Recently I was working out in the morning to prepare for another long day, and on this particular day I was on the Stairmaster. Over time I have developed a love-hate relationship with it. It does a great job of preparing me for the hiking season, and it develops aches and pains in me that make me want to never get on it again. On this particular day the machine informed me at the end of my workout that I had climbed to the top of the CN tower in Toronto, Canada and asked me to input my initials as a record of my achievement.
I dutifully typed PAE and hit enter. Now that's an achievement! My initials then appeared on the screen below a couple of psychopaths who had climbed over 400 floors that week.
Then it hit me. Why was I doing this? Was anyone really going to look at this and go, "wow, whoever PAE is...he's got it together. Man, strong work in doing 204 floors. Wish I could do that! What a man!" Nope, nobody's going to do that. In fact, the record gets erased every week, so to maintain my "standing" I'll need to come back weekly in the hope that I can limp my way to the top of another tower and type my initials in once again for the world to see. Completely pointless.
Yet isn't this the very thing you and I do with our everyday lives? For most this happens through our careers, but it isn't always there. You might have to develop a presentation and deliver it to the higher ups to show them how together your organization or department is. You might prepare diligently for an upcoming evaluation, putting together binders of information or preparing exactly what you might say when you are being watched. More charts and graphs to show things are on the up and up because of ME!
Maybe for you it isn't the career that does it. Your brags come on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pintrest or other social media. You post things about yourself or your family or things you have made that make it look like everything is perfect and under control and normal, and people applaud you with "likes" or emojicons or something of the like. And for a few moments you feel good about yourself and the direction of your life, until someone else comes along and takes the spotlight away because their creation is just a bit better than yours.
Still others may do this through things they own. Perhaps your yard is kept up perfectly in comparison to your neighbors. Your car is spotless, trees are trimmed, weeds are pulled. The outside of the house is truly a reflection of what's happening on the inside, right?
While it is human nature to build monuments to ourselves to prove our worth, I find it interesting that God doesn't care for any of that stuff about us. He sees us for who we are, and chooses to love anyway. However we tend to treat God as though He does care about that stuff, and it gets in the way of relationship with Him.
In thinking about all of this, I came to some interesting realizations. I'm not ever going to have to make a presentation to God to show him how great I am. I won't be pointing to charts and graphs to show how His kingdom expanded under my watchful eye. I won't have to develop a thick report to show how things were trending when I was here on earth. I won't ever be able to show him any character traits that I developed on my own that He didn't have a hand in developing in me. I won't ever be able to ask him if he's considered a different angle to a problem here on earth, because He's already done that. I won't ever be able to give Him advice, even if I have spent all day on the side of a mountain meditating. I won't be able to point to a church planting strategy I came up with that worked really well, because if it worked it was because He made it work. I won't be able to show Him how much money I raised for Kingdom purposes, because it was He who moved people's hearts to give. I won't be able to point to the number of souls I've saved, because I don't save souls and draw people to God. He does that. I'm not going to be able to tell him about how many times I've moved to benefit Kingdom work, because it was He who planted the idea in the first place.
It seems that God doesn't have a wall of fame that I can type the letters "PAE" on. Huh.
The Apostle Paul said it this way:
1 Corinthians 1:26-31New Living Translation (NLT)
30 God has united you with Christ Jesus. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin. 31 Therefore, as the Scriptures say, “If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord.”[c]
What this reminds me of is the fact that there is absolutely NO BOASTING around the Lord. It won't happen. It can't happen. And I'll go further than that. It is the people who aren't able to boast, the people who aren't quite strong enough, smart enough, faithful enough, knowledgeable enough, rich enough or powerful enough, it is those people that are used to the greatest effect in God's Kingdom. It is those who aren't positioned well within the organization who have the most power and influence for Him. It is those who may not have the "right words" or aren't well spoken, those who are poor or even destitute, or without a graphic to show their strategy. It is these that the Lord works most powerfully through.
Why is it this way? Because God made it that way. Everything in creation points to Him. That should include your life that is here today and gone tomorrow. Your life isn't supposed to point to you, and if it does, it's pointing in the wrong direction. You were created to be in relationship with God, to enjoy that relationship, and to point back to Him in all you say, do, and create.
So rest easy knowing that you don't have to prepare anything to show God your worth. He already knows it. You aren't worth much and He doesn't actually need you for anything. Yet in spite of that, He loves you deeply and wants you to live in relationship with Himself. And in that, in your weakness and lack of preparedness and faults, He will take you further than you'd ever imagined, for His name's sake.
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| Everything in creation points to the Lord. Can you really say that the Space Needle is a more awesome creation than what is shown in this picture? |
