Free What is the Point?: Discovering Life's Deeper Meaning and Purpose by Misty Edwards

time, though, and it is a battle. If it were automatic, it would not be love. The continual choices we make to daily pull our hearts away from other loves and untangle our affections is love itself. The actual choices, even though they are sometimes painful, are an expression of love and will position us to feel the fire of God over time. Our hearts will actually change.
    S OUL
    The soul is your personality. It is what makes you, you. The soul is what makes people different. It’s the angle from which you see life. It is your identity and your unique personality. We realign our identity to be based on our relationship with God instead of on our accomplishments and the recognition we receive from people. Our identity is determined by the way we define our success and value, thus, by how we see ourselves. When we get our identity from our accomplishments and recognition, we end up in an emotional storm of preoccupation with vanity. We most naturally see our accomplishments as very small and unimportant, causing us to feel rejected and neglected by people.
    We must define our primary success in life as being ones who are loved by Jesus and who love Him in return. This is what determines our personal worth. We are to be anchored in this truth as the basis of our success and worth rather than in our accomplishments, recognition, or possessions. Our identity must be established on being loved by God and in loving Him in response. Our confession is, “I am loved by God, and I am a lover of God; therefore I am successful.”
    We will love Jesus much better with less “emotional traffic” inside our soul. We have to regularly refocus our soul and anchor our identity in our ultimate purpose, letting the secondary things take second place so that we are not tossed on the sea of vanity.
    S TRENGTH
    Our strength is expressed through the way we use our resources. We are to love God with our strength, which means instead of our usual way of using our resources to increase our personal comfort and honor. We should also use them to invest directly in building the kingdom. God cares about the love we show Him when we invest our strength into our relationship with Him and in helping others to love Him. We show our strength in five activities, as seen in the center section of the Sermon on the Mount.
1. Blessing our adversaries (Matt. 5:43–48; 6:14–15)
2. Serving (Matt. 6:1–4)
3. Praying (Matt. 6:5–13)
4. Fasting from food (Matt. 6:16–18)
5. Giving (Matt. 6:19–21)
    God multiplies and then returns our strengths back to us. However, He does it in His own timing and way. This takes faith that God is watching and that He esteems this as an expression of love. I will develop this more in the next chapter.
    Loving God with our strength involves our money, time, physical strength, and abilities. He wants us to love Him in this way, not because He needs our money or contribution, but because when we offer it to Him in love, there are many human dynamics that happen. When we transfer our confidence from our money to God, by giving extravagantly, we are loving Him. When we transfer our rights to use our time the way we want by spending time in prayer and in serving others to show Him love, He sees it.
    When we obey the Lord in these arenas of our strength, we press to love Him by giving above and beyond what most would think to give. This is so important to understand because some just think of loving God in a worship service and in a general way of emotion, but we want to love Him with our strength. Our love is tangible and has action in it. We know that even though we are weak, this will take us into a deeper level of love.
    I have sought to love Him, and I have found the pressure points in money, time, words, and physical strength. When I surrender these to Him, I feel the pain in my flesh (or natural self) and say, “Ouch, Lord. I didn’t know about that fear I had in money. I guess I didn’t trust You as much as I thought. I want to