Losing Yourself

I passed a poster advert the other day which read: “Perderse sin perder el norte” - this roughly translates as “Lose yourself without losing your way” - and I began to ponder how pertinent this is to our walk with the Lord. Our journey with God is an exercise in releasing control to Him. The first step is always our acknowledgement of our need of Him and that our self-sufficiency – our attempt to live our own lives without reference to our Creator – is essentially the root of all sin. Thankfully, Jesus died on the cross to deal with this and all we need to say is “Yes, please Lord!” for Grace to become the foundation of our journey.

However, loosely quoting Churchill, this is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end, it is merely the end of the beginning. Our need for control is extremely deep-rooted and, if we don't daily lay it down, we will very easily find ourselves “taking back the reigns” of our lives - and our Western world will applaud us for it! Our society worships self-sufficiency - “control your own destiny”, “life is what you make it”, “do what makes you happy” are all popular tag-lines today, but we are called to a very different way of life – we are called to “lay down our lives” as our Saviour did before us.

Sadly, we don't become immune from our controlling natures when we give our lives to God and, over the ages, the Church has succumbed many times, becoming, at best, a tool of social control and, at worst, a medium for unscrupulous people to gain power and wealth at the expense of others. It is so sad to see organisations which were started by people whose sole desire was to serve God, in a position where they have done and are doing more to defame the Lord's Name than to proclaim it.

Nevertheless, there, but by the Grace of God, go all of us! It is so easy to fall into the trap of doing things WE think will be good for God, instead of waiting for Him to lead. So many Christians, who started out on fire for the Lord, end up burnt out from getting caught up in DOING the things they they think they should FOR God, instead of concentrating on BEING the person He wants them to become. This is always to our benefit – the person He wants us to be is the BEST version of ourselves, the one we were CREATED to be. If we lose ourselves in Him, we won't lose our way or our identity – it is, in fact, the ONLY way to truly FIND ourselves.