3 Ways to Wreck Your Life
Aug 29, 2022One of the things that I love about blogging is the ability to answer questions publicly that we often get privately. As we talk to people there is often a certain theme or a certain question that repeatedly comes up that gives us a peek into what a lot of people might be struggling with. A question that we often get when people hear our story is:
“How do I not go down the road you went down?” or “What are some warning signs that I’m in trouble or my marriage is in trouble?”
There are a number of different ways to wreck your life.
Drinking and driving.
Stealing money from your employer.
Having an affair.
Those are things that wreck your life publicly. Those grab headlines. Those are what people see.
But there is a more subtle way to wreck your life.
There is a way to miss the life God has for you and fake out most of the people around you. What I’ve found in my own life is that the deterioration of my heart usually starts months or years before the visible crash and burn occurs. Here are 3 ways you can wreck your life.
1. Compromise truth with those that are closest to you.
Compromising truth will slowly erode your heart and destroy relationships with those closest to you. When we are willing to withhold truth from our best friend or shade the truth with our husband or only share part of the truth with our wife, we are setting ourself up for a crash and burn. The problem is, most of us don’t feel the consequences of compromising truth until it has become a pattern in our life. Because we don’t feel the consequences early, we convince ourselves that we are actually helping the relationship by saving the person we care about from the pain of the truth. Truth paves the way to intimacy in every relationship.
2. Avoid environments that challenge your character.
Do you have friends that will tell you the truth about yourself? Do you have people in your life that aren’t “YES” men? Are you willing to listen to them? Often in our life, our friends or our spouse will see our blind spot or will notice a character issue in us before we can see it in ourself. Our willingness to receive that truth will often prevent a crash and burn before it happens. Not listening or blowing it off or avoiding those relationships only sets us up for a fall.
3. Believe that you are above making moral mistakes.
As soon as you think you are too talented; too gifted; too successful; too spiritual to make a moral mistake, you are primed and ready to fail morally. The Bible says, “Pride goes before destruction…” You can measure this in your own life by how judgmental you are of others. When you see the sin in other people easier than you see it in yourself, you are prideful. Knowing that without God’s grace we would have no hope helps keep our pride in check.
