Knowing God and Knowing Ourselves
Augustine correctly prayed that he might know God after which himself. Christ is your Maker. Therefore, to know Him is to know yourself: “For you’ve died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)” The higher you realize Him, the more you will grasp who and whose you’re. And the more you see who and whose you’re, the safer you’re. We all have fundamental personal value needs: a necessity for security, a way of unconditional love and acceptance by other people, and a way of significance—the reassurance that our lives matter. Finally, we’d like satisfaction. Is there anything we are able to accomplish that may endure?
Because God Himself endowed us with these needs, they can not be satisfied within the temporal realm of this world. People often turn to others for his or her sense of security and price. But other people allow us to down, and we, in turn, allow them to down. We often look to wealth and prosperity for our sense of significance, but soon, the hollowness of worldly possessions becomes all too real. We often turn to performance, position, popularity, and prestige to realize a way of satisfaction on this world. Once again, these will all allow us to down. The only place where we are able to find those needs fully met is in our relationship with Christ.
Empowered to Love Others Compassionately
Our relationship with Christ empowers us to like others compassionately. Grasping our true identity in Christ is just not a one-off event but an ongoing journey of discovery. But the more we come to know who and whose we’re, the more we start to comprehend that we’re individuals who have a recent identity. We’re not in Adam; we’re in Christ. We have a recent spiritual DNA, because it were. We’ve been adopted into His family.
We now have a foundation for understanding our true position on this world. At the start of the upper room discourse in John’s gospel, we get to take heed to Jesus’s intimate words to his disciples. Here, we discover that Jesus’s hour of departure was upon them and that He loved His own until the tip.
But the important thing verse to focus on, and one which’s often missed, is John 13:3, which tells us, “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he’d come forth from God and that he was going back to God.” That little verse is the premise for what he was actually capable of do. He performed a visible parable when his disciples were jockeying for positions regarding who was going to be first within the heavenly kingdom.
As His disciples are bickering over who will sit at His right hand, Christ lays his garments aside, putting on the clothing of a servant and starting to scrub their feet. Though this was an integral a part of Oriental hospitality, it seems that there was no servant available to perform the ritual in the course of the Last Supper. Certainly, not one of the disciples were going to do it in the event that they were fighting over what they believed to be honor and prestige. So Jesus, the master, took up the towel and the basin and started to scrub their feet, giving them a model of servanthood.
What gave Him the safety and the facility to serve in this way, even knowing that his crucifixion was imminent? My conviction is that Christ focused on these three things: 1) He knew that the Father had given all things into his hands, and this was the true source of his dignity 2) He knew he’d come forth from God 3) He knew that he was going back to God. This was His security. Because of those three great truths, He was capable of serve—to scrub the disciples’ feet as they were fighting for greatness and as he was awaiting crucifixion. As Jesus shows, true greatness consists in service to others. Once again, the washing of the disciples’ feet is a visible parable of this astonishing insight.
Imagine if Jesus listened to what people said about him. He would never have been secure enough to serve. People would say, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Why is he eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners? The son of man got here eating and drinking.” They went on, “Behold a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Even His own siblings refused to consider in him.
We Have the Resources of Christ
Jesus was continually the topic of scorn, criticism, and abuse. If He’d listened to what people said about Him, He wouldn’t have been secure enough to serve—to like others compassionately. Instead, Jesus selected to permit His Father’s words to define Him. His true dignity, His true security, and His true destiny then empowered Him to be a servant of other people. And He invites us to do the exact same thing because, astonishingly, His resources have now change into our resources. When we expect in regards to the incontrovertible fact that we have change into children of God and have been given the safety and destiny that comes together with this information, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
If I needed to sum up the whole Bible in a single word, it might be the word relationships. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture is all about relationships. It’s about knowing the love of Christ that liberates us to like others. Once again, there’s an amazing risk involved on this. People may be painful and we may be painful to them, and yet, we’re capable of serve them because we all know who we’re and whose we’re.
The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards was right when he said that wisdom is to treat things in response to their true value. The perennial human temptation is to mistake the temporal for the everlasting. We seek success in human relationships, wealth, fame, and power, only to have our hopes shattered repeatedly. True wisdom, nevertheless, involves the popularity that you will give your life in exchange for something. As Paul, the apostle, informs us in Galatians 2:20, “I even have been crucified with Christ. It is not any longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live within the flesh, I live by faith within the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” If Christ loves us and willingly gave Himself for us, how can we not live for Him and for others?
If we leverage the temporal for everlasting gain, what we’re really doing is treating people in response to their true value. We are going to present our lives in exchange for something, and we’ll be smart if we give in exchange for something that is never going to allow us to down in the long run. Christ won’t ever fail you. Embracing this important truth allows us to forgive others after we’ve been wronged. It liberates us to just accept each the people who find themselves gifts to us and people we discover to be draining. If we’ve been forgiven all, we must forgive others.
Christ invites us then to treat individuals with forgiveness and to relinquish the demand for ultimate justice. Justice is getting what we deserve. Never ask God for justice. Not a single one among us could endure God’s justice. Rather, ask Him for mercy—not getting what we deserve—and ask Him for grace. When that is our posture, we’re freed to be individuals who navigate through this temporary earthbound sojourn with an everlasting perspective.
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Bobby Stevenson
Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
