#PartnerWithGod Archives - IdentityInWholeness

How do you do “doing”? Doing stuff is important. Nobody wants to spend their whole life on the couch watching TV while their brain turns to mush. Although we are not what we do, it’s important to do stuff.

Unfortunately, many of us do not have a healthy relationship with “doing.” Here are 4 common paradigms of doing. The first 3 are unhealthy, and for each one I’ll show you how to shift into the healthy 4th paradigm.

(1) Autopilot Doing

The busyness of life in the West tends to put us on autopilot.

Anyone with school-aged children knows this. Every other minute you find yourself shuttling some kid somewhere to some activity. And that’s not bad. We’re investing in our children. Kudos. But has it drowned out you? Are you just John’s mom or Amy’s dad?

Adults, young and old, are barraged by constant notifications from our devices. Someone emailed! Or posted! Or shared a TikTok! Look! Now!

Don’t get me wrong; I love my iPhone and being connected. But have the devices that were supposed to save us time hijacked our time instead?

I can speak from experience that men can live their whole life on autopilot. I did for a long time, before I broke out of it. Providing for your family. Doing the job. Then, after 40+ years in the workforce, retire in the veiled frustration of unfulfilled monotony, and die in front of the TV. How tragic.

Too many of us never discover the exciting calling God created us for. Living on autopilot starved our heart’s passion to death long ago. Autopilot stinks.

Silence is the Antidote to Autopilot.

The good news is, our God raises the dead. It’s in the silent spaces, the quiet moments of our lives, that the Holy Spirit whispers life to our distracted hearts.

But it takes intention on our part. Here are some examples:

Schedule regular white space on your calendar. Turn off the phone, put away the computer, and any other distractions. Spend even just a few moments alone with a journal. Light a candle. Declare this time as yours. Listen for the Holy Spirit reminding you of your heart’s passion. He put it there in the first place.

Can you dare to remember? Would that change everything?

(2) Wounded Doing

One of the enemy’s foundational strategies is to bury the calling of God on our lives under a mountain of wounding.

Wounding can lead us to self-medicating with addictions. Anything to drown out the pain for a little while.

Addictions can be self-destructive:

Sex
Alcohol
Drugs
Porn
Codependency (addiction to other people’s problems)

But we can also be addicted to good things that we’ve let get out-of-balance because they take away the pain:

Entertainment
Shopping
Eating
Social Media
Relationships

Our addictions can even look really great on the outside, and be praised by the people around us:

Work
Church
Activism

Doing self-destructive things is obviously an addiction. But how do we know when the good things we’re doing are actually an addiction, medicating pain in our lives? By answering one question: Are we getting our value from it?

If this is you, there is something in your life God wants to heal. But to receive God’s healing, you have to be willing to go into the pain. Not to get re-traumatized, but to let God open the wound just enough so Surgeon Jesus can bring his healing.

(3) Desperation Doing

The world is not a safe place. Being an adult can be outright scary. We feel like we’re dancing on the highwire without a net.

“This business venture better work or we’re out on the street.”
“My spouse’s chemo has to beat the cancer. I can’t stand another loss in my life.”
“I can’t believe I’m having to deal with this!” (Fill in the blank for you.)

When something important and out of our control hangs in the balance, it’s easy to get into desperation. It’s even natural. It’s human nature to try and control what we can.

And again, doing things is good. But doing things in desperation is not. And the cure is to make a paradigm shift into paradigm number 3.

(4) Partnership Doing

We may end up doing the exact same things we were doing in desperation. But when we’re doing them in tangible partnership with God, our heart’s posture in doing them is different.

Ok, what do I mean by tangible partnership with God? Granted, God’s Spirit in us is intangible. We don’t physically experience him like we do other humans. (Usually, there are those moments…) But our experience of him can be just as real.

It is possible to walk out your life in a tangible partnership with God. Here’s what that looks like:

You’ve done the work of hearing God for the calling on your life.
You’ve clearly defined what you’re responsible for doing.
You’ve clearly defined what God’s responsible for. Usually, bringing the results. Making it work.
You’ve made an overt decision that even if God doesn’t bring the results you expected, your heart will still testify that he is good.
Rinse and repeat. When it doesn’t work (or when it does), you go back to God and refine his calling on your life, the actions you’re responsible for, and what he’s responsible for.

For example, I tangibly partner with God for my time in doing this website, which I do mostly during my lunch break at my day job. My lunch break varies in length depending on when I arrive at work in the morning.

I don’t set an alarm. God’s responsible for waking me up early enough to hit the gym and arrive at work with enough website time at lunch.

I always wake up at different times, within an hour or two. Even accounting for unpredictable traffic, I can’t count how many times my lunch break has been just long enough, to the minute, to accomplish what I needed to do that day. God’s in this.

I’m responsible for going to bed at a reasonable hour. And I’m responsible for using the time he gives me efficiently (e.g., not scrolling social!).

So he gives me the time, and I do the things. You’re reading the results. My partnership with him works. Yours will too.

Your Turn

Do you see yourself in any of these “doing” paradigms? Is this post an eye opener? Share your story with this community in the comments.

If this hit home and you want to talk with me about hearing God’s calling on your life (practically and for real!), and partnering with God in it, email me at dave@IdentityInWholeness.com. I’d love to talk with you.

And please share this post to bless others.

The most common malady in the human experience is loss. We have all experienced it in the past. We will all experience it in the future. It is a sad fact in this fallen world. By far though, the greatest loss is ourselves. That is trauma’s worst consequence—the loss of our identity. The good news is God wants to restore our lost identity. We can partner with God and reclaim our lost identity. I recently saw a brilliant illustration of this process.

Our new favorite Internet-TV series is The Chosen, a dramatization of the gospels that is done extremely well. Instead of trying to cram everything into a two or three-hour movie, they are presenting the life and ministry of Jesus as a multi-season series. This gives them the luxury of developing fictional but plausible backstories for the various characters that meet Jesus, like the disciples, Pharisees, and others.

Jesus is not the main character, although he becomes more and more of a central character as the series develops. The main characters are the people who meet Jesus. The vision of the production is to introduce Jesus to viewers through the eyes of the people who met him, so viewers can have similar experiences meeting Jesus. The stories surrounding its production and the impact it is having around the world are truly the fingerprints of God. This series is reaping amazing Kingdom fruit.

(You can download The Chosen app on your device from your app store, and watch the series for free.)

Spoiler alert. The first episode of season 1 is all about Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus delivered from multiple demons (Luke 8:2). There is nothing in scripture about her initial encounter with Jesus, so The Chosen gives her a fictional but plausible backstory. The trauma in her life has completely robbed her of her identity, even to the point of her name. She goes by the name of Lilith, which means “night monster.” None of her friends even know her real name.

3 Steps to Partnering with God in Reclaiming Your Identity

At the end of episode 1, Mary meets Jesus, who restores her identity in a way that’s amazingly practical for us. There are 3 steps, and Jesus wants to partner with us in each one.

1) Jesus Called Her by Her True Name

When Jesus shows up, the demons plaguing Mary aren’t happy being around him. Mary bolts. Jesus goes after her, stopping her dead in her tracks with one word:

“Mary.”

He calls her by her true name. Not the false name, the false identity, the trauma has given her, that everyone else knows her by. But her true name. Her true identity. The one she thought was lost forever. BTW, “Mary” means “beloved.”

How to Partner with Jesus when He Calls Our True Name

Agree with him. Mary stopped and turned. He had her attention. Does he have ours? Do we acknowledge our true name?

Agreement means action, not just an intellectual nod while we continue on with nothing changing. We stop. We turn to him. And we, in our heart of hearts, buy into the truth of our real name, the one he gave us.

Don’t buy into the false identity anymore. Mary stopped going by the name Lilith. And whenever someone calls her Lilith, she reminds them, “I’m Mary now.”

At one point Jesus says, “You always were” (episode 8).

One area where we are actively encouraging people to keep, and even celebrate, their false name is by condoning transgenderism. These individuals have suffered such deep trauma that it has completely stolen their identity down the most basic, fundamental level: their gender. Rather than helping them reclaim who God created them to be, we slam the door of God’s healing in their faces by celebrating the false name they give themselves when they “switch” genders. (“Switch” in quotes because they aren’t really switching genders; they are just pretending. They still have the same XX or XY chromosomes God created them with.)

2) Jesus Quoted Her Life Verse to Her

In the episode, there was a particular verse from Isaiah that her father had taught her. She’d saved the paper with that verse for many years, but finally had given up. She tore it up and threw it into the sea. Goodbye identity.

After he calls her by her true name, Jesus miraculously quotes her life verse to her. He’s reminding her of who she really is.

How to Partner with Jesus when He Quotes Our Life to Us

Agree with him. Let your heart leap! It may not be a Bible verse per se, but Jesus will remind us of our life’s passion. That part we thought could never happen, that we’d given up on.

Agreement means action. Think about it: If this passion, this calling I thought was dead, were really to happen, what’s the first thing I’d do? Then do that. One step at a time. Keep doing the next right thing.

3) Jesus Claimed Her

Finally, Jesus says to Mary, “You are mine.” He claims her. It’s in that place of holy surrender to him that the healing happens. Mary collapses into him sobbing tears that were many years overdue.

How to Partner with Jesus when He Claims Us

Agree with him. We have a choice. We can surrender to him, or we can go our own way. Will we release our defenses and trust him, or will we continue to protect ourselves? The choice is up to us.

Agreement means action. What does this look like? Being claimed by Jesus is all about lifestyle. If you agree with his claim on your life, you can’t live a lifestyle that breaks his heart. For example, we get healing for addictions through a recovery process. We save sex for marriage. We start tithing and our tips at restaurants substantially increase because we’re living in generosity. We love hanging out with God’s people, the church.

It’s All in Our Agreement

Are you noticing a pattern here? Although healing can be a painful process, Jesus is doing all the heavy lifting here. We partner with him through our agreement and our actions coming out of that agreement.

There are many voices vying for our agreement. Who are you agreeing with today?

Tell us your story in the comments. It will help others when they see they aren’t the only one. And please share this post so we can bless as many people as possible with the freedom that comes from agreeing with Jesus.