The Life of God in Us

I once had a client whose business brilliance outshone the stars of Harvard Business School. Yet she scorched everything she touched. Relationships turned rancid, projects were poisoned by punitive criticism, and her management style left associates embittered.

We met for lunch a couple times a year for much of the 90’s. Over time, my opinion of her zigzagged from an initial awe to distaste, and finally to pity. These facts emerged:

• She was an identical twin, younger by twenty minutes.
• She was an excellent musician but played only second chair violin, because her twin played first.
• She got an MBA from a top business school; but her sister became a surgeon.
• She brought her boyfriend home for Easter, and he fell in love with her twin.

A year later that former boyfriend married her identical twin sister.

What Lights Your Fire?

In the movie Chariots of Fire, someone asks Harold Abrams why he runs so fast. He says,

When that gun goes off, I raise my eyes and look down that corridor, 4 feet wide, with 10 lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.

Eric Liddle’s motivation is simpler: “When I run I feel God’s pleasure.”

Powerful people often appear indistinguishable from ordinary people—except they are fast, friendly, successful, or moral—but they may be energized by completely different superpowers.

Greatness and saint-ness are not matters of degrees of natural ability; they are matters of supernatural infusion. The “great” invest themselves in “great” endeavors, whereas great believers gravitate towards investing their hearts in God.

It is not a matter of activism versus mysticism, it’s a matter of God’s life in us. The human great go, whereas godly saints are sent. Extraordinary heroes draw attention to the person or plan (“Wasn’t Steve Jobs brilliant and isn’t this church-growth plan wise?”) whereas spiritual heroes are ordinary people who are made extraordinary by the life of God inside.

The worldly genius zigs. God calls us to zag.

Human Sweat

Believers are too easily vitalized by the sweat of human effort. When we worship worldly wisdom (the “Three Keys” to this and the “Seven Principles” of that) we make alliances with Egypt. We “go” when God calls us to “come.”

Our human plots hamstring God’s plans.

Recently those worldly mystics of mysteriously numbered methods have begun to prefix their magic potions with awe-inspiring modifiers. They are not longer “keys to success but: “Life-changing Keys,” “Mind-blowing Lessons,” and “Staggering Secrets.”

I wonder what their older siblings do.

Relational Fuel

Relationships empower us for good or ill. It is not our gifts that distinguish us nearly as much as the fuel that animates them. Some connections thrust us into rivalry, enmity, or despair, but there is another connection that supernaturally turns water into wine:

The most important aspect of Christianity is not the work we do, but the relationship we maintain and the surrounding influence and qualities produced by that relationship.

That is all God asks us to give our attention to.

(Oswald Chambers)

We too have an older sibling who out-performs us in every conceivable measure. But he doesn’t compete with us, he completes us.

The only fruit of our lives that matters is produced by the life of God in us.

Sam