Adapted from my book Jesus + Nothing = Everything, my friends at Modern ReformationMagazine published the following article I wrote for their March/April issue (only excerpted here). If you only subscribe to one theological magazine, I strongly suggest you subscribe to Modern Reformation.
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The virulence of opposition was more than I could bear. I was undergoing the shelling of my life. I was ready to quit and escape elsewhere. It would be so easy just to walk away and never look back.
All that is what I was going through when, mercifully, vacation time rolled around in June 2009.
On our first morning away, I woke up still saturated with the misery that had been intensifying for so many weeks. I opened up my Bible; in the reading plan I was following, it so happened that the day’s passages included the first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Colossians.
Desperate for help from God, I read those verses and my eyes were opened to see the incredible sufficiency of Jesus with greater clarity than I’d ever seen before.
In my misery I demanded an explanation from God. After all, I had done what he asked me to do—I had put “my baby” on the altar. And now this? Like Jonah in the belly of the great fish, I was arguing with God and making my case for why He owed me rescue. Worn out, afraid, and angry, I insisted that God give me my old life back. As I was reading Colossians 1 that morning it dawned on me that it wasn’t my old life I wanted back as much as I wanted my old idols back and I knew that God loved me too much to give them to me.
You see, I never realized how dependent I’d become on human approval and acceptance until it was taken away. For the first time, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of being deeply disliked and distrusted. I was realizing just how much I’d been relying on the endorsement of others to validate me–to make me feel like I mattered. In and of itself, human approval and acceptance are not bad things. They are, in fact, a gift from God. But I had turned them into idols by making them my primary source of meaning and value and worth and significance, so that without them I was miserable and depressed.
God began rescuing me from my slavery by forcing me to more fully understand exactly what I already had in Christ. I was learning the hard way that the gospel alone can free us from our addiction to being liked–that Jesus measured up for us so that we wouldn’t have to live under the enslaving pressure of measuring up for others–including ourselves. His good news met me in my dark place, at my deepest need. Through his liberating word, I was being transformed…freed…refreshed.
The verses that set me free, specifically, were Colossians 1:9-14. In those verses the Apostle Paul says (my summary): You will grow in your understanding of God’s will, be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding, increase in your knowledge of God, be strengthened with God’s power which will produce joy filled patience and endurance (v.9-12a) as you come to a greater realization that you’ve already been qualified, delivered, transferred, redeemed, and forgiven (v.12b-14).
What those verses liberatingly taught me was that because of Jesus’ finished work for me, I already had the justification, approval, acceptance, security, freedom, affection, cleansing, new beginning, righteousness, and rescue I was longing for. I started to see the many-faceted dimensions of the gospel in a more dazzling way. It’s almost as if, for me, the gospel changed from something hazy and monochromatic to something richly multicolored, vivid, and vibrant.
I was realizing in a fresh way the now-power of the gospel–that the gospel doesn’t simply rescue us from the past and rescue us for the future. It also rescues us in the present from being enslaved to things like fear, insecurity, anger, self-reliance, bitterness, entitlement, and insignificance.
In the crucible of suffering, the now power of the gospel was liberating me to be okay with not being okay.
I was coming to glorious terms with the fact that because of Christ’s finished work for me, I had nothing to prove or protect. I didn’t need to pretend anymore that I was strong. I was being set free from the narcissistic impulse to impress people, appease people, measure up for people, or prove myself to people.
Read the whole thing here.
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