Episode 13: Breaking Free From Judgement and Comparison - Finding Peace and Purpose
In this episode of FOUND & REFINED, host Amy LeSage discusses the importance of overcoming judgment and comparison in our lives. She reflects on her personal journey of surrendering her life to God and the transformations she has experienced over the past two years. Amy emphasizes placing God at the forefront of everything and details her struggles with self-worth, judgment, and social media. She encourages viewers to eliminate negative influences, set healthy boundaries, and lean on faith for guidance and strength. Through personal anecdotes and scriptural references, Amy highlights the significance of compassion, forgiveness, and living a Christ-pleasing life.
00:00 Introduction and Personal Journey
01:01 The Importance of Placing God First
02:15 Understanding Judgment and Self-Worth
06:28 The Impact of Social Media
09:35 Addiction and God's Love
14:49 Living a Christ-Pleasing Life
15:59 Forgiveness and Harmony
25:37 Practical Steps to Avoid Judgment
31:09 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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🎵 Check out these songs (let's add some WORSHIP songs this week!)
➺ "JESUS IS COMING BACK SOON" - Forrest Frank & Josiah Queen
➺ “Lift Me Up” - Maverick City Music, Dante Bowe & GRAHAM
➺ “Broken Vessels” - Hillsong Worship & TAYA
➺ “O Praise The Name” - Hillsong Worship
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TRANSCRIPT - EP. 13
Hi friends. Welcome to another episode of FOUND & REFINED. I am your host, Amy LeSage. Today, we're gonna pick up where we left off on judgment. This was something, as you guys know, if you've been following along, thank you for following, and watching, um, or listening. But you will know that a lot of my story and what I'm on here to share is how God has been changing my life, a whole and kind of hitting on every topic throughout the past two years of things that I need to change within myself. And that was shortly after I had surrendered my life to him and said. Thy will be done. I wanna live the life you created for me. I wanna follow you. I wanna walk that path, the path that you've laid out for my life. And I don't want to take control over my life anymore because my sinful nature is leading me.
And within the past two years, he pointed out there were a lot of things that I had put in front of God. One of the biggest takeaways, looking back in hindsight, is that it is so, so important to place God at the top of everything you do. That he's your north star.
He's where you're going for, how you should react to situations, how you should think, how you should live your life, how you should treat your kids, how you should treat others, how you should treat yourself, how you should love yourself. He has to be front and center first, most important thing.
Otherwise, what takes place in front of it is worldly ideas and sinful nature. I grew up a Christian and still got this wrong. So this isn't just a message for Christians, although it definitely is. It's also a message for people who are new to the faith and trying to figure out, okay, now what does this all mean?
And how am I supposed to live? What am I supposed to do with this? I didn't realize how many things that, um. I had gotten wrong and what the devil had done with that and how he had manipulated my thinking, my feelings, my perspectives, um, everything.
You know, the second that you get off track, which we're all bound to do because we live in a sinful world, and no one's gonna live here perfectly. That was Jesus' spot. And it will only be his. So there's no way that we can live perfectly, but we can definitely strive to live better lives, pleasing to him.
He designed us and made us to have a specific life here on Earth. If we go to him for that, we can live out that life. But if we're just kind of like doing the things that we wanna do and living life whatever way the wind blows, you're gonna get caught in a storm, and the devil will sneakily get his hands on you and start weaving webs in your mind and in your life that shouldn't be there.
And so this really has been a walk of complete trust and faith and astonishment in how differently I should have been doing things. I'm just grateful that God has had the patience with me and taught me some different ways of living. So that's what I'm here on this platform to do, is to spread that word.
I've gone through things, so I'm turning around and I'm coming back for the people that are going through it to talk you through it, to encourage you through it, to give you motivation to get through hard times because life is really hard and none of us can escape that. Um, so these are some of the things and some of the topics that I feel like the Holy Spirit has brought to my heart and into my life to tackle and to really challenge.
And so I'm bringing that to you to also think about and challenge in your own life, um, with full support and love behind that. No judgment on my end because the only reason I'm able to talk about this with you is because I've walked through it. There are times where I continue to have to circle back and walk through it again and check myself and do it again.
So there was never any judgment. There was never any, I'm better than or any of that. Um. No way. I'm not that type of a person, so I hope you never feel that way. Let's get through this together, and let's try to live a Christ-pleasing life here on Earth while we have time here.
One of the first things was just figuring out my worth. But that one took a while. He kept working with me on that topic. That one took months and months and months. And even has come back in the beginning of this journey, at which you'll see if you're following along, that I was still struggling with that.
Negative self-talk worth. Just understanding the evil ways that the devil can just keep speaking into our minds and telling us that we're not worthy and we're not loved, and all the negative things that he can speak into our hearts and our minds. But, um, so that one's been an ongoing one, but as I was walking through trying to figure out that part of things. The Holy Spirit was also speaking into other topics that were, um, a part of my life.
Judgment was one of them. Last week I spoke to you guys about just a humbling experience for myself, that began even before this journey, before I submitted my life and gave it to God completely. And kind of just realizing like, we don't know people's situations.
We cannot judge other people's situations. This is the same idea about judgment, but it's in a different way. Something that I think we all struggle with, and thankfully, it's been brought to light since I wrote about this. I actually pulled up one of my old notes when I was journaling about judgment, and it was from March 23rd, 2024.
Thank God for notes, um, in our phones, because man, the Holy Spirit will talk to you at the most craziest times, and if you can't remember, you gotta write it down somewhere. I've got notes all over the place, but mainly the big ones are when I would pull over and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, type it out.
Uh, social media and other people's opinions and all that stuff that's, that's been an ongoing thing. But I feel like every year we get a little bit more in tune with how dangerous social media can be. It's everywhere.
Social media is everywhere, and it's like this endless opportunity to compare where you're falling short, to compare your life with others, to compare what other people have, to compare what other people can buy, to compare what other people are making dinner-wise for their kids. How they're providing the highlight reel can get really defeating at times. I knew that when social media started. I actually did not have a Facebook account, a personal Facebook account, and still rarely post on my personal Facebook page. I ended up getting a Facebook account because of FOUND & REFINED you have to have a personal page in order to have a business page.
So I ended up joining kind of late in the game, and um, I knew it was gonna be a comparison thing for me. I knew it was gonna be a struggle to see what other people were doing and judge myself against those things. So I knew I was opening a world that could be really unhealthy for me. I tried to put up boundaries and barriers around that. But it got me on a backend still.
A lot of times, we'll look at other people's pages or whomever you follow, and, um, we'll either feel like we're falling short or we're doing better than you know, we've all done it. Each one of those feelings is a dangerous; it's just a dangerous, slippery slope, but what do we really know about someone else's life?
I hardly know and fully understand my own story and my own life. It's just funny to think that, like in this snapshot, we know and understand someone else as a complete stranger. Most of the people that we're following, we don't have an intimate relationship with. We're just following them for whatever their content is that's pulling you in. We really don't know.
For me, it was very tempting as I was following fashion , content, and what people were buying, good deals, cute outfits, what's the trend? All this stuff.
And they were trying on all these new clothes. They had all this stuff put together. They made the whole outfit look good. So you want the whole thing. And never in my mind was I thinking they might still have tags on it. Or they might actually just have it and then return it. You know, I was just thinking, yeah, that's so cute. I want that too. Their whole entire life situation, their financials, and everything is probably completely different than mine.
But just seeing it, because that was a sore spot for me because that was .A, a, a place of my worth and something that was an unhealthy purchasing habit. It was the worst thing I could have done was continue to follow these people.
Having placed so much worth in my clothing, it really was so empty. It really was. I think we will probably come back to this in detail, but with anybody who has an addiction and is chasing something, to get a feeling to feel better about themselves, or to escape a feeling, it ends up feeling empty in the end.
It doesn't give you what you need or what you're searching for, for very long. And so it was such a relief. And I have to, I have to just say this, and this isn't about judgment, but I just wanna say this to anyone else who's struggling with any kind of addictions. That was the first thing when I understood God's love for me.
When I understood how much he really loved me, to send Jesus and for Jesus to die for me. When I really understood it and accepted it, that was the first thing to be wiped away. I want that to be an encouragement to you because that was daunting for me. I tried to stop. But until my worth and whatever that addiction was or is for you until that was satisfied, through God and through Jesus Christ, which he can satisfy all of the things that are pushing addictions, I believe it with my whole heart.
Whatever you're searching for, you will be able to find in him and through him . It's just, it was wiped away. There are other things that I had to work really hard through. I had to learn and really work hard at reformatting how my brain worked around those topics. This one, the addiction, was wiped away, gone, done.
I was so thankful that he did that. When you replace the chase with a permanent solution, like Jesus. Whatever the chase is that you're trying to get away from or, or get to when you replace it, he will erase the desire.
/ And to that point with social media, I had to decide who I was gonna follow and who I wasn't anymore, who was pouring into things that were difficult for me personally, and, you know, challenging me in ways that were unhealthy, and I had to get rid of that.
With social media, if you are judging yourself or others, or feeling badly about yourself, when you're looking at these things, you need to seriously get rid of it. What is the point?
Judgment is such like a broad topic, right? You can either judge yourself against others, you can judge others and compare 'em to yourself. You could judge others and just be flat out mean and think poorly of them and think that, you know, their situation. Judgment can be placed in so many different ways, and the Bible is so clear.
That's not our place. We can't judge anybody. We don't have the right. There is nobody who's doing life perfectly to be able to judge how someone else isn't. That's God's responsibility. We will all be judged on our final day here. We will all be put against judgment and he's the only judge over our lives.
We don't know anyone by the outside appearance. We don't know anybody through their highlight reel. We don't know anybody as much as God knows them. So we really have no right. Who somebody is, is their heart, and there is nobody here that can say they understand and see someone else's heart through a highlight reel.
You just don't.
Social media is dangerous. And it's good too. It can inspire you, and it can uplift you. And I definitely encourage people, go follow the right people who will pour into your life in a positive way. But you know, when it's starting to not be positive, you know, when you're starting to look at something and start feeling bad about yourself or start like looking at someone else and being judgmental about that, you know, we all know it's just, if you wanna continue that.
The second I start feeling that, and I do, I still do, because sometimes these things will flip up and they just come up in your algorithm. I think it's just the algorithm trying to throw something back at you. And I know when I get that feeling in my gut, I'm like, Nope, that's it.
Swipe, out, like, am I following that person? Unfollow whatever it is. I have to be really careful. We have to all be an active part of how the devil is getting to us and the things he uses to make us feel badly about other people or ourselves.
I think that's one of the main things I didn't really realize. I was just floating through life, loving God. I loved God. I believed in God, but I floated through life without giving a lot of thought to things. I just kind of lived out life. I tried to give it my best shot at things, but did I run it past God? No. Did I think about how I should really be feeling about that in comparison to what the word says?
No. Did I? Well, sometimes I did, but did I always do that? No. That's what I'm saying, like God has to be at the tippy top, the very, very top, to how we live our lives, how we love others, how we show compassion, and how we throw up boundaries when we start feeling ourselves slipping.
If you're someone who judges other people by how they look and their status or anything like that, you really need to take a look at who are the people that Jesus surrounded himself with: Fishermen, tax collectors that nobody liked, we had to constantly compare Jesus' life here on earth to how we live our own.
What were the messages that he was trying to tell us? What was the reason behind all of these things that he did? Nothing was by happenstance. Nothing was like by accident. Everything was by God's perfect plan. Everything was for a reason. Everything Jesus did while he was here on this earth is for us to learn from and to take something from.
There isn't anything that I've read so far in the Bible that isn't a lesson within itself.
I was just reading this morning in Philemon and Colossians. Philemon is all about how to forgive someone who's wronged you. A servant stole from another person, and Paul is writing a letter, letter to this person saying, please, you've gotta forgive them.
Take them back. Love them, forgive them. I then started reading Colossians, another letter from Paul, and he speaks about love, and patience, and peace. He wants us to live in a world of peace.
If you don't have that and you have anger in your heart, or you have jealousy, or you have judgments, that's the devil. That's the devil just poking at you because it's so easy to do that in a sinful, fallen world. It's so easy to do that when someone's hurt us or when we feel slighted by something in our life, and we all have been hurt and slighted by something. We all have.
And if you're young, it will happen. But what God constantly calls us to do and what the Bible constantly calls us to do is still love and forgive and live in harmony. Live in harmony with one another. We look around at what's happening in the world. The devil's mad, man. He's mad. There is obviously a revival of the Christian faith right now, and he's mad, and you can see it in the way that the demons and people are pushing up against it.
It's not loving. It's not in harmony, it's out of anger, it's out of spite, it's out of blame. It's out of jealousy; it's pointing fingers. That's not the way God intended for us to live. If you look at what the Apostle Paul is constantly teaching people, it's to live in harmony with each other. If you are not feeling that way on a platform, if you are not feeling that way when you look at somebody, if you are not feeling that way about people in your life, there is a change that needs to happen, and it can only happen by the grace of God and the Holy Spirit within you. It can only happen that way because our sinful nature, our flesh, wants to be angry. Our flesh wants to be jealous, our flesh wants to judge, our flesh wants to have revenge, and just fight back. That's our flesh. What God calls us to do is to forgive and love one another, live in harmony with one another, help one another. It's so crazy how much it's coming up in the Bible. I always knew it, um, because I was taught it from a young age. But now, reading the Bible, it's like smack in the face all the time.
I'm not saying that's easy. That's hard. Sometimes that's a minute-by-minute battle until you can be free of it. But satan has a hold on us when we're being judgmental and angry and all those negative feelings towards ourself or towards others. It's no different. It's no different; just because if you're doing it to yourself, that doesn't lessen the amount of wrong, it doesn't.
Okay, I'm gonna read from here because this is some of the stuff that I had wrote. And I think it's important because I don't want to skip over how I feel like it was given to me.
One of the things that really stood out, when I was writing in my notes, was that God was clear about the life he wanted Jesus to live on Earth. And one of those points is if God isn't judging us based on our status or our looks or our possessions, who are we to do so?
If our perfect Lord, the only one who could truly judge, chose not to, who are we to go around judging each other?
And I'm not talking about using good judgment to make a decision. That's not what I'm talking about. That's a different type of judgment. I'm talking about the kind of judgment that tears down, that compares, that assumes, and that makes you or someone else feel lesser than. What positive has ever come from judging others? Maybe it gives you a quick subconscious lift, like at least I'm doing better than them.
But does it actually help? Does it actually fix what you are struggling with? If anything, judgment drains us. It creates toxicity in our lives, in our hearts, in our communities, and in our families. When you judge in front of your children or your friends, you're setting the tone, especially for your children. You're setting the tone of how you speak about others. You're showing them that that's how we treat others. It's important to lead by example here with your kids or even with your friends. If your friend groups are doing that, get out of that group. That's not okay. That's negativity that you don't need in your life.
There's enough of that going around. You don't need to welcome more in by the friends, quote unquote friends. You think that if they live their life judging others, that when you are not around, they're not doing the same thing to you and about you, most likely they are. That's a part of who they are. That's something that's woven into them that needs to be gotten rid of. But they need to actively take part in that. And maybe you can be an active part in that by saying, I'm not gonna be around this. I can't listen to this because it's, it's draining me. It's dragging me down. I'm not gonna do this. So either it changes, or I have to separate myself from you.
This is happening at a kid level too. You guys, I hear my children who are in middle school, I hear how the people in their school are talking, and it's, it's toxic.
Where is it coming from? Are these kids learning this on their own? No. Their parents or influential people in their lives are the ones that are teaching them this. And it's bad. It reeks toxicity. It's negative. It's affecting kids, middle schoolers, elementary kids who are just kind of being dragged into it. Parents, if you're doing this in front of your kids, you've got to stop because it's going to them, and they're doing it at their schools.
Social media only magnifies this comparison and judgment. It invites us to scroll through hundreds of lives in just a matter of minutes, taking in everyone's highlight reels while sitting right in the middle of our hardest moments. These platforms can become a photo album of everyone's best moments. We all know it. We can all say that we understand that, but we still flip through it, myself included. And it's a recipe for comparison and judgment at times. If you're not being careful about who you're following, what you're watching, you could very easily get pulled into this vortex of judgment and comparison.
And it's nasty. It's nasty. Let's be completely real. As we scroll through dozens or hundreds of stories at once,
our brains can trick us into feeling like that's happening in that exact moment. And everyone else's life is, is thriving. While I'm sitting there scrolling through and looking at this in the pickup line, waiting to get my kids, not knowing what I'm gonna have for dinner, and knowing that that's gonna be a scramble, way past due for a Kroger pickup, knowing that when the kids get in the car, there's probably gonna be an argument or a fight because they're hungry and they need a snack, and they're agitated by something that might have happened.
At least one of 'em. When you have four, they're agitated by something that might have happened at school that they couldn't take out or talk about with their friend. So they're gonna take out on their sibling the second they get the chance, and they're in the confinement of their own car. And then we forget.
As I'm just coming off of a high of seeing everyone else's highlight reel and how great their lives are looking and their vacations are, their snapshot, their snapshots often staged or curated. And I can just so easily be like, my gosh, my life sucks. This is horrible. Why isn't it like that? Why can't I do that?
Why don't I have it like they do? And then I can easily, coming off of those feelings, be frustrated immediately and handle my kids wrong, handle them improperly, handle them with frustration instead of patience.
Be careful. I'm not saying all of social media is bad, but the overall feeling that I had when I wrote all of this down was that you need to be careful. You need to be careful about what you're letting into your sphere, what you're letting into your mind, and what you're looking at. Use your own good judgment so that you are not left judging yourself and comparing yourself against others. Judging others is toxic. It encourages negativity. It's a quick path to unhappiness. It shifts our focus from gratitude and empathy to bitterness and insecurity. And the more we allow judgment to take root, the more it impacts every area of our lives and relationships.
Not only making us miserable, but teaching those around us to do the same.
One thing that really helped me in this journey was when I stopped looking at the world for answers, and I went to God first. I had to seriously put up boundaries and get rid of the things that weren't serving me well. Once I started getting rid of things that were pouring into my life in a negative way, I started feeling and seeing change. It is so confusing to go to other people, to look to this world, to have all these different outlets and different things to follow, and listen to, and what this person says you should do, what the news says, this and this says this, and you're watching this social media account, and then you've got people in your life, and all. It's just can get so noisy. I literally got out of the driver's seat and handed the keys to God.
Things just become so much more simple. We're overcomplicating things. If you're a Christian and you're going elsewhere and you're looking elsewhere and you don't have God at the top, you are overcomplicating your life. I know it 'cause I lived it up until recently. You are overcomplicating your life in a profound way. It can be so much simpler if you trust and follow God's plan for your life. If you trust and follow what he says, you should be doing in life. If you live by these rules that he's put in place, in the Bible. Again, we'll never be perfect, but we can strive to live that way. We can notice when something is off balance. We can notice when something is hitting us wrong or when we're, when we're having negative feelings. You know that everyone knows that it's whether or not you're going to let that be your narrative.
You're gonna continue to listen to those negative things. You're gonna continue to live that way ... it's up to you. That's the free will that we all have. That's the free will he gives us. I urge you to try something different, if you haven't yet.
Start putting up some boundaries, start eliminating the things that are bad for you. Start eliminating the ways you're thinking about yourself that are bad for you. Start eliminating the ways you are thinking about others that are bad for you. Start eliminating the ways that allow you to judge others, or force you to judge yourself or others.
Start eliminating some of those things and see if peace and calmness become a part of your life. Even a little, you're gonna see it!
If you start doing this and you pray that God shifts your heart and shifts your mind, and the Holy Spirit works within you, you are gonna see it, and you're gonna start realizing, whoa, this is like a better life. And you might even come up against other really hard things, and it's still gonna be a more peaceful life. I really urge you to just try. Start being protective of yourself. Lean on God for his strength and his help, and he will be there. Reach for him, cry out to him. And he will be there for you. He promises it. He will walk with you through the hardest things.
Overall, I wanna leave this conversation by saying, judging others is toxic. Judging yourself is toxic. Judgment is toxic.
Resist it and it's hard. Notice it when you're doing it and resist it. When you see yourself doing it, get rid of the thing. If it's in your mind, pray to God to take it away. Call to him to take it away. Get the devil outta your head. It's his work, not god's.
We are not the ultimate judge. We are not the judge of anybody. We all sin. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. None of us are. And again, taking it back to last week, we don't know what's going on with people, so just stay away from it. Have some compassion. Pray for that person, even if it's an enemy, pray for them. It's hard. Man, it's hard. But it frees you of that tight grip of anger, and resentment, and comparison, and judgment. It frees you of it as you give it to God and as you pray for goodness, the devil's grip on you; he can't fight against that. He doesn't stand a chance.
Becoming aware of how this is happening in your life is step one. Step two is flipping the script in your mind and choosing compassion instead.
If you're always judging others or yourself, maybe stop and ask yourself why. A lot of the time, it's coming from a wound or some kind of pain that we haven't dealt with. Maybe not every time, but a lot of the time. I know it from personal experience.
For me, the only thing that actually freed me from years of this was giving it to God. In just a few months of really doing that, he took away fears and old patterns that years of trying on my own never fixed. So here's what I wanna leave you with today. Social media is a double-edged sword. We all pretty much know that. But are you doing something about it to protect yourself from it? Are you aware of it, or is it just something you know and you just keep going on the way you usually do? Be aware, protect yourself. Don't feed into the narrative that you are not enough. If it's making you feel bad about yourself, step back from it. Close out some of those accounts. Do whatever you gotta do to protect yourself and get yourself right and feeling better. It's worth it. Create boundaries, and if you can give and hand the feelings that are negative over to God, that's your best bet. It really is. Be free. Let him take those. Let him free you of that. Let him help untangle all of the things that were never meant for you to carry.
It takes actively thinking about this sometimes continually, but you can do it. You can absolutely do it. If I can do it, you can do it. Just be aware. Alright, guys, until next time, keep reVISIONing the world around you. Bye.