Who Am I, Pop-Pop?
The lovely little lady is constantly asking me, “Who am I, Pop-Pop? Who am I?”
It’s not as if she is having an existential crisis, as she is too little for such complications of personal psychology; she is simply playing out various television characters to whom she has been attracted – hence, she is Austin or Tyrone or some other enchanting persona.
I happily play along; it does, after all, contribute to Amber’s sense of imagination and, to be frank, there are worse things an adult like me with both child-like and (alas!) childish ways could be found doing.
(Who are you, little love of mine? You are my lovely little grand-daughter, that’s who! But more along these lines as time progresses and our good Lord allows.)
It remains a rueful reality that for many those existential crises are quite challenging. Modern-day therapy rooms are filled with such personal traumas. Contemporary western culture is apparently in the throes of such a crisis of confidence and character.
Who are we? What are we? More profoundly, of what value and purpose are we? It is not an uncommon notion today to suggest that we are of no greater value today than a pigeon or a pig or a bug. Human significance has been seriously brought into question.
Are we really alone in the universe? Does an animal have comparable value to a human being? Are we of any worth to the higher powers; most notably, to God? A passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet makes for compelling consideration:
“I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me – no, nor woman either …”
Hamlet sums up a great deal of contemporary thinking. We are fascinated yet repulsed by human identity, cast as it is on a planet that is set amidst a million-zillion other ones with nothing but sheer conceit to suggest that it bears any particular profundity.
Does God care for us, if He exists at all? Is He, as the 17th Century Deist William Paley, advocated, the Great Watchmaker who put things into place and then uncaringly went away, perhaps to fry other fish?
Is He, as some theologians seem to put forth, our Great Nemesis, looking to twist the screw and deepen the knife at whatever turn in order to prove and promote our depravity and prove and promote His Sovereignty at our expense?
Are we presumptuous enough to believe that we have any semblance of worth in His eyes? Or are we presumptuous enough to believe that, having created us, we aren’t worth a fig to Him? Presumption abounds on all sides!
Who do we think we are?
It is a staggering thought to believe that we are all alone in the world, that no one cares and that we are left to our own devices. It doesn’t appear that we are capable of bearing such a lonely burden.
It is even more staggering to know that you are loved, whether by a man or woman, by a child or, more notably, by God who is the Author of the entirety of all there is – God, do you actually and really love me?
It is an extraordinary proposition and an even more extraordinary reality. It breathes hope to the most despairing of mortals and sobriety to the most flippant of souls. It encourages, exhorts, challenges, embraces, fortifies, soothes and caresses.
It also yearns to be embodied. The love of God is no mere abstraction. It was given incarnated form in the person of Jesus Christ. It searches for embodiment as it is received by those who have come to know Jesus as Savior and Lord.
This kind of embodied testimony is the proof in the pudding that God cares for us, even loves us, and loves us with a love that is beyond human reason but not human experience. And to be willing to embody such love more than suggests that we love Him back.
Isn’t that really what is at issue? I don’t believe it is so much that people don’t believe in God as that many simply don’t want Him in their lives, at least not on His terms. Unbelief is more a mask behind which they hide rather than a tenet to which they adhere.
But even the tenets have a way of getting in the way of actual encounter with Jesus Christ. Our intellectual inquisitiveness often (not always, but often) belies our expressed desire for Jesus Himself; too often, we rest content to merely know about Him.
Love strikes the deciding difference. Who knows the love of Christ? Who loves Jesus with a depth of love, the likes of which a mother feels for her baby or a lover for the subject of his or her affections?
Professing Christians sometimes love their baseball teams more than their Savior! Many truly love Him, but have yet to properly address the level of priority they ascribe to Him in their lives. And then there are those who love Him with all they have and are.
They are the apple of His eye, living lives that warrant divine residency with them (John 14:22, 23). They present the best argument on behalf of the notion that God truly loves the world. They are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16).
His Presence becomes embodied in them. You know there is something unduly becoming about them. You have discerned Jesus Christ in them.
I know a few of whom this can be said. A friend of mine from seminary days who now oversees a world-wide missions’ agency is one such individual, as is an American Baptist pastor of Argentine origins who ministers to Hispanic pastors along the eastern seaboard.
To know them is to encounter Jesus in them. Who else wants to let Him shine forth?
The great English actor Laurence Oliver, in his reflections upon his career in On Acting, has this to say about his performances:
“I have always been an actor who molds characteristics to hide his personality. I take parts of the character into myself – not onto, or they would fall off. I do not search the character for parts that are already in me, but go out and find the real personality I feel the author created. I work all this out before I began to rehearse the part and build up the role from within, knowing that the camera will expose me if I am not true, if my imagination is askew or only at half-power; if I am doing anything unreal. I make use of my natural talents and make sure that I do not waste other people’s time on the set.”
I’ve been waiting for such a description all of my homiletically-charged life! Olivier speaks of a life lived other than our own; The Apostle Paul would have embraced such a description, for it was he who propounded the classic words of embodied Christianity:
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing” (Galatians 2:20, 21).
Paul did not want to “waste” God’s time (if I may put it that way), just as Oliver did not wish to waste that of his fellow actors. Olivier allows a part to be integrated into his personality – i.e. to “build up the role from within” – while Paul literally dies so that Jesus may live. Such a course makes for the best acting and the sincerest Christianity.
We really can’t be living embodiments of Christ’s Presence unless and until we have died to ourselves. Jesus cautioned those of us who both profess and want to follow Him: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Self-denial, not self-fulfillment, is the thing.
We love our lives, even if we hate our circumstances, even if we have a poor sense of self. The old saying rings true: A man knows his own dirt (and makes his peace with it).
Jesus also acknowledged this basic fact of the universe: “I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds” (John 12:24). His own life was expressive of it.
Fruit-bearing is perhaps the most significant expression of Christ’s Presence. The production of nature’s elements, i.e. fruits and vegetables and flowers, require care. Cultivation requires weeding and pruning those things that prove cancerous to growth.
Our sinful selves are toxic to our spiritual desires. There is no way around it: We get in the way. That is why submission and personal sacrifice are so important to our Christianity. We must die so that Christ may live.
It is a hard truth that even good things are obstructive to our growth in Christ. There is a reason why Paul recommended celibacy (I Corinthians 7:8), Jesus wanted to be put before family in the hierarchy of personal value (Luke 14:26) and the rich young ruler was directed to part with his wealth (Matthew 19:21). We must be so very intentional.
Did we say that these were hard truths? They are very hard truths. It is of comparable challenge to recognize that even things that adorn the world of religion are often obstructive; after all, He was most vehemently opposed by the religious elites of His day.
Bishops, theologians and “spiritual” people take note! You may have all of your theological ducks in order. Your ecclesiastical traditions may be impressively draped and hallowed with time. Your experiences may have taken you to the mountain top.
But what did Jesus say? “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” (Matthew 7:21-23).
A lot of us have grown content doing religious things, even within the evangelical camp. We have a knack for producing yet another newer, more contemporary church. We are quite adept at churning out yet another Bible translation. And we do know how to fill an auditorium with one more concert crowd that rocks to the latest Christian “artist.”
Our Lord truly knows the deception of my own flesh and continues to deal with my fleshly expressions of Christian identity. None of us are exempt; we are all sinners. And we all need to lie down and die if Christ is to breathe into us, giving us new life.
No one wants to die. It is as natural as breathing, no semi-pun intended. But it helps to know that Christ wants to replace our old, broken and tired existence with a new, restored and refreshed one. We just need to let Him get on with it.
Do we allow the old self to keep plodding on? Or do we make way for the Spirit of Jesus to overcome, permeate and even re-create who and what we are?
C.S. Lewis gives perspective to the issue at hand in his classic, Mere Christianity:
“The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, ‘Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked – the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
That’s the deal! There are no negotiations, though our theologians, ecclesiastics and experientialists have tried them in lieu of honest and hard but necessary surrender.
I know that He had to break me. I was as well-intentioned as any clergyperson that I know. I was hard-working, honest and capable of manufacturing the best ideas to be applied in the church as the ecclesiastical world can boast.
Little or none of it worked. I wasn’t as good as I thought or as effective as I thought to be. Then He broke me. My only contribution to the solution lay in the acknowledgment of my brokenness. Neil Anderson writes in Victory over Darkness that “Brokenness is the key to effective ministry.” I learned this truth, albeit the hard way.
Entire churches need to learn it now; thankfully, it seems easier than ever to be broken. Name me one church that has not been beset by spiritual malaise, numerical decline and financial fears and I will sell you a bridge in Brooklyn! Our trial becomes God’s triage.
Why does a church profess Christian allegiance? What motivates those street-corner venues that have sat there for decades if not centuries?
I hope not for so shallow a purpose as “church growth.” The conceit that more people will parley into more of God’s favor is both unbiblical and frighteningly demagogic.
I hope not for the maintenance of hallowed but lifeless traditions. Lots of churches seem more expressive of rigor mortis than spiritual arteries pulsating with Christ’s blood.
I hope not for the upkeep of church graveyards (Yep, such rationale does exist!).
I hope not for social justice which, though a worthy aspiration, is not worth a fig if divorced from God’s holy standard. Righteousness and justice jointly inhere in God; so they must inhere together within us.
And I hope not for the affirmations of theological systems in which Jesus is subordinate to deterministic doctrine or experiential exploitation. Jesus is the hermeneutical key to God’s Word, not a specific doctrine. And He is Lord over us, not subordinate to our spiritual whims and fancies.
Lewis is correct: “The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him.”
One little phrase hits the spot - “little Christs.” We are meant to be living embodiments of Jesus. Our worship is found faulty if we are other than this. Our discipleship is flawed is we are devoid of this. Our witness is discredited if we aren’t acting out our calling.
Each Christian is meant to be a vessel within whom Jesus lives and through whom He works. Each and every church is to be an instrument by which Christ is revealed to the world. So the question becomes: Is Christ to be found in us?
He has certainly provided the opportunity. It is most assuredly His plan for our lives. It takes time, but He is patient. There will be bumps and hurdles, but He makes level paths for our feet. We get in the way, but He will have His way. His Word will have final say:
“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces, all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into His likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:17, 18).
The glorious likeness comes from God. It is our privilege to be the bearers of this ever-increasing and glorious expression of His likeness. Our worship is enriched. Our discipleship is enhanced. Our witness is accentuated.
Who am I, Pop-Pop? Often, my lovely little grand-daughter will say that she is the beast and I am the beauty. My reply is to remind her that she can’t be the beast because she is beautiful and I can’t be the beauty because – well, because I’m simply not.
Who is she? She is Amber, as lovely an expression of little femininity as I have known. I can’t say that I see myself in her, as I have married into the family, but perhaps she will one day bear some reflection me by virtue of our love for one another.
Who am I, really? Today and forever, I’m a child of the living God, thanks to Jesus and the operative power of His Spirit who is ever-present in my life. You see, He loves me, and I have been enabled to love Him back. Don’t you see the resemblance?
It is our prayer that our resemblance to Him would be apparent in all of us who claim Him as Savior and Lord. Vive la Jesus!
Bradley E. Lacey
July 15, 2011