Tame Your Strengths Before They Destroy You

By taming our strengths and aligning them with God’s will, we avoid falling victim to the passions and transform our gifts into tools for holiness.

So let’s expound. What does this mean? Taming our strengths?

If we look at the example of a horse and it’s rider, these are two distinct things that when they come together in a successful unity, can achieve incredible accomplishments. There needs ideally to be love between them and trust between them, but the horse must be tamed, it must be trained. Similarly, the rider must know how to train, and how to guide and direct, the horse. If something is missing from this, now you have a relationship, a horse, that is unpredictable, that will not do what you want, sometimes may impose it’s own will, and potentially even harm itself and you.

So bringing it back to us. We, and when I say we, I mean our true selves, our spirits, are like the rider, and the horse is like the strengths, the gifts, that have been given to us. There needs to be that taming, that training of the strength in order for it to be successful. If not, then we will be led down into the depths of the passions.

So some examples. Maybe you are someone who is very organized, is on top of things, is on time, very structured, can help direct, guide, manage situations, people, etc. This is a fantastic strength, a gift of orderliness you’ve been given, but it can also very easily be turned into rigidity, inflexibility and unwillingness to accommodate others.

Let’s say you maybe have a great zeal, godly zeal for justice and to protect others and do what is right and defend them from different situations, or protect them in times of vulnerability and weakness. But when the self gets involved, the ego, and there’s perceived hurt, etc., this can very easily be turned into a more destructive anger.

Love; love is from God. It is very giving, sacrificial. A perversion of this would be lust, which is very focused on oneself.

Or you can have some great natural talent that has been given to you and that can very easily be turned into pride or sloth that comes from this taking for granted of this talent.

It’s important to recognize what these strengths and weaknesses are within yourself. Sometimes you may be aware of one, you may not be aware of both the strength and the weakness, the two that correlate together, but if you can recognize one, then you can logically figure out the other and confirm that. So it’s really important to acknowledge these things within yourself, be aware of them and to work on them.

We want to focus on the taming of the strength. We don’t want to focus on the negative and just trying to avoid the negative when we want to focus on the positive, the gift, the strength that we have, and on taming, developing that.

And this doesn’t just apply to yourself, it applies to other people that you interact with, and this applies to yourself as well, but many things that you don’t like about other people come from things that you do like about them. So we’ll often get into a friendship, a professional relationship, romantic relationship with someone because there are various traits about them that we admire.

For example, the orderliness. They may be, very on top of their life and organized and always on time, and you admire that. Then sometimes you’re like, “man, I wish you would just relax or throw out the plan and just do something new and fun.” Or I mentioned, someone that you like how much they defend what they believe in, and other people and you. But then, you find out maybe they’re quick to anger. So these are things that you don’t like that come from things you do like.

It’s important to recognize that and not judge and criticize other people, and to treat them in a loving way. Love first. And to help build them up and support them and guide them so that they can also tame their strengths and avoid falling victim to the passions.

Another good point is humility, because this is a huge topic and it applies to basically area every area of life and pretty much every quality within you. So if you have a specific strength, weakness, situation about yourself or someone else that you want to hear more about, send me a message or comment about it and maybe I’ll make a video about that.

But something that can generally be applied is humility. This again goes right in line with everything that I’ve been saying so far because you did not do anything to receive the talents, the strengths that you have. They are given to you.

So just like how the rider and the horse are two different things, you need to recognize that you are you, independent of the strengths that you have, the natural talents you have, and the gifts that have been given to you. You need to recognize that you did absolutely nothing to receive them and that God gave them to you. It’s your responsibility to use these to glorify God and to develop them to the best of your ability and use them for greatness, holiness, and goodness.

You also need to recognize that no matter how good you are at something, how easy or difficult it may be, how experienced or how new you are at something, you need to depend, rely, and turn to God for it, no matter what. Without that, you will always fall victim to the passions.

We are incredible beings created by God in His image, and we are capable of absolutely incredible feats. However, without God, without that reliance, dependence, and leaning on God constantly, we will be led astray and ultimately will fall.

So I think that’s a good point to kind of wrap up. Obviously, knowing your purpose in life is very relevant to this conversation. So my last video, Life Reset – How To Find Your Path , is all about helping people figure out what to do when they don’t know what to do with their life. So feel free to give that a watch if you feel it relates.

The ultimate example of everything I’ve been saying, taming your strengths, is Christ himself. We want to be more and more like Christ and strive to become like Christ. The greatest thing we have to learn about Christ’s life, is the Bible. So definitely read that, but as a tool, completely for free, I’ve taken all the different passages of Christ’s life and his teachings from the Gospels and organized them into one cohesive, readable narrative. And this is not to replace the Bible, but as an additional tool for study, or to help you get to know Jesus’ life if you haven’t really read the Bible much in an accessible way. So I’ll link that below as well. 

Access & Download The Life and Teachings of Jesus Christ

Thank you for watching, hope you enjoyed and see you in the next one.