Redeemed Conference - Redeeming our Perspective

Friday night’s service was an incredibly powerful service. The presence of the Lord was there from the beginning and never left. From the first utterance of sound to the last person leaving the auditorium, you knew you were in the presence of the Lord.

So many wonderful things happened even before Kerry began to speak. Anointed worship, tongues with interpretations, encouragement to keep trusting God and to keep walking in His redemption.

Kerry’s message Friday night was “Redeeming our Perspective”. We all have times when we let life get in the way of our perspective. I am guilty of that quite often actually and I was really glad that this was what she was speaking on.

Isaiah 43:1 says, “But now, thus says the LORD, who created you, O Jacob, And He who formed you, O Israel: Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine.”

In this verse the Lord is claiming you! You are His! He created you, redeemed you, and called you by your name. He knows you and He loves you!

Psalm 139:16-17 says, “Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them. How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!”

In these verses we are reminded that God knew you before you were even conceived. He wrote the days of your being in his book before you even existed. He thinks precious and good thoughts about you.

These verses are a great place to start considering what our perspective should be. For me personally, but I think for women in general, we don’t give ourselves enough credit. We don’t think we are pretty enough, or good enough, or talented enough in life. We put ourselves down and we don’t feel worthy. I am the world’s worst at taking a compliment. When other people give me a compliment, my first reaction is, “yeah right”. But in these verses, God is complimenting me. He is complimenting you. He is telling you that you are worth something to Him. He is telling you that you are valuable to Him.

In Kerry’s book and in her message, she gave strategies for redeeming our perspective.

1. Allow God to define you. 
• Don’t compare yourself to others.
2. Find your security in God. 
• If I am dependent on Him, He gives me what I need moment by moment.
3. Accept your limitations. 
• There are certain non-negotiable limitations in life. We all need sleep, food, and there are only 24 hours in a day. 
• Every season of life has different limitations. 
• Live graciously within your limitations.
4. Stop longing for the ideal.
5. Embrace God’s purpose for your life

All of these things speak to me directly. I have struggled my entire life with feeling inadequate as I mentioned above. Never feeling like I was enough. But by God’s definition, I am exactly who I need to be, created by Him for Him and greatly loved.

Accepting limitations is something I also struggle with, but I think a lot of women struggle with that one too. We want to be the best and do it all. We weren’t made to do it all. At some point, we will reach our limit. We will reach a breaking point. We need to understand our limits and live within them.

Stop longing for the ideal. This one hit me square between the eyes. There are things in my life that I have struggled with and part of the struggle has been me wanting life to be a certain way. Life is not always ideal, but that doesn’t mean it is always bad.

This can apply in many ways, but here is an example. When I decided to go back to college after I was married and had a child, I couldn’t do everything by myself. My husband and my son had to pitch in around the house. We started teaching our son to fold towels. At first, I would let him fold them, but I would come back behind him and redo them. Now, this didn’t save me any time. It didn’t solve my dilemma of needing help getting things done. If I was just going to come back behind him and redo them, it didn’t do any good to ask him to do it to start with.

At some point, I realized that when he folded the towels, they didn’t sit pretty on the shelf, but they were clean and “folded” and put away. So, I finally let that go. As he got older and folded more towels, they started looking better. They still aren’t the way I fold them when he does them, but still, they are clean, folded, and put away.

The towels on the shelf don’t have to be perfect. The clothes in the drawers and hanging in the closet don’t have to be perfect. This is a topic for an entirely different post, but your spouse doesn’t have to be perfect! Live in reality and accept the fact that life will not be perfect. It is ok that it isn’t, because we serve a perfect God!

Embrace God’s purpose for your life. God has a plan and a purpose for everyone in life. Whatever that is embrace it head on and live it with everything that is in you.

I intend to continue to work on having a redeemed perspective. I want to continue to work on viewing myself the way God does and not letting the enemy convince me that I’m anything less. I pray the same for each of you.