Daily Reading for August 26
When we live our lives competitively, it is easy to carry that worldview across to our faith. If salvation is a competition, some must win and others must lose. If God loves the winners, then we must hide our sins deep rather than bringing them to the surface in repentance. If God loves the winners and condemns the losers, then so must we. But if God keeps messing up the competition by throwing the game—becoming a servant even though he could be a king, dying on a cross instead of conquering Rome, saying that the wealthy ones are those who give everything away—then our worldview looks a bit different. What if Kingdom life is about cooperation rather than competition?
If that’s the case, God might not be pleased that we never missed a Sunday in church if we used our weekly attendance to smugly put down those who only came on Christmas and Easter. We might get to the pearly gates far ahead of the pack, only to find that no one is allowed in alone. When another mom in the playgroup has a child who is slow to learn, maybe proving the superiority of your child is not the answer.
Being God with skin on for our peers means putting aside our competitive instincts to be sure that everyone succeeds. Jesus makes it quite plain that being his disciple means living very differently from the world. In this case, it means giving up on entering the “rat race,” the competition with others for life’s toys and resources. There is no drive to keep up with the Joneses in Kingdom life. Like Paul in Philippians 4:12, we learn to be content with what we have. We don’t seek to be proven better than others in competition. We take whatever gifts we have been given, tie them around our waists, and use them to serve others.
From God with Skin On: Finding God’s Love in Human Relationships by Anne Robertson. Copyright © 2009. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com