How Not to be Miserable

As a pastor and spiritual leader, I meet a lot of people.  

Most people are stressed out and fed up. Life’s hard and it can feel impossible to know how to live when stress and pressure pile up.

The Bible has a lot to say about how to live life. The basic message: ‘Keep the main thing the main thing.’ 

And the main thing is Jesus. 

He’ll get you through the tough days when there seems to be no hope. 

 

Start upward. 

“Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” -Deuteronomy 6:5

 I call this living upward. 

In order to see transformation happen in your own life,  you need to respond to God’s love by loving Him right back. 

The first step toward wholeness is loving God with everything you’ve got. 

God loves you. He always has, and he always will. Even though you may be off track right now, His love for you has not diminished one single bit. (And I love that about Him!) 

 

Go Inward. 

Once we’ve experienced God’s love for ourselves, it’s time to go inward. 

When you love yourself without being fully devoted to God first, things get messy extraordinarily fast.  

The cross teaches us that we are simultaneously more loved than we can ever imagine and also more broken than we would ever care to admit.  

The cross shows us God’s amazing love because Jesus died for us. But it also shows us the depth of our sin—it’s so bad that Jesus had to die. 

And the good news today is that as we live upward by loving God, the Lord will reorient our self-image so we become increasingly healthy people emotionally. And that’s the whole key for the next step in getting things back on track. 

Push outward. 

The final step to bouncing back is to live outward by loving others. 

As we live upward by responding to God’s love with love for him, then we focus inward and see ourselves through the lens of God’s love, the Spirit of God compels us to push outward to love others with this amazing love. 

God doesn’t want his love to stop with us.  

But let’s be honest: Loving others is incredibly hard.  Why?  

Because people are messy. And we don’t want to love messy people.

But we are messy too. And living upward continually reminds us that God loves us, even though we’re messy. 

And living inward teaches us to love ourselves, even though we are messy. 

Then, living outward directs us to love others, especially when they are messy. 

And that love for others changes things in ways we never imagined.  

And just like that, in three simple steps, you find yourself, day in and day out, locked into the groove of following Jesus. 

It’s that simple. Upward. Inward. Outward.