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June 12 - August 20, 2019
When you take an interest in others more than in yourself, it’s a very small form of dying to yourself, something very close to the heart of Christ. When you give your life away, something greater rises.
Guilty.
Love has a speed. And it’s slower than I am. There’s a good chance it’s slower than you are. Love pauses. Love lingers. Love offers full focus and gives far more than it takes.
Irrelevance happens when the language, methods, or styles you use no longer connect to the culture and people around you.
the fastest path to irrelevance is this: stop changing.
your willingness to change gives you the ability to communicate timeless truths in a way that has meaning to those who come after you.
the greatest enemy of your future success is always your current success.
If you’re missing the goals you have for your mission, change your methods.
Incremental change brings about incremental results. Furthermore, incrementalism inspires no one. Radical change brings about radical results. If you’re in a rapidly changing world, small amounts of personal incremental change are likely not enough.
pride is, in many ways, the master sin. It’s the root of our rebellion against God, against others, and even against what’s best for us.
Pride will lead to cynicism and accelerate burnout. It will leave you feeling disconnected and can cause you to become irrelevant. And by the time it has run its course, pride will leave you feeling empty, despite everything you’ve accomplished.
Sure, you don’t spend most of your day thinking you’re great; you spend most of your day with a gnawing sense that you’re not. But that, too, can lead to an obsession with self.
pride compels you to pick out people to convince yourself you’re superior.
comparrogance. It’s the arrogance born of comparison.
As Tim Keller put it, “When work is your identity, success goes to your head, and failure goes to your heart.”
Pride doesn’t make room for the gifting of others.
One sign of humble people is the ability to attract and keep people more gifted and competent than themselves for the sake of their team or cause.
You may even tend to be a know-it-all, whether you really are knowledgeable or are just making stuff up to trump others in the conversation.
When you value the counsel and input of others, especially on the things you’re best at, you embark on a path toward greater wisdom.
Pride inoculates you from the counsel of others and the stirrings of your conscience.
self-righteous Christians don’t do drugs. They do food.
The only person your pride impresses is you.
The problem with success (even a small bit of it) is that you get addicted to all the trappings. And pride will convince you that you are entitled to it all.
The more you have, the easier it is to lose your gratitude. Scarcity creates gratitude, and most of us live in relative abundance, globally speaking.
Gratitude fosters humility because it moves you out of the role of the star in your story.
That’s the thing about burnout. Once you fall off the cliff, there’s nothing to grab on to anymore. You’re in free fall, and all the grasping and clamoring you do doesn’t help a bit.
Spiritually, I found myself in bizarre territory. I never lost my faith. I never stopped reading the Scriptures, and I still prayed. It’s just that in the numbness that accompanied my burnout, I couldn’t feel my faith anymore. I prayed, but it seemed like my prayers bounced off the ceiling. I read Scripture, but I no longer sensed that Scripture was reading me.
Your Passion Fades
Little Things Make You Disproportionately Emotional
Nothing Satisfies You
You Can’t Think Straight
Your Productivity Is Dropping
Sleep and Time Off No Longer Refuel You
Your unresolved past will sink your future unless you deal with it.
If you leave Jesus out of the cure, you leave out much of the potential healing.
Why do friendships matter? Because you need people who believe in you when you’ve stopped believing in yourself.
In pivotal moments like these, you will lean either away from God or into him. Lean in, hard. Even if you feel nothing.
obedience is greater than my emotions. Eventually your emotions catch up to your obedience.
4. Rest
What can you do today? Do it. Even if you don’t feel like it.
If you don’t grieve your losses during your recovery, you’re missing tremendous opportunities to put the past behind you. Otherwise, your past continues to sabotage your present and your future.
it’s easier to find relief from the pace than from the weight.
But rest in and of itself will never bring you relief from the weight of life or leadership.
If God is doing surgery, it’s because he wants to bring healing. It’s a sign of his love. So let God go as deep as he wants to go.
There is no end to the sad discontent of making you the mission of your life.
If you want to beat emptiness, find a mission that’s bigger than you.
Give people a cause, a mission to make a difference in the world, a way to help others, and they will rally. Let them know their efforts have made a difference in someone else’s life, and they’ll look forward to getting themselves out of bed.
Prayer is not a button to be pushed; it’s a relationship to be pursued.
the emptiness inside you will go away only when you decide to stop making life all about you.
When you are intimately in touch with your own emotions and inclinations and deeply knowledgeable about the ways of God, you’ll have a much greater chance of seeing it—whatever it is. Self-aware people have a conscious knowledge of their motives, desires, feelings, and character. They are also in tune with how their actions affect others. The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to see it coming.
