Devotional Thought of the decade

¹¹  When I was a little child I talked and felt and thought like a little child. Now that I am a man my childish speech and feeling and thought have no further significance for me. ¹²  At present we are men looking at puzzling reflections in a mirror. The time will come when we shall see reality whole and face to face! At present all I know is a little fraction of the truth, but the time will come when I shall know it as fully as God now knows me! 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 (Phillips NT)4

¹  You have been raised to life with Christ, so set your hearts on the things that are in heaven, where Christ sits on his throne at the right side of God. ²  Keep your minds fixed on things there, not on things here on earth. ³  For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴  Your real life is Christ and when he appears, then you too will appear with him and share his glory! Colossians 3:1-4 (TEV)

All my life I search for this unique, individual self—my true self—and yet I never fully find it. Only God knows it fully, for He designed it. And only God can give it to me because He created it and is creating it right now, sculpting it with all the tools of heredity and environment that make up my life. None of us knows who we really are once we stop fooling ourselves. That knowledge and that destiny await us in our home. Our home is in Heaven because our true identity as individuals is waiting for us there. The character’s identity is found in the author’s mind and nowhere else.

While I have no need for my childish speech, feelings, and thoughts, this passage from 1 Corinthians 13 also makes it clear that I am not capable of the kind of understanding I would expect of someone who is more.. mature.  My ability to know reality and what is true is limited, and it will be until Jesus comes for us.

I struggle with that limitation, as much as I did as a 12-16-year-old when I thought I knew everything, or at least was making progress towards that audacious goal!  Like Peter Kreeft, I wanted to know who I was, and there were a lot of struggles on the way.

To be honest, I am not sure who I am… I could define myself as a musician, a pastor, a husband, a father, a son, and someone who suffers with Marfan’s Syndrome and probably am on the Asperger’s Spectrum as well.

None of those things really define me, and I can’t yet know who I am, only God knows. He is, as Kreeft acknowledges, still working on me, crafter me as a master craftsman only can.  (He is doing the same for YOU, by the way!)

Before I became a precocious teenager, I was far more content with not knowing everything, I was content with just learning, just experiencing, and I need to do that more in the next year. I need to be satisfied with less control, with having less wisdom than I think I need, to simply walking and living with God.  That is where I am truly content anyway.

Content playing the keyboard, content with my head in a book, learning what I can.  Content teaching people what I really know well, that “the Lord is with YOU!” Really content as I put in people’s hands the Body of Christ. Content as I see these things have an impact that only God can be responsible for, as He brings them to maturity, as they learn to depend on Him.

That’s is something I can’t control, I can’t plan for it to happen.  I can work on the opportunities, but it is something that I have to trust in God to make happen.  To trust Him as a child does, and perhaps like a much older person, who has wisdom.

God is with you…

and in 2020, come share in His feast!

and let us sing His praises together…

the rest will work itself out.

God’s peace from 2019…

Peter Kreeft, The God Who Loves You (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 22–23.