I’ll Always Be Me, But Jesus’ Me Is My Best

LONG is this life, or at least that’s how life seems.  Too long it can seem.  Then we don’t want to go.  God must wonder what we truly want.

But that’s life.  We don’t know any better when we’re aged than we did when we were young.  And yet we’ll have seen so much that we’ll be confidently able to say, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”  Why do so many people so foolishly think they have life sorted out?  Why are there myriads of know-it-all’s?  They don’t know more; they just have to appear to know, because their pride usurps their self-control.  But this isn’t a rant about know-it-all’s.

This is about the dualist fact that I’ll always be me, but Jesus’ me is my best.

I’ll always be the person I was born to be; the person people know who is me.  I’m always be that person.  But Jesus makes me better; the best version of the me I’ll always be.  I’m who I am, but I’m a completely different me in Jesus.

But I have to do one thing to achieve this holy ideal.

This one thing is I have to enter Christ’s passion; actually live Jesus’ anguish.  I have to live as if I’m going, myself, to Christ’s cross.  I have to live in the horror of the crucifixion, yet also, at the same time, I have to live in the salubrious wonder of the resurrection.  I have to see the horror in the fact of my sin that sent my Saviour to the cross, and I have to see the wonder that, through him, I’m raised to new life.

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I’ll always be me.

For many, many people that would be a scary and hopeless reality.  And the same I would declare, but for the Lord Jesus.  I’m free to be Jesus’, because he’s freed me to be me.  You’re free to be his, because he’s freed you to be you.

It doesn’t really matter what the rest of the world thinks of me.  I know what Jesus thinks of me.  That’s enough for me.  But contingent on such a relationship is the respect due him, alone, for what he did once, for ever!  His will is that I end my pettiness, my indulgences, my insatiable seeking.

Jesus sponsors the grown up, responsible version of me.

Christian life, taken seriously, is the best life for us and everyone in our orbit.

Life in Christ is nothing changed about who I am, yet it’s everything changed about where I belong.

In Christ, I can celebrate that, on the one hand, whilst nothing has changed, on the other, everything has changed.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.