Living Vertically or Horizontally

Hello and welcome to this newest episode of Become a Competent Biblical Counselor. My name is Dr. Dave Jones, and today's episode is entitled Living Vertically or Horizontally. And the scripture that I want to use today is found in 2 Corinthians 10, 12, where it says, For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves, but they measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves among themselves are not wise. We have a lot of that measuring and comparing going on in the world today. And it doesn't matter whether you're a Christian or not, is something that we all do. And those of you who are trying to become a competent biblical counselor are going to have people coming to you with various problems and issues that you can listen to and determine if they are living their lives vertically or horizontally. I'm reminded of someone who called me on the phone, a man whose wife had died about a year prior to this phone call and left him with an 11-year-old little girl to raise on his own. And he learned very quickly that this little girl was really comparing herself and measuring himself to all her friends. And there were some things that he wasn't comfortable with, and he wanted to find out how he could address these issues, and so this was the purpose of the session. To begin with, it seems like a number of the girls that were friendly with his daughter had mothers who were friends with the daughter's mother. And they in turn took it upon themselves to determine how this little girl should be raised, regardless of whether the father approved it or not. I don't know where they got the idea that it was up to them to take on this role when they were not asked to do so. But anyway, so the session went on as this. The little girl wanted to do everything that the other little girls were doing, including wearing the same clothes, the same wristwatches. They would uh identify with themselves every day with respect to what color that they're wearing to school and uh where they're going to with the parties, and it just went on and on and on. And the father was saying, you know, I would love to find out who, what mother is creating all of these scenarios for these little girls to follow, and they are all following. So the father managed to get through wrestling with the demands of the other mothers and uh trying to raise his daughter the the best that he could. Years passed. The little girl graduated from high school, the little girl went on to college, graduated from college, only to find out that when she came out of college, she decided she was going to do what everybody else was doing. Same like she was doing when she was 11 years old, which created a tremendous amount of dissension and separation between the father and his daughter. In fact, it got so bad that the daughter chose to leave her father's home and go and live with the friends and the mothers and the parents of the people that she had been influenced by for so many years. And then I have other examples of people that are constantly calling and they're saying, you know, I just I don't feel well. And you listen long enough and you're gonna find out why they don't feel well. They don't feel well because uh of the question that I ask. Tell me about your friends. Well, they'll hedge a little bit and say, I yeah, I do have some friends, and and then I'll say, Well, how impactful are they in your life? Well, I'm very close to them. I say, and somebody She didn't like the way that I dressed, and I'm just really down about that, and I'm really having a rough time. Why does she say that? I tried to do everything I could to be helpful to her and to like her, but she doesn't like how I dress. And so that really hurts my feelings. So the point I'm trying to make here is you can see the comparison. Measuring themselves by themselves, comparing themselves among themselves are not wise, but we do it all the time, don't we? In fact, those of you who are listening right now to this will agree, yep, that's true. I do that. I know people that do that, and we know it's wrong, but we just continue doing it because we want to feel comfortable in our surroundings, in our culture, we want to be able to fit in, but maybe you shouldn't be fitting into this. Maybe you should learn how to stand up for yourself and say, I'm not going to follow the crowd. And why are you giving your power away to somebody else to determine your self-worth? Why are you giving up that power to the to someone that they have the sole responsibility and right to correct you, to tell you how to dress, to tell you how to walk, to tell you how to talk, tell you what to do. There's the comparing and the measuring that has to stop. And how do you stop that? You instead of focusing on the horizontal, your friends down the street, the friends at school, the family, that's horizontal. Turn it vertically. What does God think about how you're dressed? What does God think about what you're doing? What does God think? And if you just can just develop a habit of every time you find yourself measuring yourself and comparing yourself with someone else, and stop and say, No, what does God think about this? And when I approach counselees like this, they understand what they should be doing, and they understand also that it's going to be difficult to break that habit and put on some other habits, but they do know that what they are doing is incorrect. It's a sin. And so they are encouraged to ask for forgiveness, to repent, and start living their life according to the vertical. What does God expect them to do? I want to mention something right here that I think is extremely important, and everybody that I bring this up to agrees. The problem that we have with this comparison and measuring issue cannot be any more substantiated clearly than our utilization of social media. Now you know what I'm talking about. We've entirely too much time with social media listening to people who are giving us suggestions on how we should live our life or how we should handle our problems, and we don't even know who these people are. There you go. As far as the scripture, they are not wise. In Johan Hari's book, Stolen Focus, he says, but there is evidence that these social media sites are now severely harming our ability to come together as a society to identify our problems and to find solutions in ways like this. They are damaging not just to our attention as individuals, but our collective attention. At the moment, false claims spread on social media far faster than truth because of the algorithms that spread outrageous material faster and farther. A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than real news. And during the 2016 US presidential election, flat-out falsehoods on Facebook outperformed all the top stories that nineteen Main Street news sites put together. As a result, we are being pushed all the time to pay attention to nonsense, things that just aren't so. He goes on and says, if we are lost in lies and constantly riled up to be angry with our fellow citizens, this sets off a chain reaction. It means we can't understand what is really going on. In those circumstances, we can't solve our collective challenges. This means our wider problems will get worse. As a result, the society won't just feel more dangerous, it will actually become more dangerous. Another way to look at this is when we're trying to make decisions and we just have all the facts but we just don't know what to do. What do we do? We ask our friends, we ask our neighbors, we ask our family, we ask our spouses. Okay, that's fine. But then it's like taking votes. Well the majority of the people say I should do this, but the majority of the people say I should not do that, I should do this, and I'm so confused I don't know what to decide. Back to the topic of this episode. What does God think that you should do? We don't stop and look at it that way. You have to encourage your counselees to stop measuring themselves by themselves and comparing themselves among themselves. It's the horizontal influence that they are living their lives with. They've got to stop and say, What does God think about this? I had a man call me once and asked me, he says, I'm uh I'm a I'm a husband, but I'm not doing the job the way I should be doing it, and I don't know what to do. I said, Are you a Christian? He says, Oh yes, most definitely. He says, uh, I'm a pastor. I said, okay. What do you think God wants you to do? And there was silence. He says, Well, I said, no, no, don't say well. You're comparing yourself with everybody else. You're afraid that people are going to be concerned about what you're doing as a pastor, that you're having problems in your marriage. What does God think about what you're doing as far as the problem that you're having in your marriage? And what does God want you to do to correct this? That's very direct and provoking. I know why he called me, and he knew why he called me. He wanted me to give him some kind of consolation that what he is doing is correct, and that it's her fault. No, that's not the emphasis. The emphasis has got to be stop living your life horizontally, live your life vertically. And you've got to beat that drum over and over and over again with your counselees that are living their lives in that way. The same is also true with the kind of music that you're listening to. Are you honoring God and are you pleasing God with the music that you're listening to? Why don't you listen to music that warms his heart and warms your heart in the process? A different way of looking at life. Stop giving your power away to people whose opinions you are respecting more than the opinion that God has on what you're doing, what you're listening to, how you're talking, how you're behaving. Live your life vertically. Encourage your counseles to live their lives vertically and be careful of the horizontal. So thanks for listening, and I look forward to our next episode. And in the meantime, live vertically. Have a great day.