us. It's okay if people don't Think that we're always amazing and wonderful. People can be wrong about us, and People may be right about us, and we just don't like what it is that they're they're saying, but when we surrender that and lay that down, we free ourselves. We can surrender the desire to be perfect. Reaching for perfection really just leaves us discouraged. But instead we can move to a place where we see progress, where we see that we are growing and we're releasing this expectation that we have to be perfect. We're just. Instead, we're constantly just relying on the Lord, recognizing without him that we will always fall short and, I think, even surrendering the notion of failure in success. Sometimes, when we fail, we have a hard time with that and Sometimes, when we succeed, we want to get really attached to that. But when we just lay it all down, then we can move more into this relationship with the Lord.
Speaker 1:As you move into the new you that redeemed you, the sanctified you, the you that God says you already are, you want to open your mind up to see that it's possible, it's probable and it's inevitable that you are being made new. Look for all the evidence that God is working in you. Make a case that you're loved. Make a case that you're loving. Make a case that you're pressing on. Find the evidence that you're walking in truth and being a wise steward. And when you find that evidence, hold on to that feeling, even if it's for 30 seconds, then hold on to it for 60 seconds and then then an hour, so that you can practice stepping into that new identity and, even when you find evidence against it, declare what is true, declare who God is, declare what he says about you, be it, normalize it and trust that it is who you are.
Speaker 1:When we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, he's going to help us move from being self-focused to a place of being focused on him, where, instead of Complaining and over analyzing ourselves or looking for the accolades of others, we can shift our energy on to worshiping him, praising his name. And any obstacles that come up in your path, problems that arise, situations that aren't going as you expect, you can see those as opportunities for your faith to grow legs. So, as you reflect on your new year, as we move into 2024, what don't you consider? What it is that's your goal, your intention for the year? Who do you want to become? I Hope you guys have a happy New Year's and I will see you in 2024.