I am weak.
Everything today is competition. You must get the better grade, the better job, the better pay-raise, the better spouse, the better house, the better scholarship, the better dog, the better body. As long as you volunteer more often and support a green, pink or rainbow cause, as long as you beat somebody else and get the A instead of the A-, you've achieved.
I don't know this for a fact, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the biggest motivators behind the biggest success stories from middle-class America. To just get ahead of one more person.
I do know for a fact that this is one of the biggest lies in Christianity. As long as your going to church about the same amount of times as the average church-goer, as long as your cut and dried ten-minutes-a-day devotions is longer than your best friends five-minutes-a-day devotional (I mean, come on, we need to fit Jesus somewhere in our overly busy lives). As long as your prophetic insights are mostly right on - that must mean your hearing the Spirit well - and as long as people are being ministered to in powerful way - that means that you've spent so much time with the Lord, His presence cannot help but pour out of you. As long as your prayer is longer than the spiritual leader beside you.
Right?
Even with all of this climbing going on and on, it never seems to go upwards.
What if, while we think we are doing good by being 3 steps ahead spiritually than our neighbor, we should be 50 steps ahead in God's eyes. It's sickly humorous to think that we have made other humans marking points of our achievements. It's as if we think that on Judgment Day, God is going to line us all up in a row according to our spiritual achievements, pull the first billion and send the rest to hell. I thought that we were going to stand before God on Judgment Day. Alone.
I wonder what would happen to the church if she pushed everybody and everything out of her line of vision and just sat there, indian-style, with Jesus and her heart, dangling in the middle for both to see. I wonder what would happen if she asked Him what holiness and truth looked liked in comparison to her heart. I wonder what He would tell her, I wonder what He would ask of her. I wonder if it would change everything.
I bet it would.
I bet the face of Christianity would be completely transformed. There would be less pride, less strife, less striving, less religion. The confidence in the flesh and it's achievement would be completely shattered. The knowledge of Him, His power, His suffering, His righteousness and His holiness would increase. Putting away the grimace of exertion, Christianity would be a well-spring of Joy because it would know that absolutely nothing we achieve in our flesh makes us any holier.
We would know grace. We would believe in grace. The meaning of His mercy towards us would be so much more powerful. We would actually know what true humility is because we would understand that we are nothing that is lasting without Him, constantly renewing our hearts and minds.
And, in the end, everything would funnel down to Love. That is the greatest commandment, no?
To love.
Where would the church be - where would the individual, unique heart be - if every "success" it achieved came from a place of Love? Not out of striving or competition, just Love. Not based out of Modern Day's Handbook of Achieving Spirituality, but out of the intimate and quiet places with the Lord. What if we were like children and did things for the Lord because it simply delighted our hearts to do so?
"Be still and know that I am God." -Psalm 46:10
"But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ....that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but that which is through faith in Christ-the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead." - Philippians 3:7-11
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