Are you living to prove a point?  Are you waiting at the drop of a hat to tell someone about that thing that you care so deeply about?  If so, I’ve got some very bad news for you.  People probably don’t like hearing you talk about it.  It’s not you, it’s us.  It’s just how we’re made.

I’m not trying to bring anyone down, or anything like that, but my heart is for people to experience life to the fullest, and you simply can’t do that when you walk around with a millstone of knowledge that you’re waiting to drop around someone’s neck.

How do I know this?  Because I was once the point man, and sometimes still slip into that role.  Whatever I was going through at any given time, was my point, and it didn’t matter if what you were talking about had anything to do with it or not, you better believe it was coming up in conversation. 

Being a Christian only made this worse.  Now I had good reason to prove my points.  Beacuse I was doing God’s work, and trying to make people better.  Until I realized how broken I was.  Hurt, scared, terrified of not being heard. 

What kind of point can you try and prove when you realize that you’re whole life has been spent trying to gain people’s approval?  About the only thing you want to do is shut up and not open your big fat mouth ever again.  This phase doesn’t last forever, but you can never again start dumping your point all over a perfectly good conversation in total innocence again.

When I started to learn what it really meant to experience complete validation and really know what the love of God feels like, I stopped caring about proving points to people.  I just wanted them to experience the same thing.  That can turn into a point to prove in and of itself, but part of that whole experience is learning that people can not be bullied into experiencing true validation. 

Are you living to prove a point?  If so, it’s possible that you’re not really doing either.

As I listened to them offer us one thing after another, I realized that I was watching someone verbalize what so many of us struggle with.  It’s very hard to accept the fact that when Jesus died for us, it was unconditional.  It wasn’t based on anything we did.  It was based on the fact that God loved us so much.  So this brings up two interesting facts.

1. We cannot earn our salvation because it’s already done.
2. Beacause we can’t earn it, we’ll never deserve it.

Earn

I’m not sure what the dictionary definition of that word is, but I’ve always interpreted it to mean "to make progress towards, to pay off".  There are many things in this life that we must earn.  We must earn our grades, we must earn our pay at our jobs.  But salvation is not something we can’t earn.  We can’t make payments towards it.  If we could that would mean that Jesus’ sacrifice was not enough.  To put it bluntly, God did not send his Son to die for me so that he could hold it over my head for the rest of my life while I pay him back for it.  It was his choice, based on His love for me.  Nothing I can do can make that sacrifice justified.

Deserve

When someone says "you deserve it", they usually mean that you have paid an adequate price for something, it’s rightful that you should have it.  You deserved a promotion because you earned it.  Being deserving of something implies a state of arrival.  When I have arrived at the state of deserving something, it’s because of the long process of earning it.  After I work a full month earning my wages, I deserve my paycheck.

But since salvation cannot be earned, it means that we’ll never deserve it.  We will never arrive at a state where salvation is rightfully ours.  It will forever be the perfect gift that we must accept without the ability to pay off, earn, deserve, or otherwise validate.  And that’s extremely difficult to accept.  Because everything else in my life I feel that I have to earn so that I’ll deserve what I have.

Salvation and beyond…

It’s funny how your perspective on everything changes when you begin to deal with your own discomfort knowing that you’re the recipient of the greatest symbol of love mankind has ever received, and it has nothing to do with your good works.  All of a sudden, you begin to realize that the reason you’ve been judging people is because you’ve always felt that you have what you have because you earned it.  And therefore you deserve it. 

What an amazing life this can be when you can look at all your blessings, and instead of patting yourself on the back for how hard you worked to get it all, you can simply look the Father in the eyes and say "Thank You".  You have what you have because he blessed you with it.  Not because you worked hard, and not because you deserve it.

I was just sitting there listening to "More Than A Friend" off of my favorite album right now by Jeremy Riddle. The words and the melody of the song were hitting me deep, right there at my job. At that moment I felt so validated, so complete. But my only thought was "I have to find a way to show other people that this is possible." As I followed that train of thought, I found myself getting frustrated because I realized how futile it is to explain something like that to someone who isn’t looking for it.

Suddenly I felt a prompting from the Holy Spirit inside me. "Let this be just for you."

Instantly I looked back on my life. I realized that every time I had begun to experience something from the Lord that was changing my life, my first reaction was to try and tell someone else about it. To have it change their life even before my change was really started. This has happened enough to make me wonder why I have that reaction. I think I understand it now.

Somehow through a culture of religious piety, and the wrong kind of fear of God, many of us have an indwelling fear of being focused on ourselves. Our attention is always focused outwardly. We are happy when the people around us are happy. And if we do enough good for those around us, we may even convince ourselves that we really are pleasing to God because we’re so unselfish.

So what happens when an intoxicating, and refreshing sensation like the presence of God interrupts our day? I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I’m to be honest, it makes me uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because it feels selfish. Uncomfortable because I’m afraid it can’t be real if it’s happening to me and not someone else. Uncomfortable because it’s focused on me. And so I try to shift the focus onto others, again, and again, and again. I’m so used to being focused on everyone else, that to sit there and just bask in something that’s there just for me feels wrong. And that’s sad.

I think that it’s a slight perversion of Jesus’ sacrifice to think that Jesus was focused on "others" because he gave his life for us. That’s a cop out. Jesus was focused on His Father. He even asked that if it be His Father’s will, that this cup (dying ) be taken from Him. So to say that Jesus was focused on us, and that He loved us so much is missing the point. Jesus only wanted to do what His Father’s will was. Therefore, He was focused on him. That’s our model.

It’s also a mis-interpretation to think that God sent Jesus for "others". God sent Jesus for me. He didn’t include me because there were some other people he really wanted. He wanted me. He didn’t send Jesus for a big group of people. He sent Jesus for each and every individual person. There’s no "group benefit" to salvation. It’s individual.

I’m realizing that salvation is intensely personal. And seeing our relationship with God in terms of other people only cheapens the sacrifice that he asked Jesus to make. It’s so uncomfortable for me to think of God looking at me, just at me and saying "I sent him to save YOU." Because I feel like somehow it’s wrong for me to be worth saving all by myself.

God never intended his focus on each and every heart to be diffracted and reflected by our fear of receiving something good that’s just for us. His love is supposed to be a beam of light so strong that it cuts directly through the eyes of our heart, changing us from the inside out. The thing about our eyes is that when we look away from the light, it doesn’t get into our eyes. I may look away, but his love is always shining right into my eyes, waiting for me to forget about my obligations, forget about my "good Christian" duties, and just look at him. To soak in the individual focus that he has on each of us. It’s only then that I can be transformed from the inside out because his light can only get in when I’m looking straight at him.