Nobody is really happy about this... but I'm going to pause for a moment to talk about your private life. You may not think I have the right to talk about your private life and so might take issue with me airing all of your behind-the-scenes details all over the internet. It is, after all, YOUR private life, isn't it? It's not mine. And it is, after all, your PRIVATE life, right? You haven't publicized all the hidden inner stories of your soul. But that won't stop me. I'm going to talk about your private life anyways.
I have three questions I'm going to ask over the next few days that I hope will bring us to one conclusion regarding your private life. First question:
Is Your Private Life Really Yours?
You probably
assume that your own private life is yours and not somebody else’s. But is that really true? As far as our own life is concerned we
seem to believe that we have the right to keep things to ourselves that we
don’t want other people to know about and that that should be okay. What’s mine is mine and my life is
mine, isn’t it?
We
have a serious conflict here.
Jesus seems to think that our life is his. All of John chapter 17 is a prayer from Jesus where he
refers to people as “his own” and he calls people “mine.” Jesus thinks we are his. In Luke 14 Jesus says that he expects
us to give up everything for him.
We surrender and become his.
You could try to keep hold of your own life, to control it, to seize it
and try to run it, but Jesus says that’s useless. He thinks your life is not really yours. In fact, Jesus thinks that your life is
his and that it’s to be lived in service for other people, not so that the
world can revolve around you.
Jesus thinks your life is about God and about others. Romans 14:7-8 says “For none of us
lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. If we live, we live to the Lord; and if
we die, we die to the Lord. So
whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” The passage goes on to say that when you belong to the Lord
then you live for others because that’s God’s heart for you.
Look,
you are very special. God knit you together with painstaking care and love. God loves you so much he created you so
that he could be with you. He
wants to live within you. You were
created to be his residing place, his home. God wants to be at home in your hearts. He wants your life to be his. And whether you feel depreciated in
value or like the market has overextended itself on you, the truth is that
Jesus cherishes you and wants you to be his. He wants to have you as his very own. He created you for that purpose. 1
Corinthians 3:16 asks, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and
that God’s Spirit lives in you?”
In 1 Corinthians 6:19 Paul asks, “Do you not know that your body is a
temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own.”
This
is where the conflict within us lies.
We don’t want to be owned by anyone other than ourselves. This is my life. As the great philosopher Bobby Brown
once said, “It’s my prerogative.”
So if our life is to be God’s home, does this mean that God has ownership rights to our life? That we have to play
by God’s rules? Well, yes. That’s right. But which one leads to freedom? Keep our life for ourselves, or letting God have it?
Luke
9:24-25 says that whoever wants to seize their life will lose their soul… What good is it for a person to gain
the whole world, and yet forfeit his very self? As we live as God’s people, then we gain abundant life from
God. As the inside of our lives is
being shaped and directed by God, then we begin to live in the way we were
created to live. If we go against
that pattern by trying to steal our life away from God’s hands, that’s when we
start to feel restrained in ourselves and we feel strained with others. We were
created to share our life with God forever; to give him ownership of our
breath, of our thoughts, of our days; to give him rule in our hearts; so that
we could truly have life. That’s
what we were created for. If we go
against what we created for, we will have conflict within us, we will have a
divided heart, a heart that struggles to pump.
As
parents, we try to establish this pattern in our home with our children. That’s the goal of every parent,
right? Children are expected to
live according to the patterns set up at home. Kathy and I tell our kids over and over again, “Look, if you
follow the ways we have given you, then you will live free and enjoy life and
your relationships will be abundant.”
But every time they go against those patterns, or cross over the
boundaries, or exhibit destructive behavior, or seize the shape of their life
in their own hands without us, their success rate goes down and their self-joy
becomes restricted. Their life
doesn’t flow quite right. As our
children, they should live according to our ways because they are in our
hands. We as their parents are
striving to shape them and love them and enable them to fully live. They are our kids. We are entrusted with the
responsibility to give them life to the fullest. To the degree that we do that according to God’s ways, if
they reject our hands, if they resist our shaping, if they think their life is
theirs alone and that we have no right to interfere, if they think their
private life is no business of ours as their parents, then they will never
learn to live free.
Our
seven year-old recently asked me if he could drive the car. It’s a manual, a stick-shift, by the
way. I said no, I can’t let you
drive the car. First of all, you
don’t know how, second of all, it’s against the patterns established in our
home, and third of all, you’re seven with an adventurous-streak that scares the
breath out of me. He was mad at
me. “You never let me do
anything!” he yelled at me. Well
first of all, I said,
I let you do a lot of things… if that’s not true I’ll take away the
Wii. Second of all, this is a
silly conversation. Third of all,
someday after you mature and I teach you how, you’ll be driving soon enough all
over the place. Trust me. “Well,” he said, “sometime I’m going to
take your keys and drive off to my friends.” I said, “Okay, but I have to warn you, I don’t think that
will end well.”
You
are child of God. Your private
life is God’s to shape and to pattern after his heart. And if you reject that idea, your
private life isn’t going to be that fun.
In your pursuit of freedom you are going to feel restricted and
restrained and antagonistic and ashamed and you’re just going to want to sneak
it around and it’s not going to end well. Is your private life really
yours? No. It’s God’s to shape and God’s to
prepare for the blessing of others.
