10 Things That INTJs Find Extremely Annoying

28 January, 202027 January, 2020Marissa

Ever wonder why something you thought was perfectly innocent annoyed your INTJ friend? Or why you, as an INTJ, find certain things that other people don’t worry about the most vexing part of your day?

Our Myers-Briggs® personality types describe how our minds work. It’s a description of the mental processes that we use most comfortably, which come together in unique ways for each personality type. Because of the special way our brains are “hardwired” to function, each type has different things that they typically find very annoying.

Of course, even if a group of people share a personality type there are going to be plenty of individual differences between them. Some INTJs might, for example, enjoy being hugged or not find emotional conversations all that annoying. In general, though, most INTJs will find the 10 things on this list extremely vexing.

10 Things That INTJs Find Extremely Annoying | LikeAnAnchor.com — Photo credit: Pexels via Pixabay

1) Anything Illogical

INTJs approach the outer world using a mental function called Extroverted Thinking. It’s a highly logical way of making decisions and evaluating information. If something doesn’t make sense, can’t be measured, doesn’t work, and isn’t based on impersonal criteria then it’s clearly not the right choice. But other people don’t always see things that way, which can be frustrating and annoying for INTJs.

2) Inefficiency They Can’t Fix

INTJs aren’t just interested in arriving at decisions that make sense. They also want to come up with solutions that work long-term. Something that isn’t efficient irritates them as being out of place and ineffective. This annoyance can make them very productive when they’re driven to streamline processes and bring order to chaos. If for some reason they can’t fix the inefficiency, however, it becomes a continual source of annoyance. Read more →

Reasonable Wisdom

25 January, 202024 January, 2020Marissa

What’s the difference between godly wisdom and worldly wisdom? James gives us part of the answer when he describes “the wisdom from above” as “first pure, then peaceful, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, without hypocrisy, and without partiality” (James 3:17, WEB).

We’ve been studying through this list for several weeks. Now James complicates things by using a word found nowhere else in scripture to describe wisdom as “reasonable.” Alternate translations include “easy to be entreated” (KJV), “obedient” (LEB), “wiling to yield” (NKJV), “open to reason” (TLV and CJB), and “submissive” (NIV). This makes it a bit difficult to see what else God has to say about reasonable, obedient wisdom but we’re going to dig in and do our best to study it anyway.

Persuaded of Good Things

The word we’re discussing here is eupeithes (Strong’s number G2138). It’s a compound word formed by putting eu (G2095) in front of peitho (G3982). Eu is extensively used as a prefix in compound verbs so it’s no surprise to find it here. It means “well” and “good.”

Peitho’s basic meaning is “to persuade, particularly to move or effect by kind words or motives” (Zodhiates’s Complete WordStudy Dictionary: New Testament). It also means to be convinced or persuaded to believe something is true. This word can be used in a positive sense (such as Paul persuading people that Jesus is the Christ in Acts 28:23) or in a negative sense (such as when certain people persuaded the multitudes to stone Paul in Acts 14:19).

But, beloved, we are persuaded of better things for you, and things that accompany salvation, even though we speak like this. (Heb. 6:9, WEB)

The wise aren’t persuadable to just any idea, though. Wisdom is “reasonable;” eu + peitho — good persuasion. The wise are not skeptical or suspicious, for they are obedient and easy entreated. But they’re not easily persuaded by deceivers or convinced that evil is truth. Read more →

5 Tips for Dealing With Your Emotions in a Healthy Way Instead of Bottling Them Up

21 January, 202022 January, 2020Marissa

What do you do with your emotions? A lot of us bottle them up and pretend they don’t exist because we’ve grown up thinking it’s not okay to express problematic feelings like anger, or that strong people don’t cry, or that being too happy makes you look ridiculous. There are also people who swing to the opposite extreme and give all their emotions free reign, but that’s a different issue than the one we’re talking about in this article.

Emotions are a complicated subject. We all have them, but what are they really? And what’s the best way to deal with them? Those are questions typically answered by trial and error or by whatever messages regarding emotion we were targeted with as children. As such, we can make several mistakes when approaching emotions. We might see them as something that’s pesky and distracting rather than a core part of being human. We could make the mistake of thinking everyone has (or should have) the same emotional temperament as us. Or we might decide all emotions are negative and it’s better to hide our feelings than to process them.

As someone struggling with anxiety and depression, I often find myself stuck in negative emotions instead of working through them. In many cases, I also react to situations that could be positive in a negative way. But even people with great mental health can still struggle to process emotions effectively. And the more we bottle up emotions (particularly negative ones) without processing them, the greater the risk that we’ll reach a point where they’re released by something like a burst of out-of-place anger or by collapsing into tears for no apparent reason. So how do we avoid such problems and learn to process our emotions in a healthy way? Read more →

Gentle Wisdom

18 January, 202016 January, 2020Marissa

The Bible speaks of two different kinds of wisdom, one that is of the world and one that is of God. In his epistle, James gives us a list of characteristics that describe “the wisdom that is from above.” he says that it “is first pure, then peaceful,” two characteristics we talked about in posts titled “Pure Wisdom” and “Peaceful Wisdom.”The next characteristic on this list is “gentle.”

Intelligent people often have a reputation for having a cutting wit and a low tolerance for those who don’t see things their way. Wisdom doesn’t act like that. It is gentle in a fitting, proper, and unassertive way

Defining gentleness

There are several Greek words you can translate as “gentleness.” The one James uses is epieikes. This word has to do with legal fairness and indicates moderation, clemency, and equable dealings with others. It involves being “lenient, yielding, and unassertive.” The closely related word epieikei expresses “the virtue that rectifies and redresses the severity of a sentence.”

This type of gentleness is about actively choosing equity and justice in our dealings with others, even when you could assert your legal rights against them. Gentleness keeps us from “the danger that ever lurks upon the assertion of legal rights lest they be pushed to immoral limits” (Spiros’ Zodhiates’ The Complete WordStudy Dictonary: New Testament, entries 1932 and 1933). Read more →

How Do You Hold on to Hope When You’re Fighting Anxiety and Depression?

14 January, 202013 January, 2020Marissa

Anxiety and depression are two of the most common mental illnesses, and they often occur together. Just because its relatively common, though, doesn’t make dealing with both feel any less weird. Exhibit A, this image I ran across on Pinterest:

It’s overly simplified, of course, to say “depression is when you don’t really care about anything” and “anxiety is when you care too much about everything.” Still, these comments capture part of how strange it feels to simultaneously (or alternately) deal with depression and anxiety. “Having both is staying in bed because you don’t want to go to school and then panicking because you don’t want to fail. Having both is wanting to go see your friends so you don’t lose them all, then staying home in bed because you don’t want to make the effort.”

Anxiety and depression are going to show up a bit different for everyone who struggles with them, but for me it’s like one day I’m on-edge, jittery, and so distracted by my inner anxiety monologue that I struggle to remember how things actually happened. Then the next day I feel like a weight’s pressing down on me snuffing out all motivation and hope. And some days, the smothering feeling is there but I’m also anxious about stuff I should care about and there’s this weird fight going on in my head. It’s exhausting.

Holding on to hope isn’t easy when you’re fighting a struggle inside your mind that tells you the worst could happen and there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. But we’re also not helpless victims of our own minds. We can change the patterns of our thoughts. We can choose to hold on to hope even when there seems no reason for it, and the easiest/best way to do this is with the Lord’s help.

Do I Love God Enough To Obey Him?

11 January, 20208 September, 2022Marissa

The apostle John had a particularly close relationship with Jesus. Though Jesus loved all of “his own who were in the world,” John is identified in particular as a disciple “whom Jesus loved” (John 13:1, 23; 19:26; 20:2, 21:7, 20-24). If we want to know Jesus — and we do, because that’s part of salvation and eternal life (John 17:3; Phil. 3:8) — then who better to learn from than John?

We’re taking a short break from our series on godly wisdom because I really felt like this was the topic I should be studying this week. Love and relationship are so important to God. Knowing Him and being known by Him are central to salvation, Christianity, and our eternal hope. We have to know Him in His way, though. Jesus said there will be people at the end who think they know Him and yet never had a relationship with Him (Matt. 7:21-23). That’s a scary thought, but John makes sure to leave us guides in his writings for how to love Jesus and how to tell whether or not we truly know Him.

Knowing God is Essential to Life

John’s writings are among my favorite in the New Testament. He highlights Jesus’ power and divinity — the things that make Him so much higher than us — more than any other gospel writer, yet He also highlights Jesus’s love and His longing for relationship — the things that make Him closer to us. The way John talks about Jesus and the Father makes it clear that the powerful, eternal, creator God longs for a relationship with us.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. … The Word became flesh, and lived among us. (John 1:1-4, 14, WEB)

Jesus came here not just to die for our sins and reconcile us to God, but also to get to know us. He is the good shepherd who knows His sheep and is known by His own, who choose to follow Him (John 10:14, 27). He calls us His followers, friends, chosen, and beloved (John 15:12-16). And He reveals that knowing Him and the Father is key to eternal life (John 17:3). The importance of knowing and being known by God cannot be overstated.

Do I Love God Enough To Obey Him? | LikeAnAnchor.com — Photo credit: Shaun Menary via Lightstock

Keeping the Words of the Lord

We often like to think of concepts like love and grace as something with “no strings attached.” If there’s a commitment or reciprocation implied, then we may start to get defensive and resent that it’s not “freely given.” That idea would have been ludicrous to the people of Jesus’ day. Grace is a reciprocal arrangement (we don’t have time to go into that in this post, but click here for an excellent booklet on the subject). Love has to do with commitment and covenants that attach us to God. In a way that seems odd to modern readers, relationship with God is connected to obedience and law.

“One who has my commandments and keeps them, that person is one who loves me. One who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will reveal myself to him.” … “If a man loves me, he will keep my word. My Father will love him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him.” (John 14:21, 23, WEB)

Really knowing Jesus goes beyond saying we believe in Him. It includes letting that belief change the way we live. We demonstrate how much we respect and care about Him by living according to His commandments. And since John points out that Jesus is also the Word — one of two God-beings who’ve been here for eternity — that includes the commands He gave in the Old Testament as well as the New. Jesus stated in no uncertain terms that He wasn’t here to get rid of everything He’d taught before as the Word, but rather to elevate those commands to an even higher level under a New Covenant (Matt. 5:17-48).

Knowing and Commandment Keeping

John further explores the topic of knowing Jesus in his first epistle. He begins, much as he did in writing his version of the gospel, with Jesus’ eternal existence as the Word of life. Then he shares that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all,” which means we have to walk in light in order to fellowship with God (1 John 1:1-2:2).

This is how we know that we know him: if we keep his commandments. One who says, “I know him,” and doesn’t keep his commandments, is a liar, and the truth isn’t in him. But God’s love has most certainly been perfected in whoever keeps his word. This is how we know that we are in him: he who says he remains in him ought himself also to walk just like he walked. (1 John 2:3-6, WEB)

As this letter continues, John keeps coming back to themes of love, law, sin, and relationship with God. 1 John is one of those Bible books that it’s good to read in one setting (it’s not that long) to get a better feel for the points the writer is making in-context. As you read through it, one thing he continues to repeat is that we can’t have a relationship with God if we insist on breaking His commandments.

Choosing Righteousness as God’s Children

Whoever remains in him doesn’t sin. Whoever sins hasn’t seen him and doesn’t know him. Little children, let no one lead you astray. He who does righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. (1 John 2:1-2, WEB)

If we go back toward the beginning of the letter, we see John has already clarified that the children of God don’t practice sin, but if we slip up we can still repent and Jesus will restore our relationship with God (1 John 2:1-2). He’s not saying a Christian who sins is automatically disqualified for salvation. But he is saying that salvation comes with the expectation from God that we’ll respond to His work in us by starting to live lives modeled after His righteous standards.

We declare by our choices whether we are children of God, who practice righteousness, or children of the devil, who practice lawlessness (1 John 3:8-10). Again and again John emphasizes that children of God keep God’s law, chiefly the two laws that Jesus and Paul identified as the most important — love God and love others (Matt. 22:36-40; Rom. 13:9-10). All other commands hinge on those two. God is love and we need to love as He does, in deed and in truth (1 John 3:11-24; 4:7-21). That’s just how we do things in the family of God.

How I Love Thy Law

As John wraps-up this letter, he ties what he’s written about loving and knowing God together with what he wrote about loving our brethren. He also addresses a common complaint about how “hard” it is to obey God.

By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments. For this is loving God, that we keep his commandments. His commandments are not grievous. (1 John 5:2-3, WEB)

Many people think of commandment keeping as something burdensome, but John tells us that’s far from true. Living within God’s law yields blessings, not hardship. Our attitude toward God’s law should be like that expressed in Psalm 119. This psalmist is in love with the law because it belongs to the God whom he loves. God’s laws are an expression of His character. If we want to be like the Lawgiver and receive the blessings that come from walking with Him, then we’ll respect His word.

Psalm 119 speaks of God’s law as a source of delight, strength, liberty, hope, comfort, life, wisdom, righteousness, peace, and much more. How we keep God’s law is different now — elevated to a spiritual level in the New Covenant — but it still matters (this is largely what Romans is about). God cares about the relationship we have to His words and whether or not we love Him enough to do what He tells us to do. Which brings us to the question of today’s title, “Do I love God enough to obey Him?”

It’s easy to say we love God but it’s harder to follow-through on the things that prove our love is genuine. If we truly love Him, though, obeying His word shouldn’t be a problem for us. It’ll still be a struggle at times to submit our own will to that of our sovereign God, but it’s something worth doing. The blessings of knowing God far outweigh any aspects of obedience that we might find inconvenient. And when we love God and follow His words, continuing to turn back to Him if/when we make mistakes, then we’ll have the assurance that we know Him and are known by Him as well.