In my last post I shared some thoughts on my summer in NMB and how I'd caught myself wanting to justify my success or failure. After returning home, I read a Tim Keller quote that really resonated with me as I thought through my summer:
"Unless you believe the gospel, everything you do will be driven by pride or fear." This is pretty applicable to my experience. I wanted to justify myself before people because I feared what they thought of me. I probably should be writing this is present tense: I fear what other people think of me. Then there's pride, which is defined as a deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements. Gross. I was prideful in my accomplishments this summer when things went well. And when things didn’t go well, I could talk about my inexperience, to justify myself. If we don't believe that God accepts us through Christ, and we look to some other thing for acceptance or to prove ourselves, that's idolatry. "Idolatry is looking to some created thing to give you what only God can give you" (Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor). When we idolize something, we love it above all other things. We serve it. We draw meaning and worth from it, more than we draw our meaning or worth from God. I read somewhere that we never break one of the 10 commandments without also breaking the first commandment (that's probably from a Tim Keller book or sermon or tweet). “I am the Lord Your God; You shall have no other Gods before me.” The rest of the commandments involve breaking the first one because we’ve made something an idol, a god. Unless I believe the gospel, I'll bow to pride or fear. Unless I believe I am known and loved and accepted by God first and foremost, and live my life out of that firm foundation, I'll trust in man to provide those things. If I don't believe the gospel, I'll find myself on sinking sand.
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"I've never done this before."
I can't count how many times I said that to people this summer in NMB. I'd never lead a US Summer Mission team before, I'd never actually been a staff person on a US Summer Mission, and I'd never been to NMB. Throughout my time on summer mission, I'd catch myself saying this statement, and actually annoying myself with it. Why did I feel it was so important for others to know my experience level??? There are two sides to the coin: If I succeeded, I could lobby for extra credibility in my abilities: “I’ve never done this before! Look at how I handled that situation! This is great! I’m doing great!” And if something didn't go super great, I could in a sense blame my lack of experience instead of the fact that I flat out failed at something: "Yeah...that didn't go so well...but, but, I've never done this before!" In both situations, you can see the condition of my heart:
As I’ve been thinking about this and trying to figure out where this is coming from – I realized that in both cases, I was finding my identity and my righteousness in the wrong things. And so frequently, we find ourselves on these two battlegrounds: We try to establish our own righteousness – our own set of rules or agenda by which we think we can work hard enough. And then we will be good enough for God. And we wrongly root our identity in things that don’t fully satisfy us. Other people give us approval and acceptance but it’s never enough to satisfy. There's this great material we use in Cru sometimes call "Gospel-Centered Life." In it, the authors share something I've found very applicable to my situation: “At the root of the human condition is a struggle for righteousness and identity. We long for a sense of acceptance, approval, security and significance – because we were designed by God to find these things in him. But sin has separated us from God and created in us a deep sense of alienation. To experience the deep transformation that God promises us in the gospel, we must fight to repent from self-righteousness. Our souls must be deeply rooted in the truth of the gospel, anchoring our righteousness and identity in Jesus and not in ourselves and our abilities.” We studied Galatians this summer and throughout the book we got to continually bring up the concept of righteousness with students, and walk them through this idea of justification through faith – and we got to preach the gospel to ourselves as we did that: God doesn’t love you more because you’re here on summer mission, or because you did that one thing really well. Or… yeah, maybe that talk you gave wasn’t awesome, but God will still use it because you stepped out in faith and trusted Him with it. “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ; so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” - Galatians 2:16 |
Amy WellnerEncouraging others to intentionally live out their God-given identity. Archives
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