Who Am I?

After last week I was not sure if we would have another speaker as good and Jefferson Bethke, but I would say that BJ Thompson has been just as good. It is incredible having one amazing speaker after the other. BJ has tackled some huge questions this week such as: Who am I? Who are we as believers? And why are we here? The question that has impacted me most is who am I? This is a question that I know I have to constantly be asking myself or I will forget, like I so often do. When I forget I fall into living the performance lifestyle. I see my relationship with God as a performance relationship. I work so hard on doing good things and go before God and say, "Look God, look at all I have to offer." Unfortunately it is never enough, because there is no way I can perform my way to God. When God looks at all my good works and says they are worthless, it leaves me with only my sin, which is pretty depressing. I know that there is a standard that I can never reach on my own. At this point there are three things that we tend to do. We run because we know there is a standard and choose not to live by it. We sit because the weight of the standard overwhelms us so we become depressed and don't do anything. Or we make up a new standard to make us feel good about ourselves and become self-righteous. How do we get out of this mess of living a performance based life? One thing that I realized, when BJ mentioned it, was that our biggest issue is not understanding that God loves us unconditionally. It is believing that God loves us unconditionally. Not many of us truly believe that there is nothing we can do to change how much God loves us. BJ left us with three things we need to do to experience God's grace.

1) Understand that we are a mess. Jesus came for the sick. He does not want us to come to him acting healthy. However this is so contrary to human nature. We don't want to admit we are a mess. We like to see the mess in others to make ourselves feel good. But we need to understand that our ability to admit we are a mess is to the degree we understand grace.

2) Understand that although we are a mess, we are deeply loved. Again, this is so opposite what we naturally think. When we really understand that we are a mess, the last thing we feel is loved. But, as we see in Ephesians 1, God loved us and adopted us into His family before we were born or did anything for Him. We did not have to prove to Him that we were worthy of being loved. He loves us no matter what.

3) Let grace transform us. When deep mess and deep love meet, grace transforms. This transformation can only point to God, because there is no way we could do it. The most powerful testimony is a life changed by grace, because it cannot be credited to us.

That is how we avoid the performance life and live in the identity God has for us, which is that we are His dearly loved children.

Thanks for reading!