How to not let our doubts bring us away from God

I want to challenge everyone at the beginning of this: think about your life. Are there things that you know are bringing you farther away from God? I want you to acknowledge them. The reality is, they’re bringing you farther and farther away from Him, but His time is coming closer and closer. 

One thing I think that is easy to bring us away from God is our image. It is so easy to see flaws in ourselves. It’s so easy to wish that they weren’t there. We can find ourselves upset about them and the more we get upset the more we are willing to tear others down. There are things about all of us that we wish we could change, but God made us perfectly imperfect in His image. I want to ask you who you are allowing to speak into your life. Being a teenager, it’s really easy to let a lot of people speak into my life without even realizing that I’m doing it. It’s like I pass on a microphone to all of the people who don’t even know me to put their judgements and their opinions on me. We begin to lose focus of who’s in charge. Spoiler alert: This is not God’s plan!!

We start to make the things that people say about us the root of our identities, when the root of our identity is in Christ.  When we hear the opinions of others we start to hate the things about us that are normal. But the only person we should be giving our microphone to, is Jesus. He is the ultimate person who should be speaking into our lives and making an impact on our hearts. When we do this, we aren’t exposed to the lies of this world, but to the truth of who Jesus says we are in Him! The only thing that we have to believe is that the purpose of our lives is to be followers of Him and to know Him in every way. We need to hand him the microphone and we need to listen to what he says even when we don’t want to hear it. 

Another thing that I feel really brings us away from God is the feeling that we aren’t worthy, or we don’t want to bug Him with what’s going on in our lives. We as people look for grace. We look for it every time we mess up. The reality is, the world doesn’t want us to be given grace about our mistakes. It wants us to live in it, and be drowned by it. Let me tell you, the one place that constantly gives us grace and allows us to show ourselves even through our brokenness, is the cross. Only when we acknowledge that He is sitting there, underneath the cross waiting to take on our burdens, can we realize all that He has done for us. I know there have been moments and will be moments in your life where you don’t want to go to the cross, or you feel unworthy of going to the cross. But you can ask God to carry you there and He gladly will! He gladly takes our shame, our sin, our heartache, our pain, and our brokenness time and time again without fail and without question. We have to accept this and go to the cross everyday because there is something new everyday! We get our hope from the remembrance of His work that He finished on the cross! And it is the only place that will accept us exactly as we are!

So I challenge you again, do you know what God’s hope is for your life? Who are you allowing to have your microphone to speak into your life? Are you willing to take yourself to the cross exactly as you are to be made righteous in the image of God? And are you willing to make an effort to know more and more about God to gain more and more hope about who he says you are?