Day 175- Behave

📖Daily Reading

 Ezekiel 1-15

🎥 Video  

Join me on my morning walk as we rise and shine together by walking through the Bible daily and learn a practical applicable coaching nugget from the ultimate life coach - our creator (whatever that means to you). No judgement zone here, all are welcome, we are all on a spiritual journey because we are after all spiritual beings having a human experience.

 

📝 Reflection 

 Ezekiel 5: 7

   Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: You people have behaved worse than your neighbors and have refused to obey my decrees and regulations. You have not even lived up to the standards of the nations around you. 

 

I have been thinking a lot about behavior the last few days. Much about habit change, mindset and transformation is with the ultimate goal of changing our behavior so that it will be both desirable and automatic. Our behavior is what causes a lot of internal confusion, dissonance and often undesirable outcomes. When we don’t understand why we do what we do and what to do about it we often look for outside solutions.

We want the answers to come from the outside in. We want to understand and have reassurance and certainty before we do the hard work of changing. We want to have first then be. But we have to ‘be’ by ‘doing’ first to ‘have’. The clue is in the word behave it self - be+have. The people of Jerusalem are told to have faith, believe in God and follow His instructions of behavior and then they will have wisdom and a good life. But His ways are so counterintuitive to the human survival self, that we don’t really trust the path, although we want to have all of the rewards and benefits. 

Then we meet a prophet like Ezekiel. He is all in with God, so much so that he is referred to as the ‘son of man’; throughout. He is walking the walk. He is an open vessel who so is connected spiritually to God that he has many seemingly strange visions and direct conversations with God. God even warns him of the ridicule and rejection he is going to experience because of being His messenger and the designated watchman of Jerusalem.  In fact in Chapter 2 vs. 9 he says “I have made your forehead as hard as the hardest rock! So don’t be afraid of them or fear their angry looks, even though they are rebels.” 

At some point he must have decided to believe and just go all in and changed his outward behavior to match even before he had evidence of what he desired to be inside, and eventually it all lined up through the doing. When we don’t believe and we take a wait and see approach and wait for proof and evidence before we change, we don’t really change. It takes faith, which is a belief in the unseen, unproven and that compels action. Faith + action = being ➡️ having - then our behavior (be+have) is natural and intrinsically motivated and integrated into who we are. 

This is the conundrum many of us for thousands of years now and the people of Jerusalem try to have the evidence first and then they will be different - they/we are extrinsically motivated. This does not work long term and it is not sustainable. It is exhausting, the proverbial thirst that is never quenched, the hunger that is never satisfied. We employ strategies like idols and solutions ‘out there’, to do the work that can only be done from the inside out. Inside out in faithful and willing cooperation with our creator, leads to behaving in tandem with the spirt. Who knows maybe you will have amazing visions too. 

God also speaks to us in very personal ways. Obviously Ezekiel was a creative visionary, so this should be a wild ride the next few days as we adventure through this interesting book of the Bible.  

✍🏼Daily Journal Prompt 

What do you want to have? What is your behavior creating and bringing you? How can you begin to align the two?  Do you want peace, but you can't sit still? 

📖Tomorrows Reading

Ezekiel 16-22 

Coaching Opportunity

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If you have stuck with me this far, then you are not reading this by accident, I believe God has a plan for you and is calling you forward!😉🤩

 

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