I am His and He is mine

By creation, we belong to God, just as the artist owns the unsold painting, or the musician the music written. By redemption, that ownership deepens, but before the Redeemer came, sin took away the art, the music and threw them into a great death. Our loving Creator then sent His Son to the rescue. The Savior leaped into the abyss and died instead that we might be given back to the One who created us from dust.

Jesus came to reveal to the world the Creator we had abandoned. Then the Creator presented all of us to Him so we, with shame and great joy might belong to Him as His rescued ones. In His prayer to the Father, He says . . .

“I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world. Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. (John 17:6)

Those who have abandoned all else to follow Jesus understand that we are not our own. We have been bought with a great price. Because He loves us, we love Him and gladly give ourselves to Him.

Chambers says that when I can say, ‘I am not my own’ I have reached a “great point in spiritual nobility.” This is “the deliberate giving up of myself” to Jesus Christ. Yet I see His part in this more than my part. Like many who come into this faith kicking and screaming, I sometimes resist His ownership, even fall into the error of serving myself instead of Him. I’m humbled that only by the goodness and gentle but powerful persuasion of the Holy Spirit have I “kept His word.”

The Holy Spirit cultivates the nature of Jesus to me in order to make me one with Him, not to make me a special saint or as Chambers says, “a showroom exhibit.” God’s goal is that my life is defined by the reality that I belong to Jesus.

Chambers says something else that strikes my heart. This belonging is not characterized by what I do but by “being a perfect delight to Him.”

I know what it is to be a delight to another person; to have someone else glad to see me, look me in the eye with joy, delight to call me a friend, takes interest in me, and is pleased with me but not because of any of my accomplishments but because of who they are — a person who shines with the love of God.

What a wonder that Jesus Himself builds that relationship with me — that I am a delight to Him, not because of what I do or do not do, but because He is my friend who loves me.

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)

These truths I have known, but today they seem deeper, more vivid, more precious than ever. Jesus is my friend. I also belong to Him.

Like Ripples . . .

It seems part of my nature to beat myself up when I think I have failed, and often when I don’t. I suspect most people are not satisfied with themselves, and whether that dissatisfaction expresses itself in bragging (to compensate) or bemoaning (fishing for affirmation), everyone needs assurance of their value.
 

When Jesus Christ came into my life, He gave me a new nature. The old is still there, dead to God but alive to sin. I’m supposed to consider it dead and put it off, not allowing it to rule my thoughts, words or actions. Instead, I’m to put on the new life God has given me. This new life has no problem with self-esteem for God created it. Self-pity and boasting are activities of the old nature and no longer needed. Instead, I am to pay attention to what God says about me and base my worth on His Word.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

As a Christian, I am a product of the working of God. In this amazing verse, the Greek word for “workmanship” is poēima, from where we get our word “poem.” I looked up “poem” on an online dictionary and found this quote from John Ciardi.

For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can say where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life…. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.

The imagery in this quote makes me shiver. Is that what God means when He says I am His poem? That I can shift and change and sparkle with life that is always new and always offering to others a fascinating continuity? 

My ‘beat myself up’ self almost laughs at this possibility. Yet I know that Jesus Christ is like that. He is the ultimate work of art, the very Word of God made flesh. In Him are the glories of the Living God. He is the Word, the One who acted when God spoke the world into existence. 

And I am His workmanship. He says so. My challenge is to believe Him and stop listening to that self-centered and self-depreciating old nature that is dead but refuses to lie down and shut up.

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Lord, this image of being a poem, being like ripples on water, ever changing and always filled with the sparkle of new life, Your life, fills me with awe. Yet I know that if I am to live as Your workmanship, I cannot watch myself no more than a ripple can watch itself. Instead, I must keep my eyes and focus on You and walk by faith for You are the ultimate Word, the poetry of God that is my dynamic, my very life.