Learn the Right Lesson…

Recently, I attended a weekend seminar focused on living our identity in Christ. There’s more to that, of course, but for now this is how the weekend started. We took a dreaded redeye flight from Salt Lake City to Tampa. It was scheduled to leave at 11:30 pm. but ended up one hour late. Now on the flight past midnight we are already tired. When we finally landed after a 3 hour nap according to my Oura ring, I was very tired to say the least. But, onward we went to pick up the rental car. When we arrived at Hertz they informed us that my wife had actually made the reservation for the following weekend. No problem, we thought, we will just get another car. That’s when the drama began. Much to our dismay, it was the opening of Spring Training in Tampa and every single vehicle was already rented. We got the same answer from every other rental car agency as well. Frustrated with extreme fatigue kicking in, we decided to pursue a rental off site from the airport. After several calls, my wife found a downtown Marriott that had cars available. After making the reservation, we called back to confirm the car was there and after much assurance took a long Uber ride to the location.  When we got there we were subject to another long line and after finally reaching the counter were abruptly informed there were no cars available. Yes we verified. No, the rental place took zero accountability dismissing us with “we got no cars here, I dont know what else to tell you.” Frustrated, tired and agitated, we took another long Uber to the seminar location. Once we checked in, some 3 hours after landing, I realized we did not have some needed items and had no car to go and get them. The retreat location had nothing close by. At that moment, I say with much embarrassment, I had a complete Dad Crash-out! I was punching the air in frustration and lashing out like a crazy man. After hearing some solutions from my wife, namely that we could door dash anything we needed, I began to calm down. It started to dawn on me that although I was very tired, we really hadn’t endured that much. Thank God for Uber. We were checked in and had an opportunity to get some much needed rest in a very cool room in the Florida sun. Slowly I started to recognize that we were still taken care of; the reservation error was our own; and that there is always a solution if you can keep from crashing out until you find it. The right lesson? Challenges are going to come at times and sometimes they are our own fault even. It’s not the challenge in which you find yourself confronted with, it is your response to the challenge while in the midst of it. What will you do with your mind? Will you surrender to the frustration and crash out which leads nowhere good, or will you control your thinking to find God’s solution for you in the middle of the fight? The right lesson, if properly understood, will serve to save you from similar situations in the future and make your “right now” pretty nice as well.

The theme of the conference was “Living Your God Given Identity in Christ.” On the surface you might think it focused on what we as believers have to do to live like Christ. Which is partially true, but not the right lesson. Living your God given identity is all about living who God already made you to be. It is not about striving with sin or working hard to become something for God. Though, that is a lesson I’m sure you have been exposed to before. Rather it is about remembering who you already are according to what God did and not according to what you do. We live by grace and grace is unearned, unmerited divine favor. “By the grace of God, I am what I am!” When we try so hard to add to God’s perfection in us, we are caught up in the wrong lesson. We could never make our flesh pure before God no matter how hard we work. Doing so or attempting to do so, serves only to drive our focus inward where imperfection reigns. The more you study your own flesh, the more wrong you will find. You can discipline yourself to abstain from this and avoid that, but both works won’t get the job done. Your flesh, your works, your attempts to make yourself pure aren’t what makes you pure inside. Instead the works will just add to your misery until you learn the right lesson. Everything you are or could ever hope to be comes from God via His grace. Who you are inside now that you are born again is a gift from God. It is not based on your own works. It is a gift of God’s grace. It is accepting His plan for yourself instead of trying so hard to do it on your own.  The spirit God gave you inside is perfect and cannot sin. It is based on and carries with it the finished work of Christ. It is finished. The right lesson is to let God do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. God does not need our well intentioned help. We need His help. We need enough humility to learn to live by the works of another man. (Jesus Christ) We need the righteousness He gave us, not the righteousness we earn on our own. Adding endless commandments and rules to make our flesh pure does not move us closer to God. It drives us further away from Him. It wrangles our focus away from Him and back to our own weaknesses, faults and failings. Imagine working so hard your whole life denying yourself this and abstaining from that only to discover it was the wrong lesson. Grace is the right lesson. God wants your freewill love, not your compulsions based on fear of sin’s consequences. So He made you free from sin. Don’t you get it? Once you get the lesson right, things begin to work much better and the pressure to perform evaporates. Maybe you are tired. Maybe you were up all night on the redeye. Maybe you finally recognize the futility of what you were trying to accomplish before. I hope so because this is the right lesson. Relax.

Just some good thoughts…