What Do You Do With What God Shows You?

I’ve had God show me something about myself, felt convicted by it, then prayed about it, talked to others about it, maybe even written about it, and then gone right back to living almost exactly the way I was living before.

I don’t like saying that out loud, but I’ve done it more than once. I like learning. I like understanding why I do what I do and what is happening underneath the surface. Over the years, books, conversations, counseling, mentoring, Scripture, and a lot of time thinking have helped me understand parts of myself that I probably would have missed otherwise. God has used those things in some pretty significant ways.

At some point, I started noticing something about myself that bothered me. Sometimes understanding why I was doing something gave me the feeling that I was actually doing something about it. I could recognize where my defensiveness came from and still defend myself the next time someone confronted me. I could see that I was trying to control an outcome and continue finding subtle ways to manage it. I could know I wasn’t really present with the people around me and still be distracted without thinking.

The strange part is that I could do all of this while genuinely wanting to change. I wasn’t pretending to care. I prayed about what God was showing me, journaled about it, and even talked through it with someone I trusted to help me understand it better. Hear me, those are not bad things; in fact, they are great things. The problem was that sometimes all of that processing became a way of staying close to obedience without actually walking in obedience.

That has been hard for me to recognize.

There is a point where I don’t need more insight. I already know what is happening. I know what I said, or where I was wrong. I know the conversation I need to have or the thing I need to stop doing. At that point, another hour spent trying to understand myself may not be what God is asking of me. Sometimes He is simply asking me to obey.

James writes, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”

I have read it and heard this hundreds of times. But I think I pictured someone who heard the Word of God and didn’t care enough to follow it. The more I have processed this passage, though, the more I have wondered if the deception James describes can be much harder to recognize than that.

I can care deeply about what God is showing me, agree with Him, and even feel convicted and genuinely want to become a different man. I can even explain what I am learning to someone else. But none of that necessarily means I have obeyed.

That distinction has become more important to me because the last few years have involved a lot of looking inward. I’ve been discipled, mentored, coached, counseled, challenged, humbled, and confronted. I’ve learned things about myself that I didn’t know before. Some of those things have helped me understand patterns that had been operating in my life for years. There have been moments when something finally made sense, and I could see why I responded the way I did or why certain situations affected me so strongly.

That kind of awareness matters. I don’t want to minimize it. Sometimes we need to understand what is happening inside us before we can begin responding differently. God has been patient with me in that process, especially when I wanted change to happen much faster than it did.

But awareness is not the same thing as transformation.

Eventually, what God is showing me has to make its way into the way I actually live. If I recognize that I have been defensive, there eventually comes a moment when I have to listen without immediately explaining myself. If God exposes my desire to control something, I eventually have to loosen my grip on the outcome. If I know I have hurt someone, understanding why I responded the way I did does not remove the need for me to own what I did.

That is usually where things become more difficult, because understanding something doesn’t necessarily cost me very much. Obedience often does.

There have been times when I knew I needed to apologize, but I could feel myself wanting to explain the circumstances first. I wanted the other person to understand what I meant or why I responded the way I did. I wasn’t necessarily trying to avoid responsibility. At least that wasn’t how I would have described it at the time. I just wanted to make sure the whole story was understood.

But an apology that still needs the other person to understand me can easily become another attempt to protect myself and make myself feel better. I’ve had to learn to sit with that. There are moments when the most faithful thing I can do is simply own what belongs to me. No explanation. No attempt to manage how the other person receives it. No expectation that my apology immediately changes the relationship or makes the tension disappear. I can do what is mine to do and trust God with what happens after that.

That sounds simple when I write it. Living it has not always been simple. Maybe that is why Jesus’ words in John 14 have started to feel more personal to me: “If you love me, keep my commands.” There isn’t much distance between love and obedience in the way Jesus talks about them. What I believe eventually begins showing up in how I treat people, what I do when I am wrong, what I do with my anger, how I handle disappointment, and whether I am willing to surrender something when I cannot control what happens next.

I can spend a lot of time asking God what He is teaching me. Lately, I’ve been asking another question. What has God already shown me that I haven’t done anything with yet?

That question has a way of getting underneath all the processing. It moves me away from what I am learning next and back toward what God may have already made clear. Sometimes I already know where the conversation needs to happen. I know where I have been holding onto resentment. I know where pride is keeping me from owning something. I know where I keep asking God for direction when, if I’m willing to admit it, He has already given me enough direction to take the next step.

Maybe you know that feeling too. If we were sitting across from each other, I wouldn’t want to give you a bunch of things to work on. I’d probably just ask you to think about the last few months and pay attention to what keeps coming back. Not every uncomfortable feeling is God speaking, and not every problem has a simple answer. But sometimes we know when God has put His finger on something. The harder question is what we have done with it.

There may be something you have been praying about that God has already spoken to you about through His Word. Maybe you have spent enough time trying to understand why you responded the way you did, and now you need to own it. Maybe the next step isn’t dramatic at all. It may be a conversation you have been avoiding or a quiet act of obedience nobody else will ever know about.

I don’t know what that is for you. I know there have been times in my own life when I kept looking for more clarity because clarity felt safer than obedience. I wanted to understand everything before I moved. God, in His patience, kept bringing me back to what was already in front of me.

I’m beginning to think some of the deepest formation happens there. Not when God shows me something new, but when I finally respond to what He has been showing me for a while.

Maybe that is enough to sit with for now.