Diminishing Returns

Diminishing returns

This is an economic term defined by Merriam Webster as benefits that beyond a certain point fail to increase in proportion to extended efforts. This could be an investment that initially appears to be profitable and, over time, is evidenced as less so, or even losing momentum, profit, or purpose.

Do you have a relationship with someone who has diminishing returns? Is there someone you befriended that seemingly takes all your energy to remain friends? Do you meet with them, and they do all the talking about their life’s trials, tribulations, and trajectories? Are some meetings all you can take because you know how they’ll go as you listen intently for hours and not afforded any opportunity to inform them of your own trials, tribulations, and trajectories? To some degree, we all have had that relationship at one time or another. Are you that friend?

How about your relationship with God, Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit? Are you constantly telling God about your problems and assuming your own solution and then praying about it to Him and then submitting to His will only if He blesses it? Do you seek to inform God of your situation and then seek His guidance only when it suits you? If you don’t seek first Him, nothing will be added to you, but folly, frustration, and failure.

On our own, straight out of the gate, launching from the starting block, we can have momentary momentum, strength, and success. However, immediately after that, our own self-filled, self-willed, and self-fueled efforts begin to wane and weaken. We simply aren’t built to do that race or this life alone. Sure, we may have initial success, but that is overcome by so much lacking sustainability that we literally diminish the farther we go.

The One and only sustainer is God Himself. He has always been God. He always is God. Forever He will be God. We obviously are not! He created us, every single one, and no one was created accidentally. God never says, “Oops.” Therefore, who we are is in direct position to who He is. We are not what we do. We are what He does to, in, and through us. Can you understand that we aren’t the strength over anything, He is?

As we surrender who we are to who He is, we decrease so that He may increase. (John 3:30)

Our efforts without Him are diminishing returns. Whereas with Him, His returns never, ever diminish. He is sovereign over all things, and we are not. However, with Him, we can increase in Him, His knowledge, and His wisdom. We will never be God, but we will become less like us and more like Him.

His wisdom isn’t attained by pride but by a lack of pride. It isn’t meant to only gain but also to grow our understanding of who He is. The godly wisdom we obtain allows us to behave rather unlike ourselves in every circumstance, seen or unseen by other souls. It affords true and Christ Jesus-like behavior exemplified by God, Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Can you see that if we don’t allow our own surrender to Him, He can’t impart His wisdom and understanding to us? Don’t be a friend of God who dumps all their woes on Him and seeks nothing else.

Although He can take it, after all He’s God, we must seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and only then will the lovely things of God be ours. (Matthew 6:33.

He will guard us, keep us, heal us, and instruct us what to do. So, come to Him through His Word, prayer, and time dedicated to Him, for Him, and because of Him. If we desire change in our lives for the good, His good, we must decrease as He increases every moment of every day. 

References

We are only what we are in the dark; all the rest is reputation. What God looks at is what we are in the dark—the imaginations of our minds; the thoughts of our heart; the habits of our bodies; these are the things that mark us in God’s sight.

Oswald Chambers

“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” – paraphrase of a Charles Marshall quote in Shattering the Glass Slipper (Attributed to C.S. Lewis who said, “Do the right thing when no one is looking.”)

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