mind

   I heard once about a man who went to the doctor after weeks of symptoms. The doctor examined him carefully, then called the patient's wife privately into his office.  He said to her, "Your husband is suffering from a rare form of anemia. Without treatment, he'll be dead in a few weeks. The good news is, it can be treated with proper nutrition."

     "You will need to get up early every morning and fix your husband a hot breakfast—pancakes, beef and eggs, the works. He'll need a home-cooked lunch every day, and then an old-fashioned meat-and-potato dinner every evening. It would be especially helpful if you could bake frequently. Cakes, pies, homemade bread—these are the things that will allow your husband to live.

     "One more thing.  His immune system is weak, so it's important that your home be kept spotless at all times.  I can't impress upon you just how important this is.  If you don't do these things, your husband is going to die.  Do you have any questions?"  The wife said, "No."

     The doctor said, "Do you want to break the news to him, or shall I?"  The wife said, "I'll do it."

     She walked back into the examination room. Her husband, sensing the seriousness of his illness, said to her, "It's bad, isn't it?"  She nodded, tears welled up in her eyes. He asked her, "What's going to happen to me?"

     And, with a sob, his wife blurted out, "The doctor says you're gonna die!"

     While I would like to think that those of us who are husbands and wives would be willing to serve our mates in a situation like that, the truth of the matter is that we don't usually get very excited about the opportunity to serve someone else.

     Paul says in Philippians 2:5 to, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus".  And the "mind" or "attitude" that Paul tells the Philippian Christians to take on is the attitude of selflessness, humility, service.  "Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.  Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others." (Philippians 2:3-4).  The attitude a Christian should have is one that focuses on the needs and interests of others.

     That's not something that comes naturally. When Christ came into this world, he brought into being a whole new approach to relationships with people.  Listen to what he said to his disciples one day when they were arguing among themselves regarding who was to be greatest in his kingdom:

     "You now that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who are great exercise authority over them.  Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant.  And whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave -- just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:25-28).

     Jesus said that in the Gentile world, in the world around us, there's very little humility.  People operate basically out of selfish motives.  They have little or no interest in helping others to reach their goals -- except when it might benefit themselves.  The name of the game is to get power and authority and then to exercise that power and authority.

     But that's not how Christians are supposed to act.  And Christ did more than just teach us that truth.  He lived it out as well.  He demands nothing of us that he wasn't willing to demonstrate himself.

     "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."

...sand

"For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more." Hebrews 8:12

A story tells that two friends were walking through the desert. At a specific point of the journey, they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one, who got slapped, was hurt, but without anything to say, he wrote in the sand: "TODAY, MY BEST FRIEND SLAPPED ME IN THE FACE."

They kept on walking, until they found an oasis, where they decided to take a bath. The one who got slapped and hurt started drowning, and the other friend saved him. When he recovered from the fright, he wrote on a stone: "TODAY MY BEST FRIEND SAVED MY LIFE."

The friend who saved and slapped his best friend, asked him, "Why, after I hurt you, you wrote in the sand, and now you write on a stone?"

The other friend, smiling, replied: "When a friend hurts us, we should write it down in the sand, where the winds of forgiveness get in charge of erasing it away, and when something great happens, we should engrave it in the stone of the memory of the heart, where no wind can erase it" 

battle

I used to introduce my younger son by calling him "my baby" which is a little ridiculous if you look at the two of us. The boy I used to pick up is now the man who picks me up. And that's pretty embarrassing. He would greet me at an airport or some public place, still does, put his arms around me and lift me in the air. When I stand next to this moose in our family, I ask myself, "How did this child of mine ever get so much bigger than I am?"

A while back, a disturbing thought occurred to me, maybe this isn't just about my son growing. Could it be I'm shrinking? I'm sure I used to measure like 5'8", but the doctor says I'm 5'7" now. Hello! Who took the inch? Don't you dare tell me it went to my waist either!

Actually, I understand as you keep having birthdays that your tissues and vertebrae begin to sort of scrunch together and you start to shrink. That's a pretty depressing thought when you don't have that much to start with in the first place! But shrinking as you get older may not be all bad.

In a sense, I actually hope I'm shrinking as I get older in the way John the Baptist described when he was talking about his relationship with Jesus. It's in our word for today from the Word of God, John 3:30 - "He must become greater; I must become less." John's goal was to shrink. I think I understand that better now than I used to. John wanted his life and his work to involve an increasingly smaller percentage of him and a progressively larger percentage of Jesus. In the strange economics of discipleship, the less there is of you in what you do, the greater you become.

This is especially difficult for those of us who want to be "make it happen" people. There are two lifelong battlefields where we wrestle with the Lord over the "me first" thing. One is the area of control. We don't mind giving the Lord time, or money, or service. We give Him loyalty, we give Him hard work. We'll give Him anything but control. I want to maintain control of the areas that really matter to me. It might be my career, or my family, my children, my money. I want to control my ministry, or my image, my talent, my plans.

For most of us, there is a major control issue that lets the control of Jesus Christ go only this far and no farther. And there can never be less of me and more of Jesus until that issue is settled with my white flag. And maybe you've been through just enough pain, just enough humbling that you're finally ready to surrender what you have held tightly for so long and that you have tried so hard to control.

The other battlefield where our ego wrestles against the takeover of Jesus is the issue of credit. We really want the credit for what we do. We want to be noticed, appreciated, promoted, and admired. Recognition is important to us. But God has said, "I am the Lord; that is My name; I will not give My glory to another." We can't know the power of having Jesus really in charge until we are ready to say, "I don't care if my name's on it or not. I don't care who knows. I am here to get people to think about You, Jesus, not me."

If you can surrender the control, if you can surrender the credit, you are ready for the incredible shrinking you. Our lives become more incredible than we could have ever imagined as our ego and our interests and our self-reliance begin to recede, and our lives become more about Jesus than they ever have before.

Frankly, I'm looking forward to the years ahead, and to shrinking more and more, so my life can be bigger than ever as I make more and more room for my Jesus.