Lie: I love you and everything about you.
Stuck: I can’t accept you until you become acceptable. You have not earned my acceptance.
Stress, Performance, Fears, Affection, Spending, Sense of humor, Driving skills, pets.
Your response reveals the truth - Anger, Frustration, Comparison, Giving up, Pulling away or distancing, mocking, Disappointment, Making up for them, treat them like children.
Big Idea: Living for the day when your love lives up to your expectations guarantees they never will. Committing to accept them as they are, sets you up to grow and sets them up for God to grow them.
Take yourself out of the equation and look at them from God’s perspective.
Philippians 2:3-4
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
Philippians 2:5-7
In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
God created him/her in his image
He/She is in a war with their old nature.
Romans 7:19
For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.
He/She answers to Jesus, not you, and only Jesus can change them.
Romans 14:4
Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.
Judging your lover makes you blind to your own sins and weaknesses.
How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
I can work with God or against him.
Romans 1:21
For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.
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