Bringing it together

Denise has a lump in her breast. Left untreated it will eventually kill her. Her life teeters on whether she admits to herself and then to a doctor that she has a problem. Denise might often visit her doctor, admitting to colds, migraines and so on. That is not enough. The doctor could even be a friend whom Denise meets socially several times a week, and she would still die from this cancer if she did not face the embarrassment of revealing the lump. She might have additional health problems she is keeping quiet about. Ironically, the more she admits to bad health, the healthier she will be. Similarly, the more we admit to sin, the holier we will be.

Let’s see how this spiritual law about holiness fits what we have been discovering. First, because God is a giver, not a taker, we know that anything God asks of us ends up being the best thing we could do. Whatever God asks us to endure, we can be sure that it is in our very best interest. Next, we know that to work infallibly, a law must be correctly understood. As we saw in the case of the boy’s lunch, a spiritual law will only work when Jesus is made the central figure. With health problems, admitting the problem to a non-medical person would achieve nothing. The crucial thing is admitting it to, and submitting to, a person who has the power to heal you. If we admit our spiritual sickness to Jesus and we submit to his treatment we will be made whole. On the other hand, those who tell themselves they are okay are in a terrifying predicament, whether they realize it or not.

Of course, there is much that makes people very reluctant to be examined for cancer. It could ruin your short term plans. Depending on the nature of those plans, that could be an enormous loss. Hospitalization means loss of freedom, loss of income and being somewhat cut off from friends and family. It could lead to the humiliation of suffering many indignities at the hands of doctors and nurses. Treatment could involve devastating disfigurement, severe physical pain and huge financial outlay. To risk all this would require great trust in your doctor – that his diagnosis is correct and that all that you suffer from the treatment is absolutely necessary. You would have to stake much on the belief that for the rest of your life you will look back with gratitude that you endured all the unpleasantness that treatment entailed.

This brings us back to the beginning of this web series, where we noted that our spiritual life hinges on faith – how much we trust God’s love to propel him to supernaturally intervene in our lives. It takes quite a faith-leap to follow instructions that will only work if there really is a wise, loving, powerful God who cares for you so deeply that he will rush to use his limitless power to meet our deepest needs and allow us only to suffer what is absolutely necessary for our highest good. But that is exactly what God is like. The One who holds your molecules together and agonized on the cross for your welfare is trustworthy to the infinite degree.

Balance

In my desire to gently ease you into a radical re-thinking – moving away from the world’s view all the way to Christ’s view – my presentation of these thrilling truths is itself more self-cantered than it should be. Enormous benefits await us, but ideally we should be seeking not the personal benefits but the joy of delighting the God who means everything to us. This shift of focus from our pleasure to God’s pleasure is the ultimate in discovering endless joy and fulfilment. It frees us from everything holding us down, allowing our spirits to soar heavenward. How could we really enjoy a movie if during most of it we were looking in a mirror checking our hair, worrying about what people think of us, and so on? Our Lord is much more important and exciting than any movie.

He is the Source of life, love, creativity, goodness, beauty, wisdom, joy, honour, power, purity, perfection – does the list ever end? Like our movie analogy, the more we forget ourselves and focus on God, the more enthralled we will be by him. We will not merely be transfixed, we will be transformed. We still, to use Paul’s expression, “see through the glass darkly” but when we take our eyes off ourselves and seize the grace made ours through Jesus’ shed blood, our eyes will begin to pierce the darkness that restricts our view of God. The more clearly we see God, the more we will behold such wonders that we will not only be captivated, our entire lives will begin to fill with the divine qualities that we focus on.

At the death of infatuation with myself, my spiritual senses become alive to the thrilling reality of God. I behold the most wonderful, exciting and beautiful Person in existence. The combined splendour of the entire universe; the pooled intellectual power of every intelligence in that universe; the greatest thing that the greatest minds could ever imagine – nothing compares with the One I am then empowered to fellowship with. To deny myself is get my eyes off myself – to stop distracting myself from focusing on the King of Glory. It is then that I truly live.

“Set your minds on things above” (Colossians 3:2)

Suppose you are walking in an open field, wanting to reach a distant tree as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Since it is your feet that do the walking it would seem the best method is to keep looking at your feet, ensuring each step is in the right position. And yet, as we all know from experience, if we only looked at our feet we might think we are making good progress but we would actually be wondering all over the place, needlessly tiring ourselves and probably never reaching our goal. To walk the straightest course, reaching our destination with the greatest speed and ease, we must literally take our eyes off ourselves and set them on our goal, with only occasional, fleeting glances at the ground nearer our feet. Likewise, we make the greatest spiritual progress not by constant self-examination or preoccupation with our needs, failures or inadequacies, but simply by fixing our attention upon Jesus, filling our mind with an awareness of how wonderful he is.

Like Peter, I fix my eyes on Jesus, step out of the boat and take a couple of miraculous steps on water towards my Lord. Then I notice the wind. I look at the waves. I remember I’m human. I begin to sink. On the positive side, Jesus is ever-present to grab me in his strong arms and I had managed a couple of amazing steps. But it was ever so brief because my focus soon lowered from Jesus to circumstances and then to myself. As an alcoholic is addicted to drink, I’m addicted to focusing on myself instead of my Lord. What initiates my self-consciousness is more often feelings of inadequacy than pride. Whatever the cause, however, it gets my eyes off Jesus and I begin to sink. I have times when I wrench my eyes off myself long enough to gaze upon my Lord. For those brief moments astounding things are possible.

Then the old addiction gets the better of me. Pride or self-protection, fear or selfishness, consciousness of my inadequacies or memories of past failures – some awareness of what I am without Christ – becomes so strong that I forget that I am not without Christ. Before I know it, the Lord has slipped from my thinking and I’m getting that sinking feeling. But although it happens so often, I know the answer is to re-set my gaze upon my Saviour. So I try again. Will you join me?

Saviour,

I’ve wanted to follow you, but from a respectable distance. I haven’t wanted the humiliation of dragging my cross to Golgotha and sacrificing my self-centeredness, self-righteousness and selfish ambition. I’ve wanted to avoid discomfort, not voluntarily embrace it for you. And yet you said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” – follow the Lord who was crucified for me. You leave me no option. It is so basic that you even drive home the nails by placing the statement in three Gospels. You want the best for me and from me. It’s scary. I recoil from it as if I had touched red-hot metal. And yet, Lord, you’ve promised resurrection the other side of death to selfishness. And how can I hold back when you’ve sacrificed everything for me? Moreover, you gave your all for me when I deserve nothing, while you – my Creator, my Redeemer, the supreme Ruler and the God of perfection – deserve everything.

I’ve called you ‘God,’ but you haven’t really been my God. My life has revolved around myself, not you. I’ve followed my own desires, not yours. I’ve wanted to be your God, ordering you to do what I think is best for me, not let you in your love and wisdom tell me what is best. I’ve felt the need to look after my own interests because I didn’t think you would care enough to do a proper job of it. I thought if I completely stopped pursuing my own pleasure and focused on giving you pleasure, you’d just use me up. I’ve paid lip-service to your great love, but I haven’t really believed it. I have suspected you are almost as selfish and as self-cantered as I am. I’ve praised your great wisdom, and then had the audacity to think I know better than my Maker as to what will bring me fulfilment. Even though you suffered incomparably more for my endless happiness than I’ve ever suffered for myself, I’ve stupidly thought I want my happiness more than you do. I loathe myself for even seeking my own happiness when you sacrificed all of yours for my sake.

I have been so infatuated with myself that I have seldom dragged my eyes off myself for long enough to see a tiny fraction of your love for me. Even when I thought I hated myself, I could think of little else than myself. I might have been tormented by self-hate but still my thoughts could hardly have been focused more on myself if I were in love with myself. Instead of being like a plant reaching up to you, my sun, I have turned in on myself. No wonder my soul has shrivelled up.

From this moment I resolve to change my thinking. I now want to be Christ-cantered, not self-cantered. I will trust your love. I will take you at your word that if I seek nothing but your greatest good, you will seek my greatest good, which is what you longed to do all the time that I foolishly kept hindering you. I am in awe of your love because I know I get the best end of this deal; you don’t need me, but I desperately need you, and my attempts to please you are riddled with human frailty, while your efforts to please me are empowered by divine omnipotence.

Thank you, Lord. You are truly wonderful.