My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:20
I’m going to share with you a lesson that seems to be taking a lifetime to learn. It actually didn’t dawn on me that I had been seeing things a little upside down until just several years ago.
I was 15 years old when I surrendered my heart and life to Jesus. I told Him, “Jesus, whatever, wherever, whenever…I’m surrendered to Your will.”
Then, as I read in Galatians 2:20, I began to put to death what I saw as sinful in me and surrender it to God. For years, I would do an inventory of my heart and continually look for areas that were not pleasing to Him and pray about them. I’d try to confess and forsake those areas. But often times, the areas that I have been naturally gifted, I saw no need to surrender. I thought to myself…this is an area I can use for God. This is a talent I can use because I do it well. Instead of surrendering my “goodness” to God, I began to do my best to improve upon it.
This approach seemed to make complete sense to me. When God saved me, what He wanted was to do a Spring-cleaning of sorts in my heart and life. Right? And, as I continued to give up the bad in my life to him, he would bless me and use me for His purposes. We made a good team.
How could such a logical idea be so completely wrong?
The Bible tells me that even my righteous (good) deeds are filthy rags.
6 We are all infected and impure with sin.
When we display our righteous deeds,
they are nothing but filthy rags. Isaiah 64:6
Houston, we have a problem.
When God says for me to crucify myself…He means ALL of ME.
PINIMAGEHave you ever watched those home makeover shows where they ask the owner to sell their belongings in a yard sale and meanwhile these amazing designers are going into their home and giving them something so much better. I’ve watched people selling their “stuff” and someone will come up to buy a specific item that they all of the sudden have a hard time parting ways with. I’ve seen people change their mind and tell the customer…”I can’t part with this.” Many times it’s a husbands ugly recliner or something. You hear him say, “It’s perfectly functional. So there may be a few stains and the color is drab but it works fine.” What he doesn’t know is that there is this brand new recliner waiting in a truck somewhere to take its place in the living room. Honestly, this is rather a very poor illustration to get my point across.
Here’s the point… God doesn’t want to make me better. He wants to make me new. Brand new.
That means all of me has to go. This “Ah-Ha moment” made it’s way into my head long before it made it’s way into my heart and my actions. In fact, even now, God is making me aware of areas of my life that I still need to surrender to Him. I’ve been in a process of growth and learning. It’s amazing to me how easily I begin to lean on my own abilities and begin to slip away from full-surrender each day. However, God is patiently teaching me. He has so much more for me.
Before you allow yourself the notion that God is being harsh or unkind to tell us that even the good we do is rubbish…understand that He sees what clinging to our own “righteousness” keeps us from. Our full surrender leads to becoming who we were truly meant to be. Our real self.
I often share thoughts from my favorite author, C.S. Lewis. I believe he does a great job speaking to the importance of a crucified (fully surrendered) self. He says, in his book, Mere Christianity…
Now here I’ve got a rather difficult thing to say. On the one hand, it isn’t true that we shall lose our personal differences by letting Christ take us over. On the other hand, I don’t think Christ can take us over as long as we’re bothering about what will happen to our personality. Let’s take the first point first. If a person didn’t know about salt, wouldn’t he think that anything with such a strong taste would kill the taste of all the other things in any dish you put it into? We know, as a matter of fact, it brings out the real taste. Well, it’s rather like that with Christ. When you’ve completely given up your-self to His personality you will then, for the first time in your life, be developing into a real person.
He made the whole world. He invented it as an author invents characters in a book, all different men that you and I were intended to be. Our real selves are, so to speak, all waiting for us in Him. What I call my “self” now is hardly a person at all. It’s mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
At the beginning of these talks, I said there were personalities in God. Well, I go further now: There are no real personalities anywhere else — I mean no full, complete personalities. It’s only when you allow yourself to be drawn into His life that you turn into a true person. But on the other hand, it’s just no good at all going to Christ for the sake of divinity or for a personality. As long as that’s what you’re bothering about you haven’t begun, because the very first step towards getting a real self is to forget about the self. It will come only if you’re looking for something else. That holds, you know, even for earthly matters: Even in literature or art, no man who cares about originality will ever be original. It’s the man who’s only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original — and doesn’t notice it. Even in social life you’ll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.
That principle runs all through life from the top to the bottom: Give up yourself and you’ll find your real self. Lose your life and you’ll save it. Submit to death, submit with every fiber of your being and you’ll find eternal life. Look for Christ and you’ll get Him, and with Him, everything else thrown in. Look for yourself and you’ll get only hatred, loneliness, despair, and ruin.
My encouragement to you today is to ask God if there is some “good” in you that you are relying on. Is there some quality you have allowed yourself to lean on outside of Christ? Crucify (surrender) it today. Allow God full access to your life.
He won’t make you better…He’ll make you new!
Nana - Love this, love you!
Stephen Faulkner - Good word sister…