CHRISTIAN CHARACTER

I’m going to share a little bit about something that we go through and we have our families go through in our recovery ministry at our church. We take people through a curriculum called, “Insight.” In this curriculum, it shows you the triggers and talks about developing your Christian character. And so a lot of people try to do one or the other and they don’t integrate the two. But when you do integrate them, there’s a strength to your walk. Recovery becomes less about forgetting the thing behind you like it’s going to sneak up on you, it’s more about keeping your eyes on Christ and developing your Christian character. But you’re still not neglecting the fact that there are things that could potentially grab your attention.

So it says to add to your faith, goodness. To your goodness, knowledge. To your knowledge, self control. To your self control, perseverance. To your perseverance, Godliness. To your Godliness, brotherly kindness. To your brotherly kindness, love.

What many people try to do, and I even tried to do it when I was first a Christian. That first year was almost miserable! I kept going back to that, I lost the joy of my salvation when I would read in David’s Psalm. I wasn’t understanding how strong I could be if I was keeping my eyes focused on God, and recognizing the triggers.

These traits (faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, etc.) are supposed to be a compilation of strengths that’s being developed in your Christian character. It says in 2 Peter 1:10 that if you do these things, then you won’t fall away. Other scripture translations say you’ll never stumble. Now, this doesn’t mean that we won’t ever do anything wrong again.

But if we aren’t building our Christian character and adding to it, then we’ve forgotten what we’ve been saved from. We’ve forgotten the cleansing in some translations. So if we want to get to 2 Peter 1:10 where it says that we won’t fall away, we won’t stumble, then we have to go from the bottom of the step all the way to the top. The top is the agape love! We all want to love like Jesus. But that means that we have to get rid of some things and we have to add some strength, all along the way.

LEARNING HOW TO COPE
As a person develops their Christian character, (this is what we teach, Finding the Family), you have to learn how to cope. So, if we want to love, be kind, and forgive like Jesus, but we aren’t learning how to cope and turning to Him, we are going to fall flat, every time and not developing into anything.

When you take, building your Christian character, and you add coping skills, facing those things then that forms stability. We want to be stable in our walk with Christ. We love helping these families walk through life with small, steady, steps. When you walk alongside somebody and you see a transformation like we see in these families, I’m telling you, there’s nothing like it.

It’s so simple when you get up, you pray a prayer blessing over your family. You sing when you feel like screaming. It says to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to one another for a reason in the Bible, because it takes up fire right out of your mouth when you do that. So we teach them simple strategic things that help them cope and retrain their mind on how to handle life.