THE REAL YOU CAN NOW STAND UP
09/10/24 10:01
One need not be an overt glory hunter to live as a false self. One can place too much value in accomplishment, on the acceptance of peers and status in professional or business advance. The cataract that this focus spreads across our vision is seldom recognised for what it is: The neglect of the real self.
WHERE AM I?
There is a subtle form of performance orientation that is rooted in self-effort and its validation of the self. In the mode of the self-constructed self, we may realise little real self because the real self grows out of Christ our life. It takes a while to learn this however. Sometimes we get it in our senior years, other times on our death bed. Some never grow beyond the contractual formula they inherited from their parents. There is a realisation that is the core of spirit and life. ‘On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you’ John 14.20 NIV.
We are fortunate if this realisation becomes ours early in life because from that day we begin to grow into the real, born-again self. For the Christian the Real Self begins at this real New Birth. From this point onwards we grow out of being workers into being daughters/sons.
Speaking to a lack of authentic self, Brian Zahnd writes, “Most of us are scripted to think that life is a game and the purpose of life is to win. This is the way that seems right. But the divine truth is that life is a gift and the purpose of life is to learn to love well.” (1) This includes being who we are and loving who we are in Christ.
THE OBFUSCATED SELF
There are people, many of them, whose self has never emerged. This can be the self as the Believer hidden inside layers of religion and living in a self-made grace of externalities and church icons -insulated from Christ and from herself.
Or the non-believer infatuated with his accomplishments. Unless we can learn the truth that the self is found when we are naked with Christ, we will never truly love ourselves and never be truly alive. We will depict ourselves as our accomplishments, our spirituality as a list and wear our faith community as an identity and badge of status – the poor who imagine they are rich. This is what Leanne Payne means about living a life of non-being.
HIDDEN AND SEEN
Hidden in Christ we are revealed as us. We are not talking hidden in Christianity. We are talking union with God – the gift you already have – or almost have. It’s yours when you agree that it is yours in Christ. Don’t end your life as a muffled self because you lived religion but never lived Christ your life.
With Christ as your life you will love God, learn to come to terms with your flaws and love yourself. In this oneness with God you will love in God’s love and love others authentically with no element of artifice or self-interest.
BELONGING
When Christ is your life you are one with Him, with the trinity, with people and the creation. Life and love are one and they are ours in union with God. We can look for life in externalities and attach ourselves to them. But we will not be alive or our true selves but some kind of husk. Frankly speaking you cannot be fully human or fully alive attached to the law.
INTERWOVEN WITH GOD AND PEOPLE
‘I am not asking on behalf of them alone, but also on behalf of those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. I have given them the glory You gave Me, so that they may be one as We are one— I in them and You in Me—that they may be perfectly united, so that the world may know that You sent Me and have loved them just as You have loved Me’ John 17.20-23.
So what is you glory. Your glory is a ‘who.’ Your glory is oneness with God. In this new and living way, our commercial/professional and so called secular life becomes alive in us as we live as our true selves in spirit and life - being known and revealed as an expression of Christ. This is our resurrected life in which we are agents of the new creation Kingdom of God.
(1) Zahnd, Brian. The Unvarnished Jesus: A Lenten Journey (p. 10). Kindle Edition.
