Over the last few years I have had an ongoing conversation with God that goes something like this... "God, what do you want me to do?" God's response is "I want you to be mine." When this first started a few years back in my prayer time I was a little frustrated because I wanted a concrete 'To Do' list, not a fuzzy 'To Be' list. However as I chewed on what God was telling me I began to kind of understand it. It is easy to do something but it is far more challenging to be something.
Doing is an external action that does not have any bearing upon who you are. Be-ing is at the core of you, it is at the heart and soul of who you are. You can do something that looks good to those around you while still having a putrid heart. Judas Iscariot is a great example of doing with no bearing upon who you are at the core. Way too many modern politicians are another example of doing and saying things externally or publicly while their actions hidden from the public reveal what is going on in their heart as evidenced by a news story that came out this week about a number of political figures in New York state who have been indicted on bribery charges- they told the public they would fix the economy and work for the voter and what they did was work for themself.
This is why God's invitation for me to be His instead of simply doing a few godly things has really challenged me over the last few years. The best way to evaluate how well I am doing at being God's in the depths of my heart is by what I do when no one is watching- when my actions are hidden. It's easy to look good in public. It takes far more work to be good in private in the depths of your heart. God's ultimate desire is to have our heart, not our hands because if he has our heart then our hands will follow.
Over the years I have done a number of things to help me to be God's. And I will be the first one to tell you I'm not perfect at the quest to be God's. I have discovered this quest comes in waves. There are days and weeks and months that I do a great job of letting God be the master of my heart which plays itself out through my actions. But there are other periods where I allow my heart to get cluttered with junk other than belonging to God. During these periods I find my thoughts scattered and the temptation to do and say what I shouldn't strong. Something that has developed significant symbolic meaning for me has been to write a short prayer on a piece of paper and put it in a large metal vase I got from a local import store. The prayer that I write has been consistent for the last 9 years; "God, today I will be yours." followed by the current date. It is not something I do every day, problably because it would lose its meaning and become a daily chore. Instead I only do this symbolic action when I am scattered, off course, and realizing I have not been too concerned with allowing God to have my heart.
An additional bonus of this practice has been to help me realize how often we try to convince ourselves we are acceptable to God because we have done some good things for him. When I was in college a group of Christian guys I hung out with started excusing behavior that was less than stellar by saying God will cut us some slack for what we shouldn't do because we were living good most of the time. The funny thing is we all really believed this. We really thought God would overlook one sin because of a fewgood things we had done. This plays itself out in funny ways. We try to convince ourselves that because we went to church or mass or the revival or whatever else we deem important God will consequently overlook when we do something else that we should not be doing. That is legalism.
Legalism says that God is only conerned with a few external actions so we become focused on those few specific actions or beliefs (that we have chosen) ignoring other items that are often even more significant. We focus on something religious while ignoring the way we treat people, or our lack of ethics, or our obsessession with money or our appearance or food or possessions or sex or power or...
Legalism says that we must make a list of what is a sin and what is not. However sin is not so easily categorized because the heart determines sinfulness, not a list. Think about it: For some Sunday worship is a sinful act because they are only focused upon evaluating if everything was done correctly with no heart of worship given over to God in praise; For a young couple going out on a date holding hands can be a sinful act if the intention of the hand holding is to ultimatley get the other's clothes off; For a person protecting their family from an armed intruder killing is not a sin unless the intruder runs away and you kill him six months later when you finally track him down.
See the funny fuzzy lines that develop when we start trying to decide what is a sin and what is not a sin? Our problems come when we try to focus upon the external behavior of what we are doing instead of focusing on giving ownership of our heart to God- being God's.
God wants us to daily make a decision to be His. God wants me to daily make the decision to be His. "Dear God, today I will be yours." April 7, 2013.
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