…For decades I put on a smiling mask and plunged into self-sacrificing service. Hiding under that veneer however, was increasing resentment. I felt unappreciated, that my efforts were in vain, and then I blamed others for my feelings of emptiness…
I had tried to follow Jesus’ call to “deny thyself and take up your cross” – but my false idea was to suppress what I really felt and try harder to act nice for Jesus’ sake. When my wrong attitudes started to show through, I just smeared on more religious activities and platitudes. But there is nothing like total failure to get one’s attention…
If you have been a human being for awhile, you are aware that you can work exceedingly hard to improve yourself, but when you get honest, not much has actually changed in your heart.
What you really want to hear is how to get free. You want to know how you can take off the mask and become alive like Christ was alive! That is God’s goal, but the way it happens is totally different than I thought.
Jesus told His followers to move out of the old self, take up their cross, and added, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” Thinking I was “losing my life,” I was really inflating and elevating my own self-righteousness.
Eventually, like a balloon that could expand no further, my bubble of self-effort and warped thinking popped. Only then did I begin to see the extent of my problem.
How extremely humbling it was to realize that I was not just uninformed, but I had ignored and rejected God’s truth in favor of my own ideas. So for the first time in my life, I started honestly searching for God’s truth.
I began to understand the problem of the “old self” is much bigger than I had ever imagined. Scripture uses terms like broken, divisive, in darkness, alienated, without hope, lost, incapable of anything good, and dead in sin.
The flesh and blood nature you and I were born into is not repairable. But we all begin life hoping that with enough time, cooperation, and effort we can make our natural lives work. At the very least, we can do a better job than those who came before us.
As we age and experience difficulty and pain, we might give up on reaching our highest dreams, but the “old self” is extremely determined. We put our hope in others, perhaps our children or grandchildren, to achieve what we were not able to accomplish. Until we agree with God that our very nature is warped, we remain stuck.
When my life fell down around my feet, I finally saw my double-mindedness. I had tried to follow Christ, but also had clung to my natural goals, hopes and dreams. Confidence in my ability to succeed had remained firmly intact. I had just piled religious information on top of a foundation that was terminally flawed.
Now the time had come to evaluate my entire belief system in light of Scripture. As I passionately pursued God’s truth, I awakened to a profound and life-changing reality – this natural, dead-end life is never what God intended.
Jesus Christ accomplished absolutely everything on the Cross and in His resurrection to free me from my “old self” and give me an entirely new kind of aliveness in Him. That sounds abstract, but when the implications of this began to dawn on me, it blew the roof off my thinking.
To really follow Christ, I must move out of the old me and move into new life in Him. Rather than trying to remodel my self-life that is going nowhere, I rely solely on Christ’s finished work. As I rest in God’s promises for me and for others, two things happen spontaneously: My old self-confident, self-perpetuating, self-focused human nature is dismantled, and God’s truth re-creates my mind and heart.
A Scripture I learned long ago is actually coming alive in me, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, [she] is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.”
Even as I type those words, I am blown away by the immensity of what God is offering. Humanity’s problem is extreme to the max – we could never resolve it ourselves. We need more than a bit of tweaking, or an upgrade to the newest version of Human Being 7.0. The truth is we need a completely new nature, the ultimate transformation. In fact, Scripture describes it as a type of metamorphosis – like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly.
When we really follow Christ, we are no longer the product of our environment, nor held captive by our circumstances. Instead we are adopted by the Most High God and become a living response to His life-changing truth and mercy. Simply by believing God, we can resonate with the glorious love of Christ that desires new life for every single person.
JENNY WEST • APR 2014
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