Positive Christian Motivation

COMPARISON IS THE THIEF OF JOY: Don’t Compare Yourself To Others - Inspirational Motivational

Make God's word your ultimate source of daily motivation as you tune in to this impactful episode filled with motivational messages, empowering life advice, inspiring teachings, and stories. Enjoy this remarkable blend of spiritual insights and empowering inspiration that motivates you to become the best version of yourself and nourishes your spiritual connection with God.

Duration:: 20m
Broadcast on:: 22 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

(upbeat music) - Okay, round two. Name something that's not boring. - Laundry, ooh, a book club. Computer Solitaire, huh? - Ah, sorry, we were looking for Chumba Casino. (upbeat music) That's right, ChumbaCasino.com has over a hundred casino style games, join today and play for free for your chance to redeem some serious prizes. (upbeat music) ChumbaCasino.com. - No percussive. (upbeat music) - Comparison is the thief of joy. 'Cause social media has changed the landscape of life. You know, it's amazing how you can be so content with where you are and so happy, but then all of a sudden awareness drives discontentment. Because it's a slippery slope when you start playing the comparison game and nothing will steal your joy more than looking at somebody else. - And that thing that's stealing from me and from you is comparison. It's the way that we compare ourselves to other people. So comparison has been called the thief of joy. It steals your joy. And so I'm probably, I imagine, not the only one who's been pretty happy until I look at what someone else has got. - Often we don't enjoy life when we compare ourselves to other people. Sometimes we think, if I just had a different life, then I could enjoy my life. Or if I had his life, or if I had her life, then I could enjoy my life. Or if I just had what someone else had, then I would be happy and I would enjoy life. Social media has made it so easy to compare ourselves to other people nowadays. But we have to learn to enjoy our own life. We have to learn to enjoy the life that God has given us. Enjoy the season that we're in. Enjoy the blessings that God has given us without comparing ourselves to other people. And we can run ourselves in this pursuit of comparison. We will get ourselves in debt over our head to have a better car, a better house, or kids in better shoes. We will kill ourselves dieting. Or do whatever we else can to alter ourselves physically to look less like ourselves and more like someone else. We will damage relationships with our kids to push them in arts and sports and academics so that they can be better than those kids will strive for a promotion at work at the expense of our family. And we will hurt ourselves spiritually, trying to be hard to be someone and beat someone instead of being grateful for this one. You represent a part of God's image that only you have. And if you spoil it by trying to be someone else, we lose a little bit of the image of God that we can only see in you. Comparison, corrupts, God's creativity when he made you. Comparison is the enemy of contentment. If you want to be discontent, if you want to be dissatisfied with your life, with who you are, with what you have, with what you do, then just get in the business of comparing yourself to everyone else. And all of us as human beings do that. We've been comparing ourselves to one another as long as there have been human beings, but there's consequences to it. And one of the things that I've been discovering it does is it enslaves you and it can stop you from living the life that God has put ahead of you. When we compare our lives with other people, we stop enjoying our own life. The key is to enjoy the life God has given us, enjoy the blessings that he's given us and not compare ourselves to other people. The scripture says Godliness with contentment is great gain. Here the Apostle Paul is encouraging us to be content and enjoy life and enjoy the blessings God has given us. God, the ultimate source of all things packs your bags with exactly what you need for the journey he has laid out for you. Your journey is different from other journeys. God has laid out a journey for you and he has given you everything you need to do everything he wants you to do. There is this pointless pursuit in something called comparison. Comparison, it's easy to get our identity wrapped up in who I am compared to that person. Do I have more than them or less than them? Who am I compared to that person? Am I more popular than them or less popular than them? Do I have more friends than them or less friends than them? It's easy to get our identity up in how I measure up to other people. And here's the thing, we never grow out of it because mostly what we do at night is scroll on the phone and just compare, compare, compare, compare. And that's why, what do they say about comparison? Comparison is the thief of joy. It'll steal you. You can't find peace and contentment. It never satisfies. And the problem with comparison is that it's a lie. It's not my true identity, who I am compared to them. It's not your true identity, who you are compared to them. And it's not who God created you to be. God never thought about comparing you when he made you. He made us eight billion different ways. If the game you play is comparing your life, what you do, what you have to what someone else has or what someone else does or to their life, if that's the game you play, there is a very strong likelihood you are comparing yourself to something that's not real. Now, why would I say that? Because the only thing you know about other people, for the most part, is what they want you to know about them. I'll give you the recipe for living a discontented life. If you want to be dissatisfied with your life, here's, here is your action item. Spend hours every day scrolling through Facebook posts. Now, why? Because Facebook posts aren't real, they're superficial. You understand, people don't post their mess on social media as a rule. People post these superficial facades, trying to portray something that is not real. So if you're scrolling through Facebook posts all day every day, then you're going to begin to compare your life with a life that is not real. Because of social media and the effect and the way that it's shaped us, we have all gone comparison crazy. And the way that social media works, and you'll know this because you're on it, is we all want to present the best version of ourselves, don't we? So we take the selfie, we put the filter on it, and then we show it to the world. We want to put the best version of ourselves out there. And so what we're doing, when we look at social media, is we begin to subconsciously and sometimes consciously compare what we have to what everybody else has got. And what it means is you end up comparing your face to their filter. And your face will always lose in that comparison. Any of our faces would. And so for our grandma, you know, it was like she woke up in the day, she would compare herself to people. But just the people around her, the people on the street, or the people at work, but we are 24 hours a day, seven days a week getting bombarded. And because it's all seemingly perfect, all the comparison becomes upward. Look at their perfect body. Look at the money that they have. Look at the cars that they can drive. Look at the jobs that they have. And am I the only person who looks at that and feels that in comparison, my life is like this gray, drab, Monday morning experience that never comes to an end. And social media doesn't help us with it, but it's not the only place that we do it. So we compare ourselves, maybe for you, it's you can pay yourself to the pretty girl in the youth group. Or you can pay yourself to the guy that seems to get all the girls. And what happens is when we do that comparison comes into the tent of our lives, as it were, and it steals our joy and it steals our self-worth. And we end up doing one of two things. We either compete, I've got to match up, so we get on the treadmill and we run as fast as we can, of trying to get all the filters out there, trying to make sure that we match up to everybody. So we either compete or we give up. I'm not going to compete with you, but I'm just, my life's just rubbish. And you make me feel rubbish about myself. And it's like it enslaves us. And this has never been more important. This has never been more important than the digital world in which we all now inhabit. Because when I was growing up, and for many of you, if you're my age or older, the only people we had to compare ourselves to were actually the people in our hometown, maybe the neighboring town. But now kids every day get to, they get to compare themselves to every teenager on TikTok, every teenager on Instagram. And it's not just kids, it's adults too. We go on Instagram. And they're family photos. They're unbelievable. Don't let the internet define your worth, crush your optimism, dull your perspective, become your world. Don't let it define who you are. Let God define you. It's not real. It's not who you are. It's not your identity. No matter how much it feels like I have to measure up to them, they are not who God created you to be. And if you chase being someone else, you'll never arrive at becoming you. The best person to compare yourself to is you yesterday and not someone else today. And the reason for that is you don't know anything about these people that you're comparing yourself to usually. Like one of the things I've noticed is that it doesn't take much discussion with someone no matter how successful they are. You scratch below the surface and you find that their life consists of trouble and suffering in proportions that you could hardly imagine. Almost everyone is dealing with some serious problem, personal problem or problem in their family. And so what you're comparing yourself to, if you're envious, is it's an illusion. And it's not a helpful illusion. It's not a fair race to be racing against someone else, but it's a fair race to be racing against yourself. You could be slightly better than you are. And that will actually, the thing about that that's so cool. And I think the psychological literature really indicates this, is that slow incremental improvement from your initial baseline can take you places that you couldn't possibly imagine. And envy is only a impediment to that. And that notion of putting our eyes onto others when we compare, taking them off the maker and putting them onto somebody else, is something human beings have been doing, as long as they've been human beings. They do it in the Bible. So probably one of the best examples is this king called Saul. He's the first king of Israel. And he's got loads of stuff going for him. So he's ahead and shoulders, taller than everybody else in Israel. He's a good looking guy. He wins kind of like, he becomes the first king. He wins all these battles. If he had Instagram, he'd have a million followers. Life is going well for Saul. But then what Saul does is he makes some mistakes, then he messes it up. And this other guy comes on the scene called David, and David starts to do quite well. And there's this particular moment where David and Saul go out to fight a battle with their enemies, the Philistines, and they win, they're victorious. And then they turn around and they come back to the town. And as they come back, the ladies of the town come dancing out, to meet them, to greet them. And they sing in this song, and you can read it in one Samuel, chapter 18, verse 7. It says, "As they danced, they sang. "Saul has slain his thousands, "and David his tens of thousands." And Saul, when he hears that, he gets really angry. And I can totally relate to him on that, right? Because it's not that he's comparing himself to David in this moment. It's that he's being compared by other people to David, and he's coming up short. And then his response is what loads of our responses, when we find ourselves in that situation. It says in verse 9, it says, "And from that time on, Saul kept a close eye on David. "What we do is, when there's certain people "that we're regularly comparing ourselves "to maybe I'm just the only one here, "but I find that I keep an eye on them "more than anybody else. "I watch what they post, "I watch how their life is going. "And the mistake he's made "is he's taken his eyes off God, "and he's put them onto David." I reckon the reason we do experience jealousy, and we do feel like, "What's going on with them?" And how come that's not for me? Part of the reason, anyway, is because we don't understand what we've been given. We don't understand always, or we forget maybe, what we've received. So King Solomon was a king who had everything. He had unbelievable riches and wealth. And this is the coolest thing. Solomon is said was the wisest man on earth. In fact, this is what 1 Kings says about Solomon. God gave Solomon wisdom and very great insight. And the breadth of understanding, as measureless as the sand on the seashore. Wouldn't you love for that to be said about you? He could see the world in ways that no one else could. Solomon's wisdom was greater than all the wisdom of all the east, and greater than all the wisdom of Egypt. He was wiser than anyone else. Wouldn't you love for it to be said of you that listen, you can combine and compile all the wise people on planet earth, and this one person's wisdom is greater than them. This is what he said. And I saw that all toil and all achievement. Solomon says, I see that all the striving in the world, all the blood, sweat and tears that people were putting into things, spring from one person's envy of another. It is because, it is because they want. More, they want more than them. Solomon says, you would think he would be content and happy, but he says it's all about envy. It's all about them wanting more, more than her, more than him, more than them. It's so much of what we do. The striving in life is about comparison to others. And here's the reason this quest is such a pointless pursuit anyway. Listen, listen to what Solomon says in the next verse. This chase, this striving and toil that's driven by envy, this too is meaningless. And the reason it says too is because if you read Ecclesiastes, you're going to see so much of what Solomon finds that he tried to fulfill his life with is meaningless. This too is meaningless. A chasing after the wind. It is a road to nowhere. Nothing. You'll get there and you'll eat it and you'll still feel empty. You'll still be hungry. You'll catch it and you'll have a handful of wind. It's nothing. It doesn't get you anywhere. You'll catch it and it was nothing to there to start with. That's why Solomon says this is such a chasing after the wind. Because their journey is not your journey. And if you chase being someone else, if you try to be someone else, then you will never arrive at becoming the you, the unique you that God created. God had a vision when he created you. He had an idea and you will never find your purpose in him until you are at peace with your unique identity that he created in you. Comparison will come for you. Come for your joy. Come for your self-worth. Come for the purpose. That's your purpose. That's your life. That's the only one. You're the only you. It'll come for you. What comparison does is it doesn't just steal your joy. It steals your strength. Because the joy of the Lord is your strength. And what he says is, "Hey, come back to me and see who you've got. I'm the incomparable one. Am I not enough?" And I forget and it's taking Jesus so long to teach me who we get in him. Do you understand what you've received when you become a Christian? You get a father, an everlasting dad. Do you have any idea how many people want that? Where it's like the love is unconditional. It was given to you before you were born. That moment that you were born, he said, "Yes, your mind." He wrote his name on your name on his hand. He was like, "You're going to be mine forever. I'm going to love you always." He doesn't just see you this dad. He delights in you. He takes pleasure in you. He's always wanting to be with you. You receive not just a father but a savior. The perfect savior is the person of Jesus who comes with kindness. He comes with compassion. He comes with mercy. He comes with love but also with great power. That no one can rival. We sing the songs but do we understand the truth of that? No one comes close to him. He has power to set you free. What it means is that he will take you your life as it is and he will use it for his glory and for his kingdom. 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