The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness
It’s Thursday so you know what that means… Welcome back to the Blog!
This week in small group we faced the question… How do you become a truly humble person? We focused on the passage:
“That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less” -John 3:30
There are many convictions that come to mind when I hear this verse. How can I actually make myself LESS and make God GREATER practically in my life?
I have read countless times in Scripture where Jesus tells us to humble ourselves before Him in order to receive peace, blessings, and eternal life. The beloved passage from 1 Peter that I talked about last week is focused on humility too:
“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.” -1 Peter 5:7
The theme of humility keeps coming up, I can feel God pressing my heart to explore what humility truly means…
What I have been realizing is that I have been focusing on my definition of humility and not God’s definition. I was putting myself down in order to raise God up. Thoughts that I am never enough and constantly letting God down can overwhelm me at times. But, God doesn’t want us to degrade or lower ourselves, He wants us to forget about ourselves completely.
I was recommended by my friend Torrey to read Tim Keller’s The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy. While I haven’t gotten to read it yet, I have read some of the responses and reviews for the book and I love the way Keller looks at the very beginning, starting from Adam and Eve.
Why didn’t they care about their nakedness? Keller reveals it could have been because in paradise they “must have been perfectly pointed away from self and focused only on God and each other. Maybe they didn’t feel any shame because shame requires turning inwards. Only after the fall, shame entered the world as pride and selfishness did”.
Wow. We are meant to be united together, worshipping God and loving one another. Not worried about how much we are eating or how big our houses are. Believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and receiving the Holy Spirit can help redeem and renew us back to this original state. This gives us the capability to turn away from self, like Adam and Eve once were, and instead focus selflessly on God and on neighbor.
Our true mission is to spread the Gospel in order to save as many people as we can. It is so easy to get distracted by your life, your possessions, your legacy. When really this is what the Devil wants us to get distracted by. If you’re so worried about yourself, you have no time for God, for others, or for your true God-ordained mission.
So, relieve yourself of the need to be perfect, because it’s not possible to be. Jesus has already lived the perfect life for us and is constantly showing us the way if we can take a step away from ourselves to actually listen. We need to be more like John the Baptist who recognized that his success was from Heaven and for Heaven.
The response from JTB after seeing Jesus’ ministry come to fruition after his many years of baptizing and teaching is how we should respond to every good thing in our lives. Praise God, He is so good! Just give Him a chance to be good in your life.
He must become greater and I must become less. There is true freedom and peace in self forgetfulness. God truly is a poet because there is a beautiful irony to that.
I love you guys and remember to be humble, love your neighbors, and love Jesus.
Until next time…
XOXO,
Aves
Comments