Enjoy Being Yourself

The religion I practiced for my first 40 years told people what they ought to become. Everyone in authority told me I've "got to become," so that’s what I tried to do.
Do you know what that kind of religion is like? It's like a bunch of us who all bought new shoes which were too tight for us. We paid so much for them, we thought we had to smile. But all the time we were smiling, our feet were killing us.
You know what? I got tired of people telling me what I "ought" to do. I really did try to smile, because Jesus was supposed to be so good. But it was painful. I came to the place where I began to think that God wasn't a God of love. He was a tyrant. Do you know why I thought He was a tyrant? Because every time I got a little close to Him, He seemed to pull back a little bit. I'd get near, and He'd draw back and say, "Now you've got to work a little harder to get this next step." And about the time I'd get there, He'd point to the next step and say, "Now you got to work a little harder if you want to get there." And I could never get to Him. I could never reach Him. The Bible says, "Draw close to God and He will draw close to you." But it never seemed to happen.
I'd scratch my head sometimes and say, "What's going on? We're worshiping a God of love, so why can't you ever get to Him?" I always longed to hear that "Well done, good and faithful servant"; but I never did hear it. While I sat in the pew at church I heard: "You ought to confess your sins. You ought to try harder. You've got to work hard to become a saint!" But it looked as though the prize was always just out of my grasp.
There are so many things that popular church teaching, such as I received all those years, pushes on into the future. People talk about, "Oh when I get to that place in heaven, I'll have peace!" But you need it now! "When I get to heaven, I'll have continual joy!" When you need joy is now! Right now is when we need peace, joy and all of the other fruit of the Spirit.
Of course, this message left me in a quandary. I was still as self-centered as ever after all these years of trying to follow Jesus. I was terribly sin-conscious. "Is that the right thing to do, or is this the right thing to do?" "Should I have said this, or should I have said that?" "Lord, forgive me for this, and forgive me for that." And I would repeat the process over and over again, trying to make the right decision, making the wrong one, and then asking forgiveness for my sins.
Every morning I would say something like: "Now, Lord, I want to be a good Christian today. I want my language to be clean, my thoughts to be pure, and to live a good life." Then when night came I'd say, "Lord, forgive me for not doing it." If I could get today into the past, I could get it forgiven because the blood had cleansed my sins. But this kept me on a treadmill, and the attention was always on me. How am I doing? Am I succeeding? Am I failing? Am I really imitating Christ? Is He really my Lord? Am I in His will?
I decided if I couldn't make religion work, I'd drop-out of religion. I was outwardly and inwardly "bothered". I praise God for that time. That's the way he got my attention. He used that to reach me.
It was during this period that I met a man who knew Galatians 2:20 as a living reality. What he had to say had an enlightening effect. It became real to me. I saw it for the first time as a possibility now. "Paul isn't talking about an ideal situation," I said to myself. "He isn't talking about something I'm going to get when I die." Galatians 2:20 became a theme verse in my life.
As I listened to this man unfolding the mystery of "Christ in you, the hope of glory," it was so clear that it was real to him. "That's what the gospel is all about," he said. In my spiritual life, all that had really grabbed me up to this point was the fact that Christ died for me, and I could trust Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins. This was the basic message I had heard in church outside of some special sermon for Mother's Day, or a sermon on giving, or on other topics. But regardless of what the subject was, it always seemed to get back to the blood side of the cross.
Then I discovered that we don't really get moving on with God until we can just forget ourselves. Because as long as we are preoccupied with ourselves we really see ourselves as a liability to God. As long as you still have the attention on yourself, imagining that there's still something that needs to be done to improve yourself, you see yourself as God's liability. "Oh, I can't really do that, because I haven't conquered this yet." "I can't do this because I don’t have enough love." "I can't do this because I don't have enough faith." I think we would all agree that this kind of living doesn't measure up to the biographies of the great believers of God in the Bible.
It wasn't until I got hold of the reality of Galatians 2:20 that I could take old Lou, put him on the shelf, and forget him. Only then could I begin to say, "I'm not God's liability – I'm God's asset."
I'm not bragging, but the truth is God has got to have Lou! Why? To reach Lou's world. You can't reach my world, and I can't reach your world. God has to have me to reach the world that I come in contact with. So I'm His asset. He has to have a vessel, and He needs the kind of vessel that sees himself as O.K.
If I end up acting like you, then I've lost contact with the world God wants me to reach. He wants my warts – the things that look like my failures – so that His strength can come through. We are all ministers, in all our different walks of life, and that's the way God means it to be.
Why do I stress that we need to get the attention off ourselves? Because there is so much emphasis on the self in our churches. Crucifying the self, for instance, rather than enjoying the uniqueness of myself. We are all meant to be used by God through our individual soul-personalities.
The key is recognizing that God has actually put His nature into us. I think one of the difficulties Christians have in believing that Christ already lives in them as a present reality lies in the difficulty they had believing that Satan's nature ever lived in them. Most of us at one time thought of Satan as "out there," so that he just had an influence on us. We really thought we were independent people, but that Satan could have an influence on us and God could also have an influence on us. But we never really knew that from the time of our human birth – from the dawn of the human race when our first parents took the wrong fruit – we were born with Satan's nature. You don't find many people who believe that the nature of Mr. Sin, Mr. Phony God, Mr. False Way, Mr. Self indwelt them before their conversion. No, we weren't merely under the external influence of evil – Jesus rightly said that we were of our father the devil and fulfilled his lusts from within (John 8:44).
I didn't like to hear that at first, because there were some days when unbelievers didn't seem so bad. But then it dawned on me that whether they were good or bad, everything they did was from unbelief. Everything was based on self. Finally I saw the folly of the "good and evil" game. You can be just as good as you want to be, but if you're indwelt by the wrong nature you are lost! The "good and evil" game still amounts to evil.
We're talking about Christ having replaced the nature of Mr. Sin in us so that He now lives His holy, blameless, unreprovable, perfect life through us. This is a replaced life. It's not Christ and me, or Christ with me, but Christ in union as one with me. Not that Christ is Lou or that Lou is Christ, you understand, because I'm just the vessel to contain Him. But, as I allow Him, He is evidencing His love life, His concerned life for the world – my world – through me.
This is what Paul saw. He was an extension of Christ. It wasn't Paul living. It looked like Paul – people called him Paul. But it was Christ, the hidden One, living out His concerned life for the world as Paul.
When this dawned on me, when God told me I had died, I stopped disagreeing with Him. When God said that He had buried me, I agreed with Him. And when He said that He had raised me, I said, "Yup, You raised me!"
I see myself in so many biblical characters. Take the woman at the well. She asked where to worship – in Samaria, or in Jerusalem. Which is the right outer place? Which is the right religion? What is the right thing to do? "Well I'll tell you, "Jesus said to her. "The day is coming when you won't worship here and you won't worship down there. You'll worship in here, inside you, in your spirit! Because you don't have to worry whether God is out there toward the north, east, south or west – He will be in you!" This account in John 4 really helped me to get the spotlight off the outer me.
Until that light breaks in on us through the Holy Spirit, we still want Him to be a "me" lover. So we run to services looking for blessings. We still say, "Bless me, bless me." But when you see the truth of Christ living your life, the bless-me days are over. The blessing will come "naturally" as you see your life poured out for others. Because that's the world-lover in you. He's not a "me" lover. He loves you because He's got you – and He's got you because you chose to be "gotten". God's basic formula worked for you, and now He's got you, and as He lives in you, you forget about yourself.
From this point on you don't live from need, from shortage, trying to get a blessing. You have total Sufficiency in you. There's no shortage in Him. You quit saying, "Lord, give me, give me, give me." No wonder some of your prayers don't seem to be answered. God gets tired of body-fussers. You begin to look for God in every situation. As Jesus said, if your eye is single your whole body is full of light. You are full of light because you see only One person operating in all of life's situations. But as long as you are asking, "Is this good? Is this bad?" you are in darkness. To call it God if it looks good, and to say it isn't God if it looks bad, is darkness. "It looks like this," we say, "but wait a minute (or maybe longer), because God is coming."
"Christ in you, the hope of glory." Yes, glory now, just as they saw the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. God intends for others to see the glory of Christ in us. Don't you look for it. It isn't yours to see. It's for someone else to see, and those God means to see it as they cross your path will see it. They'll by drawn to the One who is in you, thinking they have been drawn to you. But you know it isn't you, it's Him in union with you – two, yet one – probably the greatest mystery of God for our finite human minds to understand.
Don't short-change yourself or they couldn't be drawn to you. Don't call yourself a liability, because you are God's beautiful asset. And don't be so concerned about sin-consciousness; instead be consumed with Christ consciousness. Get on with the glory of life because Paul said that He has not only justified you, He has glorified you.

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