Excerpt from Love Focused
Chapter 3
What's Your Agenda?
NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS ago, Judy and I were enjoying a long anticipated vacation in Hawaii with our two preschool-age children. Whenever we talk about that trip, the conversation inevitably turns to one funny memory—the Dole pineapple plant tour. We had spent most of the fi rst few days of the vacation playing in the warm water of Waikiki Beach. But by the third day, we were looking for something to do to escape the sun for the day. I had read that you could take a tour of the Dole pineapple plant where they process and can the freshly picked fruit. That sounded like fun, and it would help us avoid the sun for a few hours.
We arrived at the pineapple plant just in time for the twelve o’clock tour. The tour was quite interesting, and our tour guide was a wonderful young woman who put her heart and soul into her talk. My daughter, Melanie, was her usual talkative self, eager to see everything that was going on. Her brother, David, watched but didn’t say a word the entire time. As the tour concluded, our tour guide explained that she had a big surprise for us. In the next room, we would be treated to chilled pineapple that had been picked just hours before.
“In addition,” she smiled, “If you look in the corner of the room, you’ll find a drinking fountain that is filled not with water, but fresh, chilled pineapple juice. And you can have all you want. So enjoy!”
She was so pleased to be able to offer us such a special treat. Everyone
in the room clapped to thank her for the wonderful tour. Then, in the silence that followed, I heard my son speak his first words since we’d
arrived. Loud and clear, from the back of the room, David said, “But I
don’t LIKE pineapple.” His sister looked at him in disbelief. My wife
and I thought about pretending we didn’t know him. And after a short pause, the entire room burst into laughter.
Our family’s Dole pineapple plant experience goes down in my memory as a good example of how not to handle things. When you’re a preschooler, you don’t always handle things the right way. Fortunately,
at four years old, saying inappropriate things can be funny. But as an adult, responding to life situations the wrong way is no longer cute or
funny. In fact, it can have very damaging consequences.
As I go through my day, I am often aware that I am not handling things the way I know God would want me to. I may handle an important phone call defensively. I may get angry and impatient over the littlest things. I may fail to listen attentively to my wife or children. Sometimes I choose to avoid things altogether. Knowing that everyone else does the same things makes me feel a little better, but it is still no excuse, and more importantly, it does not explain why I do it.
Many people I talk with are also not handling certain areas of life well, and have tried very hard to change but with little or no success. They’ve read the latest Christian books. They’ve prayed, and many have sought counseling. They are sincere people who truly love God and who deeply desire to change, but they have been unable to do so. In many cases, they have quit trying. They may still attend church and participate in church activities, but they have given up trying to grow spiritually. Unfortunately, some people eventually give up on God altogether.
Recognizing the Whole Problem
As I’ve observed this process in the lives of many people over a period
of years, I’ve realized that a major part of the problem is failure to
recognize why we don’t change. We’re trying to fight a battle we don’t
completely understand or see. As a result, we are powerless to fight the
battle and enslaved by an unknown enemy.
One of the most famous surfing spots in the world is Huntington Beach in Southern California. Huntington Beach is known as “Surf City.” Even on days when the waves are small, there is always an ocean current below the surface that is constantly pushing swimmers toward the pier. As a teenager, it was one of my favorite bodysurfing spots, but you always had to fight the current to keep from being injured. For tourists who were unfamiliar with how ocean currents operate, it was particularly dangerous. The ocean currents were strong, powerful, and unseen. Tourists who were unaware of how dangerous they were, often ended up
being rescued by lifeguards just before smashing into the pier.
Just like those dangerous ocean currents, there is an unseen force operating in each of our lives that it is constantly pushing us in a dangerous direction. This unseen current often controls our lives and explains why growth and change are so difficult. But like tourists unfamiliar with ocean currents, we are often ineffective at fighting its controlling power. We don’t know it is there, we don’t understand it, and we don’t know how to handle it.
Handling Our Two Problems
As members of a fallen world, we must get up every morning and face two fundamental realities: we are emotionally needy, and we live in a world that will likely hurt us. Unfortunately, most Christians are unaware of the strong connection between their handling of these two problems and their inability to live powerful and effective Christian lives. How we handle our emotional needs and the pain of living in a fallen world has a far greater effect on our lives than may seem obvious at first. How each of us handles these challenges each day is one of our most important decisions.
When our neediness is incorrectly handled, our wrong response is what causes much of our self-centeredness and unhappiness. This response
can create anger, frustration, and distance in our relationships. It can cause us to be dishonest, controlling, prideful, and critical. In more extreme cases, our response can cause divorce, suicide, and criminal
behavior. Even more importantly, how we handle these two challenges
greatly affects our ability to be Love Focused.
OUR AGENDA
During my years of counseling with thousands of people, I’ve realized
that each of us has a self-focused agenda designed to help us deal with the pain and neediness of living in a fallen world. When we believe
that God is failing to meet our needs, we are on our own to try to get
our needs met. As a result, we are forced to come up with our own solution for our emotional needs and our pain. This solution becomes
our personal agenda.
The dictionary defines an agenda as “an underlying often ideological plan or program.”Our personal agenda is the plan we develop apart from God to get the world to solve the problem of our neediness. It is
our man-made solution to our neediness. When we do not believe that
God is meeting all our needs, or at least not the way we would like, the pursuit of our agenda becomes the driving force in our lives. Our personal agenda operates just like the ocean current I fought while bodysurfing next to the Huntington Beach Pier. It becomes an unseen force that sends us off in the wrong direction and pushes us toward the
danger and damage of a self-focused life.
Perceived Neediness
When we do not believe our needs are being fully met by God, we will act like we are still needy. We are really not needy. We just think we are. That causes us to live in a state of perceived neediness. Because of our perceived neediness, we spend unnecessary time and energy trying to fill needs that actually are already met. We act like millionaires begging for food on a street corner, refusing to acknowledge the truth that we already have everything we need.
Perceived neediness causes us to go outside of God’s plan to meet needs that we believe we still have. Such was the case with Adam and Eve. Perceived neediness played a major role in Adam and Eve’s decision
to disobey God in the Garden of Eden. Satan had tempted them to believe that God was withholding something good from them. Satan convinced them that they still had needs that were unfulfilled, that they needed more than God had already provided. They needed to be “like God.” All their needs were already being perfectly met by their loving Father. They just didn’t believe it.
Even the most mature Christians do not fully accept God’s provision for all their needs. We deny this truth in many different ways. As a result, trying to solve the problem of our neediness becomes an automatic, built-in response. It becomes our top priority. Getting our needs met isn’t something we want to do. It’s something we have to do whenever we see ourselves as needy.
Back in the Garden
The internal pressure we all feel to pursue our personal agenda rather than trust God to meet our needs is a natural response to the consequences of the Fall. Because we want so badly to live a pain-free
life with all our emotional needs and desires perfectly met, we deny that the world is fallen and we set out to try to fix it. Thus, our agenda reflects the belief that we can create a slice of heaven on earth. If God
won’t let us back into the Garden of Eden, we’ll just create a a little bit
of heaven ourselves.
Although we logically know it is not possible to return to the Garden
of Eden, we still won’t give up the hope of creating our own Garden of
Eden anyway. We actually think we can. We think we can manage all the
people in our lives to get them to love us and never hurt us. But trying
to control others will never fix the Fall. We think, “If we always do the
right thing and never make a mistake, that will do it.” But perfectionism
cannot fix the Fall. We think, “If I can just get the government to fix things, that will do it.” But politics will never fix the Fall. We even think we can manipulate God in different ways to get him to cooperate with our agenda. But legalism will never fix the Fall either.
Our Agenda: Looking to the World to Meet Our Needs
It is important to understand that there is nothing wrong with desiring others to love and accept us and to experience a minimum amount of hurt in life. It is normal and healthy to want to be loved and to be emotionally happy. The problem occurs when our agenda puts the focus on the world rather than God to solve our neediness. Because our agenda is designed to solve our own neediness, it wrongly becomes a primary focus of our lives. Our ability to powerfully share God’s love with others is then greatly diminished.
I will never forget a client I saw several years ago. Jim was a single, thirty-year-old Christian man who strongly desired to serve God and others. For the past year, Jim had been a full-time missionary in Africa
serving as the pastor of an established church in Kenya. Unfortunately,
after only a year in Africa his mission board brought him back home for counseling.
In our first counseling session, when I asked him what his problem was, he said he didn’t know. He said the members of his church in Africa had two complaints about him. First, they said his weekly sermons were too long (2 hours) and second, that he was never available during the week to spend time with the people in his church.
Jim went to the mission field with the goal of loving his congregation and helping them to grow spiritually. Unknowingly, Jim also had a personal agenda in addition to being a good pastor—to get his congregation to meet his emotional needs. In order to prevent church members from hurting him, he tried to make sure he was never criticized. To achieve this, he tried to make sure everyone in his church understood and agreed with everything he preached.
To accomplish his self-centered agenda, Jim compulsively studied for 30-40 hours each week and preached for at least two hours each Sunday. He thought this would cause everyone to understand everything he said. Accomplishing his self-centered agenda left him little time for his people and produced very long, boring sermons.
Unfortunately, Jim’s personal agenda was more important than spending time with church members. As a result, his agenda was an unseen force that unknowingly affected everything he did. Like the unsuspecting beach tourists pushed by the current, his agenda pulled him away from serving God and others. It prevented him from loving his church members and ultimately made him fail in his ministry. Proverbs 16:25 says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” With our sin nature always at work, our natural inclination to follow our own agendas rather than God’s plan always leads us in the wrong direction.
THE CHARACTERISTICS OF OUR AGENDA
1. It Makes Us Self-Centered
Our agenda of getting the world to meet our needs is a driving force behind our natural tendency to live self-focused rather than Love Focused lives. When we go out the door in the morning pursuing our personal agenda, we become self-absorbed with getting what we think we need, preoccupied with gaining the love and acceptance of other people (self-fulfillment) and trying to prevent pain, loss, or disappointment
(self-protection). To whatever degree we pursue our agenda, to that degree we focus on ourselves. The needs of others automatically become a lesser priority. Unknowingly, we end up living as if the Great Commandment said: “Make sure you get your needs met and never experience pain.”
Unfortunately, many workaholic fathers are a good example of how our personal agenda can cause us to become self-centered. I recently had a client tell me how painful it was to have a father who never attended any of his childhood activities. When he asked his dad if he would come and watch him at his Little League all-star game, his dad told him he couldn’t because “work was too important.” After my client received the same response again and again from his father, he understandably stopped asking his father to come to his activities. The father’s personal agenda was the underlying cause of self-centeredness that broke his son’s heart and caused this man to fail to love his son.
2. It Controls Us
Unless we make a conscious choice to follow God’s plan, our personal
agenda will control many of our decisions and behaviors. The more we’re motivated to accomplish our agenda, the more it controls us and
the more desperate we become in trying to achieve it. We become like
heroin addicts, controlled by the heroin we think we need. Believing we
need people to respect us, we become obsessed with trying to impress
people in different ways. Believing we need to avoid and eliminate pain
in our lives, we become controlled by our efforts to avoid conflict and
keep people happy. When our reasonable efforts don’t work and the world doesn’t meet our needs, we can become desperate. We resort to
going outside of God’s plan. In desperation, we turn to such strategies
as lying, cheating, stealing, and various types of immorality.
People often hear a good sermon on Sunday, and then do just the
opposite on Monday. I remember a mother who described such an
experience. She described a powerful, convicting sermon she heard on
Sunday about the importance of a mother being patient and not yelling
at her children. Because she knew being impatient and yelling at her
children was wrong, she told me she cried during the whole sermon.
She promised herself she would never yell at them again. When I saw
her on Tuesday of that week, she told me she had already yelled at her
children again. Why would this happen?
Often the explanation given for such a common experience is simply
that our sin nature is very powerful. That is, of course, true. But such
an explanation is only partly helpful because it doesn’t address a large
part of the problem. In addition, it locks us into a victim mentality that
lacks hope and produces frustration.
A more helpful explanation for why we so often fail to do what we know we should is that we fail to recognize what lies beneath our decision to sin. While we may understand what many of the major sins are, most Christians fail to understand how their sin nature operates.We fail to address the underlying, self-centered purpose, belief, and motivation that is actually energizing our sin. As a result, we end up tackling the wrong problem. We’re like a linebacker in a football game letting the guy with the ball run right by us while tackling the guy without the ball. It makes us feel like we’re doing something to win the game, but our effort isn’t terribly effective.
Knowing that all behavior is purposeful and goal directed, as I talked with my client that day I wanted to help her understand what she was
trying to accomplish by yelling at her children. What was more important
to her than loving her children? What was making it so difficult for her
to do what she knew was right?
During our counseling session on Tuesday it became very clear that she unknowingly had an underlying agenda. When I began to explore why she had yelled at her children so soon after the sermon on Sunday, she said it usually happened just before her husband came home from work. She said she often became anxious at that time because she was afraid her husband would get mad at her if the children were not well behaved. She also shared how painful it was for her when her husband got mad at her and how she felt like a total failure as a mother. She thought, “If I can just get my children to behave, then my husband will love me and won’t get mad at me.”
Unknowingly, her agenda of looking toward the world to meet her needs was the driving force behind her impatience with her children. Until the real cause of her failure to show love to her children was exposed, she remained stuck, frustrated, and unable to change. Just being told to “be a patient mom” had not helped her, because her impatience wasn’t the real problem. It was only a symptom of the real problem. The real problem that needed to be addressed was her agenda, the underlying current driving her impatience.
3. It Is Motivated by Fear
When we do not believe God is providing all we need, we’re left in an uncertain and vulnerable place. In this state of uncertainty, we become afraid that we’ll feel the pain of unmet needs. I have counseled many single women who have admitted their fear of not finding a man to marry. Unfortunately, it is common for a single woman to marry a man against the counsel of family and friends, just because she’s so afraid
she’ll never find a husband. If we allow this kind of fear to control us, we can pursue our agenda with the intensity of a deer running from a wildfire. The stronger our fear, the more controlled by our fear we become and the stronger our motivation to accomplish our agenda. Like a drowning man who fears dying, our fear can cause us to become totally self-focused and desperate.
4. We Are Unaware of It
As we said earlier, our agenda operates like an underlying ocean current
in our lives, an undertow. One reason undertows are so dangerous is
that they are unseen. Because our personal agendas are largely unseen by
the majority of people, their damaging influence usually goes undetected.
The average Christian is unaware that they are often driven more by their self-focused agenda than by God’s command to be Love Focused. That’s because we are often unaware of our underlying motivation. We often think we’re following God’s plan, but we’re actually trying to fulfill our own self-focused agenda. Many Christians I’ve worked with have had no idea they had a hidden agenda and that part of the motivation behind their efforts to help other people was self-serving.
It is easy to identify this self-focused behavior in the lives of others who are obviously self-centered. However, it is important to be aware that we are all guilty of pursuing our own agenda to some degree or another. At times, this self-focus may not seem obvious, like that undertow. Sometimes it may appear that we are concerned with meeting others’ needs more than our own, but when we take a closer look at our core motivations, the exact opposite is often true.
Of course, some people pursue their personal agendas more often than others. The Mother Theresas of the world are certainly following God’s plan of love far more than the person who constantly needs to be the center of attention or the person who always has to be right. Yet, we all live to some degree or another according to our own personal agendas because we are finite, sinful, human beings. This agenda unknowingly affects our decisions, actions, attitudes, and emotions. It affects how we spend our time, the commitments we make, and the quality of our relationships. Most importantly, because we are not fully trusting God, our agenda is an unseen obstacle to our ability to love God and others and to enjoy a full and satisfying life.
Recently I spoke with a young mother who was confused by her seventeen-year-old daughter. Her daughter had angrily rejected her suggestions for improving her school project. In an effort to help her
daughter get a good grade on the project, she had suggested she make
several changes. Her normally receptive daughter thanked her mother
but said that she wanted to turn it in the way it was. The mother became
a little irritated, and pushed her daughter a little harder. That’s when
the daughter became angry.
The mother said to me, “What did I do wrong? All I wanted was to help her get a good grade. I thought I was being a good mother.”
When I asked her how she felt when she thought her daughter’s project was poorly done, she said, “I was afraid she would get a bad grade. Her teacher is a friend of mine, and I would have felt embarrassed every time I saw her.”
As it turned out, this mother’s attempt to help her daughter was not aimed at a good grade. Instead of trusting God that her needs were already met, she was looking to her daughter’s teacher to feel accepted and avoid the pain of embarrassment. Like the unsuspecting beach tourists, her agenda was an unseen current that unknowingly affected her relationship with her daughter.
Fulfilling Our Agendas
A few years ago, we added a new member to our family—a golden retriever puppy named Abby. Needless to say, things at our house have
changed considerably. I’ve learned that if I want socks with no holes, I
can no longer leave them lying on the floor. Our son has been permanently cured of throwing his schoolbooks on the floor after discovering his seventy-dollar history book chewed up into tiny pieces. Our daughter has gained a new appreciation for parenthood, faced with having to say no to pleading puppy-dog eyes that want to go in the car with her to work. We’ve learned that one hundred-dollar cordless telephones taste better than two-dollar bones from the pet store. And we’ve all learned to shut the shower door tight, lest our four-legged friend join us in the shower. While Abby is only a dog, we have been somewhat surprised that in some ways, she’s just like us.
From the moment Abby bounds into the master bedroom at 6:00 A.M. every morning ready to play, she has an agenda. Her agenda for each
and every day is exactly the same—to have fun and avoid boredom.
Just like a human, our retriever seems to be amazingly goal-oriented.
In order to accomplish her agenda, she pursues a very specific set of goals. Get mom to think I’m cute so she will stop doing the laundry and pet me. Get dad to play ball with me when he gets home from work. Get
everyone to give me a treat. Those are some of our golden retriever’s
goals that will assist her in achieving her agenda. Recognizing and understanding the underlying power of our personal agenda is critical to our spiritual growth, but it is equally important to understand the type of goals that we pursue to try to fulfill that agenda. Accomplishing our agenda requires the pursuit of a very specific type of goal. This specific type of goal will be the subject of the next chapter.
