Still Not Perfect?
- Jay the Talmid
- Jul 24, 2015
- 5 min read
Still not perfect?
If you are anything like me, you got up today, looked in a mirror, and saw a person who is FAR from something resembling PERFECT! Every one of us has a struggle in one way or another and these struggles leave us feeling “less than” in many ways. The mirror for most of us is an unkind and uncomfortable place to spend time, and let’s not even talk about the full length mirror! I mean, if we are honest, we are trapped in an unkind creation where with each passing year the wrinkles multiply, the grey hairs lurk, and the waist line expands. Now, if these didn’t seem bad enough, we seem to be surrounded by a culture bent on making you feel worse about yourself than the full length mirror. Every magazine stand, TV show and media source is doing its best to make you feel less than so you will buy something to FIX yourself up so you can try to be socially acceptable.
All this leaves us feeling very “less than”. I have come to learn that using the scale of comparisons is a very useless tool when trying to find the value in one’s life. If my worth in this life was to be measured against what others do, then I am really going to develop a complex. After all, there is always someone better, faster, and basically everything else better than me. On the other hand, many today look around at the misery of others to justify how they are not so bad off, but is it true? Does not being bad off make us truly well off? Sadly no, because when we look in the mirror the same reflection still stares back at me and it does not bring me joy. So how does this negativity impact my relationship with God?
Well, like any relationship, when you bring that much negativity into the room there is a block. We read the Scripture and hear how we are wonderfully made, how much the Messiah loves us, and the verses go on and on and on and all the while we really don’t believe it. We don’t honestly think those words are for us. Oh, I know many people tell me they “know” God loves them but if you watch them closely this “know” is something that only exists in the mind and is not impacting their daily life. There is a very large gap between knowing something in the mind and knowing something from experience. So, how do we close the gap between what we know in our minds, and experiencing the kind of love talked about in the Scriptures?
It’s my belief that one of the greatest sources of division that separates us from experiencing God’s love in an empowering way is how we focus our thoughts. What I mean is this, let’s take the example Shakespeare gives us in Romeo and Juliet. Two kids, so passionately infatuated with each other that all sense of what we would call “reason” went out the window. So in love with each other that in the heat of that passion death seamed the more reasonable option than a life separated from each other. How often do we feel that way about God? Hebrews 12:29 “For our God is a consuming fire.” How consumed are we really? Look at all that goes on in our days with work, family, friends, and then count the minutes that you spend in a day with God? You see, we live in a world where companies study us to find out how we can be manipulated so they can best market their products to us. Even at work, corporations do large studies to find out how to make you more productive without spending any more money. We are engaged in a daily battle over how we identify with the refection in the mirror. Do we love what we see, loath it, or worse, become indifferent? The lover of your soul, the Creator of the universe, is passionately in love with you and me but can I say the same? Like Juliet, do I talk about Romeo in the morning, does Romeo occupy my thoughts at coffee break or lunch? Do I long to rush home to spend time with Him? Like most of us, we barely have that kind of passion for the people around us, never mind a God we cannot see. This is to our own downfall. We have lost our passion, we are not in love and most certainly we are not consumed. You might make a protest, but in truth are we overcoming the chaos of this life over being overcome by it?
If we want to have any hope of impacting those around us we need to break out the full length mirror, strip down and ask the person staring back at us, are we consumed by our love for God? Do you see a person in the mirror who cannot help but talk about God because they are madly in love? It is for this reason our countries have lost their way. We are passionate about many things in this life. Our loved ones, our work, our selfish desires, and we are especially passionate as believers about being right; right doctrine, right order of church services, the right translation of the Bible, but being passionately in love with God? Well, one only has to turn on the TV or listen to the talk around the church coffee pot to see where our hearts really are. If we are not in a passionate love relationship with God, how will we ever love what we see in the mirror? If we can’t love what we see in the mirror, how can we love the people we meet each day? It is because of this lack of passion we are running amuck. I am afraid we have come to love the idea of God but not God himself.
So how do we find that passion? What can we do to love what we see in the mirror? The short answer? Do loving things. Spend time with God, not just for a few minutes in the morning before you rush off to work or before you flop into bed at night. Take time to linger with Him and His Word. Spend time reading your Bible, like Juliet receiving a love letter from Romeo. See yourself in the pages. Read the Psalms like they are yours, read the Song of Solomon like it’s a conversation between you and God. If we begin to practice reading the Bible in this way, it would indeed become the Book of Life, a passionate love life. The world is in desperate need of people who are passionately in love. We have enough people who are passionate about being right, but far too few who are truly in love. Take the time, read the words, experience anew the ultimate love letter written just to you and let it change your world!
Shalom
Jay
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