You Can’t Meet Your Own Needs for Love, Acceptance, Worth and Security

God created you with certain needs of the heart which only He can fully meet.  I, and my staff have seen that these needs are universal, whether here in the USA, or in places like Zimbabwe, Chile, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Croatia, Ukraine or England. 

Every person needs love because God is love.  Every person needs acceptance because that is what unconditional love from God truly is.  Every person needs worth because we are valuable enough for God to create us and for Jesus to die for us.  Everyone needs security because we need to know we can’t mess up the love we have and only God’s grace in Christ can provide that.  We use the acronym LAWS to help people remember their needs.

I want you to imagine four plastic buckets sitting in front of you.  Each one has a different name on it.  The first says LOVE.  The second says ACCEPTANCE.  The third says WORTH.  The fourth says SECURITY.  God made you to live with those buckets full.  In fact, you can’t live very well unless they are full.  Yet, because we don’t know they are already full, we work hard at trying to fill them ourselves. 

What are some of the ways we do this?  We may perform so people will like us.  We may manipulate people.  We may expect people to meet these needs such as in marriage and when they don’t, we get angry and start an argument.  We may look on Facebook to see what people are saying about us.  We may try to get our kids to meet these needs by making us proud for the wrong reasons.  We may try sex outside of marriage.  We may fantasize through porn.  In other words, we try to control our personal universe by living independently of God, by looking to others or things in trying  to meet these needs.

God says it this way in Jeremiah 2:13.  For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, The fountain of living waters, To hew for themselves cisterns, Broken cisterns That can hold no water. (NASB)

God was speaking of Israel at the time, but it’s still an applicable illustration of what our flesh wants to try to do for us.  First, we turn away from our real Source who will abundantly satisfy our heart like living waters.  Second, we work hard to get our buckets filled but our buckets have holes in them just like Israel’s cisterns did.  (A cistern was a hole you dug into the ground and hoped rain water would fill so you could have water to satisfy your thirst.  But Israel’s had cracks in them so that the water didn’t stay very long.)

You can’t satisfy your own needs for God given LAWS, no matter how hard you work or who you try to get to meet them.  The little that you do strive for will not last and you will have to go out and work hard the next day to get it again.

If you are a Christ follower, you are united to the God who is love and He created you so He could love you.  Do you believe that?  We all get tested in this area when someone disappoints us or we disappoint ourselves.

Why don’t you thank God this week that He is the only one who can adequately meet those needs and ask Him to make them real in you?

Believe it! It's the Gospel.

Live Free In Christ,

Mark Maulding, President and Founder

www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2015 Mark Maulding but feel free to pass it on!

Do I Have a Civil War Inside of Me?

Do you ever feel like there are two equal powers inside you with completely opposite desires?  This is a very common feeling, which seems to explain how we struggle to live a life which pleases God.

For example, when a sexually lustful thought enters your mind, it’s not that you know you shouldn’t do that, it’s also in your new heart that you don’t desire to do it. (Ezekiel 36:27)  Yet, there seems to be a sinister opposite desire to do it, though you know you will regret it.

Another example would be when a thought of not measuring up enters your mind.  Though you know God loves you and you want to stand on that reality, there is this other thought which urges you to agree that you don’t measure up and to either give up, or try harder.

What or who is this other player inside of us?  Is it the old nature, a.k.a. your old identity in Adam, or is it something else?

Romans 6:6 tells us, Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin.

The Greek language here, is much clearer than what we read in English.  The verb, was crucified, means that our old self (nature) was crucified once and will never rise from the grave to haunt us ever again.  It was left in that tomb where Jesus was buried.

Here’s our problem.  When we read Scripture, we see that something called the flesh is what we battle with.  And, if you are like me, I was never taught that the flesh and the old nature were different, but they are.  The old nature is gone but the flesh is not.  To muddy the waters ever more, the New International Version Bible translated the flesh as sinful nature, which sounds a lot like old nature, doesn’t it.  (They did correct most of that in their most recent edition.)

The old nature (old self or old man that remained in the grave) was the deepest core of who and what we were in Adam.  This is what made us sinfully rotten to the core. (Jeremiah 17:9)  It died and was replaced with the new nature a.k.a. our identity in Christ. (Ephesians 2:6,   2 Cor. 5:17)

The flesh is strategies we have developed from living, as if we are separated from God, though we are united with Him.  We had some of these before we were saved but we may have developed new strategies since then.

I remember a good pastor friend of my saying, “So what?  This is just semantics.  It doesn’t really matter.”  Actually it matters a lot.  Here is why.

Because we only have one nature, our identity in Christ, our new normal is a heart that desires to live a loving, holy and righteous life.  It’s not to sin, contrary to popular opinion. This means it’s normal for you to live a pure life, rather than a sexually lustful life.  It’s normal for you to live with a Biblical self-esteem, rather than a fleshly one of trying to measure up. None of us will ever do this perfectly, but it is still the deepest desire of our new heart, that is our true identity – our identity in Christ.

Believe it! It's the Gospel.

Live Free In Christ,

Mark Maulding, President and Founder

www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2015 Mark Maulding but feel free to pass it on!