Dear People Who Keep Company With God,

For so many of us the year 2012 will be remembered as the year of being stripped. Stripping is painful and humiliating, but it is an opportunity to realize the truth in the saying, less is more. I think it is grave clothes that are being removed. It is the garments of what God did, yesterday’s move of the Holy Spirit, paradigm of ministry, leadership and on and on. When Jesus brought life back to Lazarus, he said, “loose him and let him go” (John 11:44). As hard as this season has been, we are being freed.

Leviticus 8:5-13 illustrates this and what follows. The Lord commanded Moses to wash Aaron and his sons in front of the whole congregation of Israel. Although it does not say they stood there publically in their birthday suits I do not think they had their clothes on either. They were stripped, washed, clothed, and then anointed. Imagine being stripped naked publically and washed. It is painful and humiliating, but necessary if we are to become all God created us to be.

We all have an image and reputation we like to maintain publically. We do not want to be seen as needy or in a weak place. We like to be known as successful, spiritual, wise, creative, trendy and so on. But our image and reputation are not real; they are an illusion at best.

One of the traps of unbroken success is that it deceives you. You begin to think the success is more about you than God. You may not consciously think that and therein is the deception. We forget that God is always looking for the people on the margins of life (1 Cor. 1:26). Sad as it may be, having our comforts and privileges ripped away from us is an opportunity to reconnect with what really matters; the truer and higher luxury of needing God and believing He can do anything. 

So it is important how we see ourselves and only the Father can give us the right self-image. We tend to either over inflate our image or be consumed by a low self-image.  The Father desires to bring us to a place where He allows us to see that our lives are of great significance because of His great love and at the same time how irrelevant we are in the grand scheme of things. 

If you look at the trajectory of Paul’s life you discover a downward trend in his thinking about himself. Early on in his ministry he referred to himself as the “least of all apostles” (1 Cor. 9). He would not put himself on the same plane as the original Apostles. Toward the middle of his ministry, he said he was the “very least of all the saints” (Eph. 3:8). At the end of his ministry he wrote, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim 1:15).

Paul was not being self-deprecating. For him, spiritual growth is realizing how utterly dependent he is on God and His grace, not arriving at some point where he somehow needs the Lord less. Paul’s view of himself diminished during his life and his dependence on God increased. Less really is more.

Many Blessings, BW

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