Flourish E-Book

Lydia Brownback

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 163

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

What Keeps Us from Flourishing? We all long to live out our faith with daily joy, but so often that joy eludes us. Why is that? More often than we realize, it's because we've absorbed messages that curve us in on ourselves. These messages have even crept into the church, disguised as truth. It's time we learn to discern teaching that's toxic from that which is true and pure. Flourish equips us with tools to identify the lies that come at us about where to find real life. As we dig deep into what God says in his Word, we will learn to discern the worldly influences that threaten to warp our understanding of what it really means to be a Christian, and emerge with a faith that flourishes—full of the abundant life Jesus promises.

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“The siren call of self sings loudly in our current cultural moment. Even as Christians, we easily fall prey to the false promises of self-focus, self-care, and self-love. With a refreshing dose of biblical truth, wisdom, and insight, Lydia Brownback invites us to consider our ways with fruitful reflection. Flourish is a book every woman should read. I highly recommend it!”

Melissa Kruger, author, In All Things and The Envy of Eve

“As someone who deals in words all day and every day, I’m always fascinated to see how they come and go, how they ebb and flow. Recent years have brought us countless articles, books, podcasts, and conferences based on the word flourish. ‘Follow this program,’ they say, or ‘switch to this diet,’ or ‘become more mindful,’ and ‘you’ll finally flourish in your life and in your relationships. Guaranteed!’ In this book, Lydia Brownback looks for and finds what I’m convinced is the true key to human flourishing. Her solution is infinitely better because it is based on an infinitely better source—the enduring, infallible Word of God.”

Tim Challies, blogger, Challies.com

“Lydia Brownback is an author to be trusted. She writes with lucid insight and biblical discernment. The result is a book that is truly helpful—a book that avoids contemporary fads and points the reader repeatedly to the sufficiency of Christ. She takes on common destructive states of mind that often hinder Christians from walking in the freedom that is theirs by grace. I suppose the highest recommendation I can give to this book is that it is one I will be encouraging the congregation I serve to read.”

Todd Pruitt, Lead Pastor, Covenant Presbyterian Church, Harrisonburg, Virginia; Cohost, Mortification of Spin

“What if the pathway to true flourishing is not what our instincts assume? What if the siren calls of society and culture are misleading us? What if real flourishing makes foolish the wisdom of the world and turns today’s prevailing solution on its head? What if self-focus leads to losing the life that really matters, and focusing outside ourselves leads to finding it? Lydia Brownback has a beat on the answer. There is a true flourishing, and it may not be what you think—and it is better than what we dream. This is no shallow guide to ‘flourishing’ when all in life is well. Brownback wants to get us ready to truly flourish—when all around our soul gives way.”

David Mathis, Executive Editor, desiringGod.org; Pastor, Cities Church, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota; author, Habits of Grace

“In a world where seemingly every voice whispers, ‘Think about yourself,’ this book is an invitation to something better. With biblical clarity, Lydia Brownback exposes the pervasive lie of self-focus and points us to a more abundant life. Whether you find yourself shackled to the self-centered spirit of the age or mentoring someone else who is, Flourish will open the prison door and let in the warm light of Christ.”

Megan Hill, author, Contentment and Praying Together; Editor, The Gospel Coalition

Flourish

Other Crossway Books by Lydia Brownback

Contentment: A Godly Woman’s Adornment

Finding God in My Loneliness

Joy: A Godly Woman’s Adornment

Purity: A Godly Woman’s Adornment

Sing a New Song: A Woman’s Guide to the Psalms

Trust: A Godly Woman’s Adornment

A Woman’s Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything

Flourish

How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

Lydia Brownback

Flourish: How the Love of Christ Frees Us from Self-Focus

Copyright © 2019 by Lydia Brownback

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Connie Gabbert

First printing 2019

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6065-1 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6068-2 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6066-8 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6067-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brownback, Lydia, 1963– author.

Title: Flourish : how the love of Christ frees us from self-focus / Lydia Brownback.

Description: Wheaton : Crossway, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018026104 (print) | LCCN 2018044341 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433560668 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433560675 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433560682 (epub) | ISBN 9781433560651 (tp)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian women—Religious life.

Classification: LCC BV4527 (ebook) | LCC BV4527 .B7653 2019 (print) | DDC 248.8/43—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026104

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2020-10-30 11:53:59 AM

With gratitude to God

for

Jessie Joy Bible Yang

1969–2018

You marked my life indelibly.

And, selfishly, I wish you hadn’t left so soon.

Contents

Introduction

 1  Set Free from Self-Consciousness

 2  Set Free from Self-Improvement

 3  Set Free from Self-Analysis

 4  Set Free from Self-Indulgence

 5  Set Free from Self-Condemnation

 6  Set Free from Self-Victimization

Cultivate: A Thirty-Day Study Guide

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

What’s trending? Tracking trends—in fashion, food, and everything else—is a hobby for some and a full-time career for others. Even those of us who care little about keeping up with trends are still curious as to what’s hot and what’s not. What’s the fascination? Trends are a big deal because they tap into our thirst for the new and novel. In reality though, there’s nothing new under the sun (Eccles. 1:9), so all trends are simply the repackaging of something old.

Cultural icons aren’t the only fodder for trendsetters. It happens with ideas and beliefs as well. Even particular words rise and fall in popularity. As I write, the word flourish is having a moment. It’s a good trend, this word flourish, because it conveys what life in Christ is meant to be—enjoying the Lord and living for him. It’s about serving with gladness, not drudgery. It’s getting beyond the ho-hum, going-through-motions sort of Christian living and knowing Christ as our greatest delight.

We want that, right? And not just the occasional flash of it, but all the time. We want a flourishing lifestyle. So why don’t we have it? What’s in the way? What sabotages our joy?

For most of us, it’s nothing big and dramatic; it’s the little daily pressures—the stresses and fears and irritations—that come along and disrupt our intentions to live and love well. But there’s often more to it. Humdrum joylessness comes also from what we take into our hearts and minds not only from the world around us but from sources that claim to be Christian. That’s what we want to make sense of as we make our way through this book. We want to see how wrong teaching about God can give us wrong ideas about God and how these wrong ideas keep us from flourishing.

To ground ourselves, it’s important to realize that we are living in the time the Bible calls “the last days.” When Jesus returned to his Father in heaven forty days after his resurrection, this new era of history began—the last days—and we’re told by God’s Word that this era will be characterized by trouble. It’s a sobering truth, but the apostle Paul wants us to face this reality head on: “Understand this,” he wrote to Timothy, “in the last days there will come times of difficulty” (2 Tim. 3:1). And then he explains why these days will be so hard:

People will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. (vv. 2–5)

As you look at Paul’s list of difficulties, do you see the repeated word? It’s love—more specifically, misplaced love. Times of difficulty arise because people are lovers of themselves and lovers of money and lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of good and lovers of God.

So many of the scary, evil things we see happening arise from the poison of misplaced love, and as Paul says earlier in this letter, it’s “spread like gangrene” by false teachers (2 Tim. 2:17).

Paul is saying that people are spiritually poisoned when they drink in wrong teaching about God’s Word and God’s ways, and that’s why he tells us to avoid it—to keep ourselves away from wrong teaching. There’s simply no escaping the fact that we’re always conformed to what we focus on.

If we want to know joy and peace, if we desire to be fruitful disciples of the Lord Jesus, it’s imperative that we breathe the right spiritual air. But how do we know what that is? How can we be sure that we’re taking in air that’s spiritually healthy?

Our challenge is to discern teaching that’s pure and true from that which is toxic and false. God’s Word is our standard, of course. But here’s the tricky part: wrong teaching about the Bible can significantly shape the way we understand the Bible! That’s why it’s vital to be able to identify what’s false—in other words, unbiblical—in the materials we allow into our eyes and ears. So our approach seems pretty straightforward—safeguard ourselves in biblical truth—but it’s actually more challenging than we realize. We need to take a closer look. As we do, we’re likely to discover that we’ve unwittingly bought into some of this false teaching because it’s been presented to us as truth.

The whole idea of “false teaching” brings to mind images of slick televangelists or cultlike groups living on the fringe. But look again at Paul’s words to Timothy and notice the very first thing he mentions about the last days: “People will be lovers of self.” Any teaching that sets self-love as the highest good is false teaching, and we are susceptible to it because it appeals to that deep yearning for affirmation we feel at our very core. That’s why it hooks us. It just feels so right. And there is an inescapable link between self-love and self-focus. Self-love and self-focus are really just flipsides of the same coin. They always go together. That’s why self-love, the sort that the apostle was writing about, directs our energies, thoughts, plans, choices—and even our theology—inward, making ourselves the center of all things.

Are we self-lovers of this sort? We might be—if we define ourselves by what people think of us. We might be—if we believe that walking with Jesus is all about maximizing our personal potential. We might be—if we allow our feelings to govern our choices. We might be—if we think Jesus saved us primarily to make our daily life more comfortable. We might be—if we allow some sin, whether past or present, to define us. Fixating on ourselves never accomplishes what we hope it will, so we need to let go of it and fixate on someone else—the Lord Jesus Christ. God’s Word—and true biblical teaching—is all about him.

So take a moment to scan the pile of books on your nightstand, specifically those that have to do with the Christian faith. Is there a common theme among those titles? How many have more to do with successful Christian living than with Christ himself? While Christian-living books can certainly be good and helpful, they can actually warp our understanding of what it means to be a Christian if Christ isn’t at the center of them. So we want to be wise and discerning not only in our book choices but also in every form of teaching we imbibe, from preaching to podcasts.

We’ve got our work cut out for us.

But as we become biblically equipped to distinguish between self-love and Christ-love, our walk of faith will flourish, and we’ll find the abundant life Jesus promised.

1

Set Free from Self-Consciousness

A few years ago, selfie sticks hit the market. They were the “it” Christmas gift that year for the under-thirty set (and many over thirty, as well). In fact, the selfie stick was listed in Time magazine’s twenty-five best inventions of 2014. Nothing better captures the spirit of our era than this extendable metal rod that enables people to position a camera for the taking of endless self-portraits. Some have dubbed it the “Wand of Narcissus.” And for good reason.

Selfies fuel the engine of social media. Many of us change our profile pictures weekly or even daily. Some of these are candid, in-the-moment, fun shots, but many are the result of countless takes and retakes, angling for that perfect one that sets us off to best advantage. The age of the selfie (and the fact that selfies are even a thing) allows us to influence how others answer the question we are always asking ourselves: “What do people think of me?”

By means of our clothes, our weight, our gym routine, the interior of our home, the behavior of our children, and even how we birth our children, we are so easily driven by a craving for an acceptable answer to that question. But in Christ, we are called to ask a different question: What do people think of Christ? When we are driven by a concern for how people perceive him, we can live free from the bondage of what people think of us. One of the most amazing aspects of being united to Christ by faith is that he actually becomes our very identity, but not until we grasp this truth can we enjoy the freedom of self-forgetfulness.

Dig

Freedom is the best gift a democracy offers its citizens. Those of us who have lived our whole lives under a democratic system tend to take freedom for granted. We aren’t typically filled with wonder that we are free to choose a career path, whom to marry, the size of our family, and where (and whom) to worship. But these freedoms we enjoy were hard-won, handed down to us through risk and bloodshed and wars. Our national history, however, is merely a short-lived shadow of the eternal freedom Jesus won for us when he shed his blood on the cross to free us from sin and God’s wrath. When Jesus rose from the dead and ascended back to heaven, he actually took us with him:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Eph. 2:4–6)

Our life is now there, in the heavenly places with Christ. This isn’t just some spiritual concept to ponder; it’s a reality with enormous practical implications. For our purposes here, it indicates that Jesus won for us freedom from ourselves. We can take our society’s freedoms for granted and still enjoy those benefits, but not so much our spiritual freedom. If we take for granted Christ’s work for us, or if we don’t understand all he has done, we live and think like prisoners rather than free women.

I think, for example, of Sophia. Each weekday she arises at six o’clock and spends fifteen minutes sipping coffee and doing her daily Bible reading. Afterward she turns her attention to the day ahead, and she thinks about what to wear as she finishes her coffee. Thoughts of God and the Bible passage she’s just read fade from her mind as she stares at the clothes rack. Sophia is focused on the image she wants to project and how her clothing choice will be viewed by the people she’ll encounter in the hours ahead. Once dressed, accessorized, and made up, she heads downstairs for breakfast, and while she scrambles eggs for the family, she ponders whether she can afford the calories if she partakes. There’s that dress she’s got to fit into for the reunion next month, so maybe she’ll just skip the toast. And on it goes throughout the day, right up through bedtime.

But even bedtime doesn’t free Sophia from self-consciousness. The busyness of the day might be over, but these quieter moments allow her the mental space to scan back through the day’s activities and conversations for the impressions she made. Things she said or didn’t say or wish she’d said or should have said or rephrased—it’s all there once her head hits the pillow.

Sophia doesn’t see the bondage in which she’s living, but her anxieties about her appearance and her words reveal it. Sophia is so focused on herself, curved so entirely inward, that she is locked in a self-made prison. That’s what self-consciousness is—a prison. If we center our thoughts and activities on ourselves, our world grows increasingly narrow, and over time our view of reality is warped. Without realizing it, we become the measure of all things in our own minds.

“What Will People Think of Me?”

Self-consciousness impacts the decisions we make. Our choices big and small are too often governed by What will people think of me? Our attempt to shape the answer to that question can become an internal undercurrent so relentless that we aren’t even aware of its pull. It can be there in the home furnishings we choose. It can be there in the tables we set and the planter we place on the patio. It can be there in the car we drive and the holiday decorations we choose for the front porch. And it can be there in the books we read and the restaurants we frequent and the places we choose for vacation.

Self-consciousness can also drive the decisions we make for our children. The schools they attend and the summer camps, the clothes they wear and the friends they bring home—that relentless undercurrent might be flowing somewhere beneath our very genuine mama-bear love. Angry words, shame, and impatience so easily arise from What will people think of me?