Where Does Your Confirmation Come From?
Where does your confirmation come from? Is it coming from your parents, friends, significant other, your things, your job, your kids, bank account, Facebook likes, or twitter followers? If you are completely honest with yourself hopefully you are in a place you can answer that question with “none of the above.” However, every single one of us at different points of our lives deal with a yearning for confirmation that we are loved, treasured, or on the right path in life by people or things outside of God. What a dangerous and slippery slope that is! When we do this we are setting ourselves up for failure right out of the gate. If you haven’t noticed, the world around us is a broken and dark place. So when we put our trust in things outside of the only true and constant being, there’s a 100% guarantee you will be hurt or damaged by those things/people.
I know I’m not the only one that has noticed an uptick in the number of people addicted to their cell phones. Cell phones offer people comfort and security which is why they are so addicting. For me personally I like to catch up on emails, twitter feed, and sports headlines when I am waiting on other things. Just yesterday I was sitting in the barber shop waiting to get a haircut and was checking twitter to make sure I didn’t miss out on anything. But in reality I was missing something….I was missing an opportunity to speak face to face to someone and share the love of Christ.
You might be saying to yourself, “I’m not addicted to my phone. I have a handle on it.” If that is the case I want to ask a question; have you ever put off something God asked you to do so you could “finish sending this text really quick,” or “I’ll get to it when I finish this game of Candy Crush.”
Truth be told it’s hard to hear God speak to us when we aren’t actively seeking/listening for him. Just refer back to my barber shop experience for Exhibit A. If you think about it, this is a new greed that is sweeping the nation and the enemy makes it so subtle you never notice it until you’re knee deep in it.
Recently God placed 1 Timothy 6:10 on my heart; “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
Truth be told you can take the word money out of that verse and place in cell phone, Facebook, sports, my boat, cloths, physical image, etc….
God is a jealous God and he doesn’t want anything in our lives to be more important than him. He wasn’t all of us and he designed us to want all of him. There is no other place that is more comforting and confirming than in God’s loving arms.
If you do feel like you struggle with anything coming before God I would like to propose you do a fast. For example, if you struggle with Facebook take the app off your phone for 3 days and do not log in from a computer either. Instead, when you feel the urge to log into Facebook simply pray to God and have a conversation. It can be thanking him for the weather, your kids, paradigm shift (ha), or whatever is on your mind. He just wants a genuine relationship with you!