The search for significance
Over the past few weeks. One thing that keeps coming back to me time and time again is just how desperately we search for significance in our lives. It seems to me that it’s often the very thing that drives us.
The more people I meet, the more I realise how much this drive affects everything.
Yet there has to be something more powerful than the drive for significance, and I think it’s simply an understanding of who we are in Christ.
A little while ago I was exploring the topic of identity, how we have been robbed of our godly identity. It seems that it’s the enemies greatest strategy has been to keep us focusing on everything else hindering us from finding the peace, hope and the security that can only be found through Jesus.
It’s funny, but the more people you meet striving for significance the more you realise that there’s something missing, striving isn’t pretty and it’s costly too. It robs us of peace, it causes conflict, it causes pain, it causes tension and competition between the best of friends and it drives some people to extremes. I think of someone like Katie Price, for example, who is so desperate for significance, so desperate for love, that she’ll do almost anything to get the sort of attention she craves, you could say she sold her soul. And though she may be an extreme case, are you and I so different?
How many times have we chosen to walk a path that has caused huge compromise in our lives? What about that career choice to climb the ladder at the expense of somebody else or at the expense of my family or my closest relationships? What about the times when our identity is so wrapped up our position that we can’t see the wood for the trees and we can’t see the damage that we are doing to the people around us? The times when we’re so busy in self-preservation mode, because of these weak fragile foundations that we’ve built on, that we treat people around us like second-class citizens?
The good news is there is a point that we can find peace in Christ, and by that I don’t mean peace with the compromise, but that place of total surrender. Simply put, if Jesus died for the sins of the world, then, we have to be able to receive the forgiveness and healing that he paid for and striving is, after all, just another sin, if we strive we are basically saying that what Christ did on the cross wasn’t enough, but it clearly is. It has to be.
I realise how much I’ve tried to pursue significance through different avenues over the years from the music career to evangelism and the prophetic gifting to leadership, things that should be godly yet been used for my own purposes, my own significance.
What I have realised now, as I’ve willingly ( though sometimes painfully) surrendered most of these things just how dependent I was on them for my sense of significance and subsequently how free I am now (which is rich coming from a bloke who’s just written his own story and published it in a book and writes a blog on the world wide web). I love the freedom I have now, it’s funny, even Dawn has noticed it, there has been a major shift. Somehow by God’s grace I have allowed him into some of the most secret places of my heart and He is bringing such freedom, love and joy. At times it’s hard to contain.
I suppose my fear is that somehow, I will get snared up in all this crap again at some point. But I have to choose not to walk in fear but in openness and humility with the possibility that the Lord may ask me to lay it all down again sometime. To be quite honest with you knowing just how free I am right now I would willingly do so again, though that is easier said than done.
Recently some people have labelled me radical, some people labelled me extreme or even a heretic and it’s funny even with those labels I can find myself finding significance in the titles, but in reality the only place I should ever look for significance is in the heart of my heavenly father.
It seems to me, everything good comes from rest, everything good comes from a place of peace, Jesus said “come to me all who are weary” and I’m sure he means more than being simply weary of religion, but being weary of striving, weary of trying to find significance, weary of being so selfish. All we really need is to know is that we are loved by the creator of the universe, unconditionally, and then from that point everything else changes.
It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what title or position you hold, once you’re free from striving, once you’re free from the desperate search for significance nothing else matters and surely that’s the place that we need to be.
I find myself in a peculiar place these days where I’m just pretty comfortable being myself, being a dad, being a husband, whether I’m playing in a band, writing a book , teaching guitar, digging the garden, blogging or speaking at an event I think I’m finally coming to a place where I’m comfortable in my own skin, you could say I am becoming who I am, and surely that’s the point?
Just being myself no labels, no titles, just as God intended me to be.
The point of Jesus Christ dying on the cross and restoring us into a place of relationship with God the Father is that the essence of our Father can be found in us, in you, in me. Isn’t that what being filled with the holy spirit is about? Bearing the fruit of the spirit so that we can be like Christ, sons of God?
There’s a line in the book of Romans that says “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed” surely that’s you and me, that’s our destiny. Once we truly learn to live as sons of God, to be like Christ, to walk as Christ walked, to live as Christ lived, the world will be transformed and surely that’s the point.
But we have to have all our other dependencies stripped away, all our false identities, all our masks, then we can just be who God has created us to be, human beings not human doings. For me, this season has been one big lesson. To begin with it was as if I was walking into the desert but perhaps I’m actually walking into the promised land?
I am prepared to count the cost, I want to live at peace with God, I want to learn to do what I see my father doing and surely that’s only possible when there are no other agendas no other distractions.
This is how Jesus lived, so surely that’s how we can live.
So there is a great challenge where do we look for our significance? do we look to status, positions of power and authority, do we look to our career, labels, titles or do we look to our heavenly Father?
Food for thought.
