Are You a Delight or a Drag?
Have you ever noticed that some people leave you feeling energized, while others leave you feeling drained?
Most of us enjoy being around people who refresh us. They encourage us, challenge us in healthy ways, and somehow leave us with more hope than we had before. On the other hand, we've all been around people who seem to sap our emotional, physical, or spiritual strength. If we're honest, we've probably gone out of our way to avoid them from time to time.
That raises an important question:
Which kind of person are you becoming?
Are you becoming someone who refreshes others, or someone who unintentionally weighs them down?
Being a delight to others doesn't begin with trying harder to be nice. It begins by being regularly refreshed by the Lord. He alone is the source of real life. Jesus said, "Whoever believes in me...streams of living water will flow from within them" (John 7:38).
As we spend time with Him and respond to the Holy Spirit in faith, His life begins to overflow int...
The Measure of a Mature Faith
What does it look like to be maturing in faith?
That’s an important question. And many people answer it by creating a list—attributes to develop or behaviors to master. The thinking often goes something like this: the more we understand, and the better we perform certain spiritual practices, the more mature we must be.
But there’s a danger in that approach.
The focus can slowly turn inward. Without realizing it, we can begin to think that spiritual maturity is mainly about us—about what we know, what we say, and what we are able to do.
When that happens, our faith can quietly drift into something we manage apart from God and His active work in our lives.
Some of the very things that look spiritual on the outside can actually become self-referenced rather than God-responsive.
If a community rewards that kind of living for long enough, it can slowly become legalistic. Instead of helping people grow in freedom, it can begin to build subtle forms of spiritual bondage—even discouragi...
Be Inspired, Not Discouraged
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When you see someone excelling—whether in school, sports, relationships, work, self-discipline, or communication—what’s your first reaction? Do you feel motivated to grow in that area, or do you feel left out, thinking, “Why don’t I have those abilities?” Or worse, “I could never do that”?
Hebrews 12 offers us encouragement for moments like this:
“Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let’s throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” (Hebrews 12:1)
The heroes of faith in Hebrews 11—people who trusted God against impossible odds—are recorded not to make us feel small, but to inspire us. Their lives are meant to encourage us to step into the faith and purpose God has for us personally.
Unfortunately, it’s easy to fall into the trap of comparison. We look at someone else’s success and either feel like failures or become prideful. As the apostle Paul reminds us, compar...
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