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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rick Warren
Read between
May 7 - July 3, 2023
You will never grow to maturity just by attending worship services and being a passive spectator. Only participation in the full life of a local church builds spiritual muscle.
it is easy to fool ourselves into thinking we are mature if there is no one to challenge us. Real maturity shows up in relationships.
Once a group becomes larger than about ten people, someone stops participating — usually the quietest person — and a few people will dominate the group.
The world thinks intimacy occurs in the dark, but God says it happens in the light. Darkness is used to hide our hurts, faults, fears, failures, and flaws. But in the light, we bring them all out into the open and admit who we really are.
We only grow by taking risks, and the most difficult risk of all is to be honest with ourselves and with others.
Sympathy is not giving advice or offering quick, cosmetic help; sympathy is entering in and sharing the pain of others. Sympathy says, “I understand what you’re going through, and what you feel is neither strange nor crazy.”
Sympathy meets two fundamental human needs: the need to be understood and the need to have your feelings validated.
We all need mercy, because we all stumble and fall and require help getting back on track. We need to offer mercy to each other and be willing to receive it from each other.
Many people are reluctant to show mercy because they don’t understand the difference between trust and forgiveness.
You will have to care enough to lovingly speak the truth, even when you would rather gloss over a problem or ignore an issue.
Until you care enough to confront and resolve the underlying barriers, you will never grow close to each other. When conflict is handled correctly, we grow closer to each other by facing and resolving our differences.
Thoughtless words leave lasting wounds.
Humility is the oil that smooths and soothes relationships.
You can develop humility in very practical ways: by admitting your weaknesses, by being patient with others’ weaknesses, by being open to correction, and by pointing the spotlight on others.
One key to courtesy is to understand where people are coming from. Discover their history. When you know what they’ve been through, you will be more understanding. Instead of thinking about how far they still have to go, think about how far they have come in spite of their hurts.
We will share our true feelings (authenticity), encourage each other (mutuality), support each other (sympathy), forgive each other (mercy), speak the truth in love (honesty), admit our weaknesses (humility), respect our differences (courtesy), not gossip (confidentiality), and make group a priority (frequency).
Because life is all about learning how to love, God wants us to value relationships and make the effort to maintain them instead of discarding them whenever there is a rift, a hurt, or a conflict.
If you want God’s blessing on your life and you want to be known as a child of God, you must learn to be a peacemaker.
Delay only deepens resentment and makes matters worse. In conflict, time heals nothing; it causes hurts to fester.
It means pay close attention! Focus on their feelings, not the facts. Begin with sympathy, not solutions.
Don’t try to talk people out of how they feel at first. Just listen and let them unload emotionally without being defensive. Nod that you understand even when you don’t agree.
Patience comes from wisdom, and wisdom comes from hearing the perspective of others.
People don’t care what we know until they know we care.
“First get rid of the log from your own eye; then perhaps you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye.”
Attack the problem, not the person.
You will never get your point across by being cross, so choose your words wisely. A soft answer is always better than a sarcastic one.
In resolving conflict, how you say it is as important as what you say.
When we focus on personalities, preferences, interpretations, styles, or methods, division always happens.
God warns us over and over not to criticize, compare, or judge each other. 9 When you criticize what another believer is doing in faith and from sincere conviction, you are interfering with God’s business:
Paul adds that we must not stand in judgment or look down on other believers whose convictions differ from our own:
From the very beginning, God’s plan has been to make you like his Son, Jesus. This is your destiny and the third purpose of your life.
God doesn’t want you to become a god; he wants you to become godly — taking
on his values, attitudes, and character.
You’ll wonder, “Why is this happening to me? Why am I having such a difficult time?” One answer is that life is supposed to be difficult! It’s what enables us to grow.
Your character is essentially the sum of your habits.
Nothing shapes your life more than the commitments you choose to make. Your commitments can develop you or they can destroy you, but either way, they will define you.
To change your life, you must change the way you think. Behind everything you do is a thought. Every behavior is motivated by a belief, and every action is prompted by an attitude.
“When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus.” 4 We learn things about God in suffering that we can’t learn any other way.
You will never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.
Every problem is a character-building opportunity, and the more difficult it is, the greater the potential for building spiritual muscle and moral fiber.
What happens outwardly in your life is not as important as what happens inside you. Your circumstances are temporary, but your character will last forever.
“If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. But if you look at Christ, you’ll be at rest!”
You know you are maturing when you begin to see the hand of God in the random, baffling, and seemingly pointless circumstances of life.
One of the most concise descriptions of his character is the fruit of the Spirit: “When the Holy Spirit controls our lives, he will produce this kind of fruit in us: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
God develops the fruit of the Spirit in your life by allowing you to experience circumstances in which you’re tempted to express the exact opposite quality!
Always beware of shortcuts. They are often temptations!
Temptation always starts in your mind, not in circumstances.
Satan does not have to tempt those who are already doing his evil will; they are already his. Temptation is a sign that Satan hates you, not a sign of weakness or worldliness.
God has promised never to allow more on you than he puts within you to handle it. He will not permit any temptation that you could not overcome.
Every time you try to block a thought out of your mind, you drive it deeper into your memory. By resisting it, you actually reinforce it. This is especially true with temptation. You don’t defeat temptation by fighting the feeling of it. The more you fight a feeling, the more it consumes and controls you. You strengthen it every time you think it.
