Is your Christian life “working?” How would you know? What’s the criteria for success?

The New Testament is very clear that following Jesus is not about adhering to certain religious activities or agreeing with a list of truthful statements. Those things may be important. But Jesus said it’s about “loving one another” (John 13:34-35). Paul described God’s goal for us is “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romas 8:29). We are to display the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23).

That all sounds lovely. But what does it look like to “work on” loving one another? Or becoming like Jesus? Or growing in peace, or faithfulness, or self-control? You may have already experienced that “trying harder” doesn’t lead to those goals.

In making this tangible, let me propose 5 things Jesus is at work to do in you. These might be a helpful way of noticing to what degree your Christian life is “working” – or not, and what you might need to invite Jesus into right now.

1. Healing you where you’re wounded

None of us comes through life unscathed. We have all accumulated wounds. Some of those wounds are easily seen; many are deeply hidden. And most of us exert significant energy hiding from our wounds and keeping them hidden from others. Acknowledging our wounds is not about blaming others; it’s about telling the truth. It’s saying, “This is what I experienced, and this is how it affected me.”

Your healing doesn’t come through pretending it didn’t matter, or through trying harder to not let it affect you. God’s usual way of working is not to simply drop healing on you from the outside. Healing requires you “go there.” You look under the surface and tell the truth. Healing usually comes through other people (James 5:16). And most of all, it requires you open the doors in your soul to allow Jesus into those hidden places.

What are you doing with the wounds you’ve accumulated?

2. Freeing you from that which keeps you bound

We all come to believe lies, though we may not see them as lies. In the process, we make agreements with the kingdom of  darkness, often unknowingly. We think and act in ways we may know are unwise, but feel powerless to change. Time alone doesn’t change old mindsets, old brain pathways, old ways of relating. And Satan, our archenemy, is ready with “stuff” if we ever start making progress toward freedom.

That’s actually good news. It means we don’t have to stay stuck. We can learn the truth, and that’s much more than a list of facts. We can renounce agreements we’ve made with darkness. And we can avail ourselves of the name of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, and the victory He accomplished against evil as we walk into increasing degrees of freedom and glory (2 Corinthians 3:18).

What lies have you believed? Where are you going for truth?

3. Integrating all the parts of you

We are not entirely wholehearted. Parts of us are fractured. And we are prone to trying to get rid of the parts of us that are inconvenient, the parts we see as weak or immature, the parts we don’t want others to see, the parts that carry sadness or fear or anger or pain.

But Jesus doesn’t want to remove those parts from you; he wants to redeem them. As a kintsugi artist, He brings all those parts together and restores them into a beautiful integrated whole. He doesn’t excise your trauma, your inner child, your tendency to hide, or your controlling nature from you; He transforms them and integrates them together into something more valuable and radiant than it could have ever been before.

Are you more integrated and whole today than you were a year ago?

4. Growing your character into maturity

We do need to grow up. Some think this is primarily about Biblical knowledge, or a certain level of “performance” as a Christian. But nothing is more distasteful than someone who knows all the “right” answers but displays no fruit of the Spirit, or the Christian leader who has all the charisma but is controlling, angry, and toxic with those close to him.

This is all about matters of the heart. Becoming like Jesus doesn’t come through religious activities; it comes through being with Him. It comes through regularly making every part of your life, your heart, your relationships, the deepest parts of your soul, open and available for Jesus to inspect, challenge you on, and enter into. You keep showing up in His presence. And you keep saying Yes whenever He says, “Let’s deal with this.”

Regardless of your external self, how mature is your character on the inside?

5. Making you useful for His purposes

Many people want to jump into usefulness, ministry, something external and “important.” Yes, start now, right where you are! But if you don’t have a measure of healing, your wounds will bleed all over everyone around you. If your character is warped or “all about me” you may be just as likely to harm others as you are to help them.

And yet it is true; this is not all about you. Your transformation glorifies God, and that always shows itself in service to others. How valuable you are comes not primarily from activities you do, but from who you become. You may or may not know the people your life impacts. But when you make all of you available for Jesus to use, the world is different. You don’t have to fret about it; just raise your sights beyond yourself and keep following Jesus.

Whose pain do you feel? Who are you investing yourself in?

Let Jesus do His good work in you.

And we’ll talk about each of these five elements in further detail in the weeks to come.

Your turn: What is Jesus doing in you right now? What part of you do you need to invite Him into to do His work in you?  Leave a comment below.

Want more? On this week’s podcast I talk with Dr. Alison Cook about the roots of our inner insecurity, and what it looks like to become a secure soul.  Listen or watch.

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• What Jesus is about in you is not a list of religious activities or agreement with propositional truths. He’s about changing you from the inside out. Here are five ways He’s doing that. Will you cooperate?  Tweet that.

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