FREE FOR THE TAKING

Image generated by AI at bible.art

FREE FOR THE TAKING

I often hear people talk about "living their best life."  While I admit there's an element of helpfulness to this idea, I think it gets a couple things wrong.  First, it puts us in the driver's seat.  Sure, there is a place for our own prioritizing and decision-making as we move from one day to the next, but the burden of making our lives consequential, of making sure that we don't shrivel up and wither on the vine, is a weight we weren't meant to bear.  Too many of us have rounded soul-shoulders bent from a too-heavy yoke.  I have good news for you today–an easier yoke is at hand!

The burden of making your life count–even the burden of living your best life–rests on God's shoulders, not your own.  His plan is gospel freedom, abundant life, an open door to simply walk into who you already are in Christ–no pressure to be constantly re-inventing yourself or blazing new trails of identity and meaning.  Your life is not a continual home improvement project.  God's plan, God's design, is for His kingdom to rule in you; and as you love Him with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, to let that kingdom have greater and greater sway over your thoughts, desires, and choices.  The secret is "Christ in you, the hope of glory," that is, the freedom to increasingly be who you already are in Christ, not the freedom to re-make your life from scratch every morning or whenever your soul itches for a tweak.  

Do you ever beat yourself up for not being more or doing more?  For living a "small" life?  For the longest time, I did.  At first, it was because I had so much baggage from my childhood–never thinking I could measure up or do anything right.  Feeling inadequate in all sorts of ways (I don't know that I ever really felt adequate at anything as a boy–except spelling; I was always a good speller).  Then, after I became a Christian, I even struggled with being a "good enough" Christian–sheesh.  I knew about grace and believed in grace, but I hadn't a clue how to receive it, or live from a quiet, confident, stable center of grace.

And then many years ago I heard someone once say that we Christ-followers needed to learn how to "celebrate our smallness."  Well, shoot, I'd been doing that my whole life!  Or had I?  Far from celebrating my smallness, I was mired in and resented my smallness.  I was so small I felt that nobody could see me.  I was smaller than the two coins the widow put into the offering.  I may have looked like everyone else on the outside, but on the inside I needed healing every bit as much as the leper begging Jesus to make him clean.  And the harder I tried to stand out or to make something of myself, all I was ever really able to do was scrape at the scabs of my leprosy.  The harder I tried to "live my best life," the smaller I seemed to get.  You see, I had yet to learn that there's a huge difference between truly, authentically celebrating a smallness that produces ever more becoming and living out of a cramped cellar of deep-seated shame.   (To clarify–shame is not the same as guilt: guilt is the product of some wrong we have done.  Shame, on the other hand, is rooted in the conviction that my very self is flawed beyond remedy or repair.  Guilt is about what we've done; shame is about who we are.)  

Somehow, I needed to make an exchange; or rather, I needed to be redeemed.  Because the antidote to shame is not achievement or accomplishment or accolades; it's not bigness or recognition or visibility, it's appropriate smallness.  Shame is most certainly a type of smallness, but it's a counterfeit, a lie.   

There's a word for this appropriate smallness: humility.  And do you know the root of the word humility?  Humus.  Earth.  Dirt.  To become humble is to discover that we are, in the words of Genesis, the dust of the earth.  And what is it that we are encouraged to remember on Ash Wednesday?  "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."  

It turns out that the secret to living your best life is getting your hands dirty.

Take a look at the creation of Adam in Genesis 2.  God shapes Adam from the dust of the earth, and then He does something remarkable, something He had not done with any other part of His creation:  He breathes His life into Adam.  Now, the word for "breath" in both the Hebrew and the Greek can also be translated breath, wind, or spirit, depending on the context.  The fact that we are made in the image of God, that we are animated by God's own spirit, and that we have been given dominion over the rest of what God has made, elevates us to what David calls the crown of creation (Ps. 8:5).  Humility is remembering that we are dust, but more than that, living, breathing, glorified dust.  Humility is remembering that once we were not.  Humility is not thinking poorly of yourself, it is simply remembering that we are made, and that we did not make ourselves.  And that's a smallness we can celebrate!

My healing didn't come from learning new truths or from studying Bible passages on shame or humility.  It came when I repented from the pride (yes, pride!) of believing that my old, cramped shameful view of myself was truer than God's liberating design for me.  It came when I agreed to become the me He intended rather than the one I had insisted on being (however pitiful and shrunken that "me" happened to be).

Friend, let me remind you of a passage I quoted at our baptism just a couple Sundays ago.  God says through the prophet Isaiah.  It's true of those who were being baptized, but it's every bit as true of every one of us who have been baptized:

"Do not remember the former things,

or consider the things of old.

I am about to do a new thing; 

now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

I will make a way in the wilderness

and rivers in the desert." (vv. 18-19)

It always helps if we remember that every day God is doing a new thing!  There is Another who has called you into being, who is shaping you, forming you, breathing His very Spirit, breath, into you!  And none  of it is of your own effort!  Do you not perceive it?  He is making a way in what was once the wilderness of your soul!  He is making rivers of living water flow in what was once the desert of your soul!  Your very existence is evidence of God at work in creation!  Your very existence is a gift from God not just to you, but to all the rest of us! 

You want to live your best life?  You can do more than read about God and Adam in Genesis.  You can live Genesis anew today.  You can do more than read what Isaiah says about God preparing to do a new thing–you can be the new thing that God is doing!  

Be encouraged, friend, for God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, who spoke all worlds into being, is both with you and for you.