If I Could Be the Pope for Just One Day, This is What I’d Say
View all responsesThe keys to happiness are internal, not external. Your exterior situation can never fully satisfy you. Satisfaction is an interior experience. An external masquerade can hide your internal disfunction and pain, but it can never heal it.
Achieving exterior superiority won’t ever fully overcome your interior feelings of inferiority. New possessions bring fleeting pleasure, but the inner renewal of a joyful heart goes on and on.
Exterior problems can be outsourced, but you have to seek, hunger, and thirst for interior healing. Long-term happiness can never be found in external possessions. The key is to learn to possess, regulate, and control your own thoughts, feelings, and desires. Allowing your thoughts, feelings, and desires to dance around and define your destiny will drive out any delight that comes your way.
The internal characteristics that you cultivate or allow to grow within you will lead you to happiness or duress. Choose them well. Notice the thoughts, feelings, and desires that are trying to forcefully define, dominate and enslave you. Internally resist them.
Your exterior behavior reflects your interior nature. To consistently change externally you must first change internally.
Self-realization is the shocking awareness that I am insufficient. That I desperately need help. That I need to continually surrender my life to and align my life with the risen Jesus Christ.
The answer you need isn’t externally blowing in the wind. It’s aligning with Jesus Christ within. If you feel dead inside, there’s great hope. The living Jesus can give you internal life! Resist inner death and surrender to “Christ in you.”
Where is your heart? Is it indifferent toward Christ or intimate with Him? Is it receptive to Christ or resisting Him? Seek to be internally surrendered to Jesus, not externally religious.
Jesus said, “Deny yourself,” not “Rely on yourself.” Self-focused thoughts, feelings, and desires lead to self-consumed confusion, but self-denial paves the way for Christ’s inner peace. No amount of external security can produce deep peace in us until we allow the risen Jesus to continually heal and overcome our internal insecurity.
A person behind a mic
Cannot make you be Christ-like,
But Christ living in you can.
Let Jesus renew your psych.
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