YA New Creation
"...many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel...that we are now good enough. He has done all we wanted Him to do, and we should be obliged if He would now leave us alone. As we say 'I never expected to be a saint, I only wanted to be a decent ordinary chap.'...But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted, and never asked, to be made into the sort of creatures He is going to make us into. But the questions is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us...We may be content to remain what we call 'ordinary people': but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience."
--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I realised we tell God that we want to be like Christ without ever realising how great the cost is. "Make me be more like Christ," we sing to Him, but once we get out into the world, we continue to cling on to our natural selves and refuse to obey Him. I've realised how I've sneaked my sinful self into my life time and time again. I do one 'good deed' for the day and next time when God comes knocking and asking me to help my parents wash the dishes I grumble and tell Him, "but I just helped Jon with homework! Can't I get a rest?" The fact is, we're not to be any more proud of ourselves for doing one good deed than a mathematician being proud of completing a sum correctly. We were made to be this way, just that, like mathematicians, we're prone to making mistakes. One correct sum doesn't give us the license to get the rest of the worksheet wrong. If anything, it spurs us on to improve.
The cost of dying to our natural, sinful, selfish selves and living for God is much more than doing your good deed for the day, or playing for worship, or doing QT. It's an actual offering of your entire life to God: every minute, every second, every task. It's committing all you have to Him and trusting Him--dying to your insecurities, your troubles, your worries, and taking up the assurance that He is in control.
Dying in general isn't a very easy thing to do. It's either a painful, long drawn-out process or, if you're lucky, a short spurt as a result of a lifetime of accumulation of fat. Usually it comes with grey hair and saggy skin. I don't think the process of dying to ourselves is going to be very different. It's definitely going to be very slow and I know for me it's going to be rather painful. I'm going to resist every step of the way, because it's just too uncomfortable, too demanding, too much for God to ask of me.
But why should I give God any less? He's the one who made me, who owns me in the first place. The seed has to die in order for the plant to live but I'm scared. I don't want to lose out, but the ironic thing is that in losing out and falling out of step with the world, I gain an eternal treasure, a world that is beyond our human eyes, a security that will remain secure. My natural self resists and refuses to die but I know it would be a much better thing for it do than stay with me and make me believe I'm as good as I can possibly be. I can't say I want it to die just yet, but I pray that God will give me grace as I learn to give up everything to Him.
It's sort of like going on pointe. You know it's going to hurt. You can feel the pus oozing out of that blister on the little toe already and the big toenail's pressing against the cardboard shank. The last time you went on pointe the toenail felt like it was going to split. You tell Ms Chew your foot's got a phobia of going on pointe but she ignores you and starts the CD player again. The music swells and ebbs and flows and you know now there's no turning back; ballet was made for pointe. The same way we were made for God.
jac was here with you
5/01/2005 10:29:00 pm
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