Walking with the Wise #44: Not About You

“The fear of the LORD is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil

and perverted speech I hate.”

—Proverbs 8:13

The Christian life is not about you. It’s not about me. It’s from front to back about God. He is the beginning of all things and He is the end. Without God, we have nothing. There is nothing. We are nothing. If it weren’t in God’s good pleasure to make us, we would not exist. If it were not in God’s mercy to reveal Himself to us through His Word, we would be lost, adrift at sea.

David Platt, in his wonderful book Radical, captures the attitude that we have toward God:

“We spurn our Creator’s authority over us. God beckons storm clouds, and they come. He tells the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and they obey immediately. He speaks to the mountains, ‘You go there,’ and he says to the seas, ‘You stop here,’ and they do it. Everything in all creation responds in obedience to the Creator…until we get to you and me. We have the audacity to look God in the face and say, ‘No’”—David Platt, Radical, p. 30-31.

We humans are, at our core, proud. We don’t naturally fear God; in fact, apart from His gracious sovereign work in our hearts, we give little to no thought of God except when tragedy occurs and then get angry because God doesn’t act according to the way we think He should. We are prone to be proud, arrogant, and make awful boasts before God. Our attitude often is not like that of the Savior, but of Satan. Our Savior didn’t lord it over others, even when He had the right to. On the contrary, He came as the suffering servant who took our sins, diseases, pains, and problems upon Himself. The Gospel is not about us; it’s about Him. It’s about the God who stepped out of eternity into temporality because of His love for us. It’s about the limitless God who is beyond time and transcends space, who intentionally limited Himself by becoming a man in space and time, susceptible to the common everyday problems we face.

Walking with the wise means learning to love what God loves and hate what God hates, but it is so much more. It is about becoming like God, by having the Son of God grow up in us, so that one day we become like Him. As John wrote,

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is”—1 John 3:2.

Growing the Son of God within us occurs by forsaking self as we grow in the Spirit of God. And growing in the Spirit occurs as we study the Word of God and learn to apply it to our lives.

I pray that we might forsake sin and self, conforming to the image of Christ as we are transformed through the renewing of our minds to the praise of our glorious God and King, Jesus Christ, the Lord. Amen.