Where you are

Where are you? Is God calling you in a very obvious way to change situations? Follow Him, if He is. Otherwise, where you are is your calling for the time being. Maybe you have big dreams for the future, places to go, plans to fulfill. That is all fine. Or maybe you are exactly where you've dreamed of being. Is it everything you imagined? Does it fall short? Regardless, right now, you are where you are, and this is your only chance at this particular set of circumstances. Live it before it's gone.

"Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God."
-Jim Elliot

That I may know Christ and be found in Him

"Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may know Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ-- the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead."
Paul, in Philippians 3

...that I may know Christ and be found in Him...

This week has been a hard one. Reflection, dissatisfaction, unfulfilled expectations, loneliness, feeling lost and adrift and lacking a sense of direction for my life. There have been some tears and some hours of crying out to God. But at the bottom of it all is this: the desire of my heart is to be found in Christ. I love Paul's language here-- to know Him, to be found in Him, the power, the fellowship, the surpassing greatness. This is all I want.

I am at the end of myself and, I hope, the beginning of Him.

Substitution

I've had Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life sitting on my shelf (both in Chicago and in TL) for about 6 months now, and I've tried to start reading it a few times-- the problem is that even by reading the first 5 pages I can tell it's a book that's going to challenge and convict me, and sometimes it's hard to get motivated to dive into one of those. I'm working on it again, though, and within those first five pages that I have read Nee brings up a point that seems obvious enough, but that I had never quite heard put into words.

He writes: "God makes it quite clear in his Word that he has only one answer to every human need-- his son, Jesus Christ. In all his dealings with us he works by taking us out of the way and substituting Christ in our place. The Son of God died instead of us for our forgiveness: he lives instead of us for our deliverance. So we can speak of two substitutions-- a Substitute on the Cross who secures our forgiveness and a Substitute within who secures our victory."

The longer I live and serve God, the more I realize that there is really not much of anything we ever do or can do in this life. Our only part is to seek the face of God, to ask that he would reveal more of Christ to us, to ask that he would crucify us and help us to set aside our own selves. And the mystery of it all is that it is here where I begin to find fulfillment. When I set aside myself and let Christ live in place of me, I find who I am without the bonds of sin and the weakness of the flesh, and I live through Christ (or he through me) the fullest version of the life I was born for.