Knowing God and Knowing Ourselves
Augustine wisely prayed that he might know God and then himself. Christ is your Maker. Therefore, to know Him is to know yourself: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3)” The better you know Him, the more you'll grasp who and whose you are. And the more you see who and whose you are, the more secure you are. We all have fundamental personal worth needs: a need for security, a sense of unconditional love and acceptance by other people, and a sense of significance—the assurance that our lives matter. Finally, we need satisfaction. Is there anything we can accomplish that will endure?
Because God Himself endowed us with these needs, they cannot be satisfied in the temporal realm of this world. People often turn to others for their sense of security and worth. But other people let us down, and we, in turn, let them down. We often look to wealth and prosperity for our sense of significance, but soon, the hollowness of worldly possessions becomes all too real. We often turn to performance, position, popularity, and prestige to gain a sense of satisfaction in this world. Once again, these will all let us down. The only place where we can find those needs fully met is in our relationship with Christ.
Empowered to Love Others Compassionately
Our relationship with Christ empowers us to love others compassionately. Grasping our true identity in Christ is not a one-off event but an ongoing journey of discovery. But the more we come to grasp who and whose we are, the more we begin to realize that we are people who have a new identity. We're no longer in Adam; we're in Christ. We have a new spiritual DNA, as it were. We've been adopted into His family.
We now have a foundation for understanding our true position in this world. At the beginning of the upper room discourse in John's gospel, we get to listen to Jesus’s intimate words to his disciples. Here, we discover that Jesus’s hour of departure was upon them and that He loved His own until the end.
But the key verse to highlight, and one that's often overlooked, is John 13:3, which tells us, "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands and that he'd come forth from God and that he was going back to God." That little verse is the basis for what he was actually able to do. He performed a visual parable when his disciples were jockeying for positions regarding who was going to be first in the heavenly kingdom.
As His disciples are bickering over who will sit at His right hand, Christ lays his garments aside, putting on the clothing of a servant and beginning to wash their feet. Though this was an integral part of Oriental hospitality, it appears that there was no servant on hand to perform the ritual during the Last Supper. Certainly, none of the disciples were going to do it if they were fighting over what they believed to be honor and prestige. So Jesus, the master, took up the towel and the basin and began to wash their feet, giving them a model of servanthood.
What gave Him the security and the power to serve in this manner, even knowing that his crucifixion was imminent? My conviction is that Christ focused on these three things: 1) He knew that the Father had given all things into his hands, and this was the true source of his dignity 2) He knew he'd come forth from God 3) He knew that he was going back to God. This was His security. Because of these three great truths, He was able to serve—to wash the disciples’ feet as they were fighting for greatness and as he was awaiting crucifixion. As Jesus shows, true greatness consists in service to others. Once again, the washing of the disciples’ feet is a visual parable of this astonishing insight.
Imagine if Jesus listened to what people said about him. He would never have been secure enough to serve. People would say, "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? Why is he eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners? The son of man came eating and drinking.” They went on, "Behold a gluttonous man and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Even His own siblings refused to believe in him.
We Have the Resources of Christ
Jesus was continually the subject of scorn, criticism, and abuse. If He'd listened to what people said about Him, He would not have been secure enough to serve—to love others compassionately. Instead, Jesus chose to allow His Father’s words to define Him. His true dignity, His true security, and His true destiny then empowered Him to be a servant of other people. And He invites us to do the very same thing because, astonishingly, His resources have now become our resources. When we think about the fact that we've become children of God and have been given the security and destiny that comes along with this knowledge, nothing can separate us from the love of God.
If I had to sum up the entire Bible in one word, it would be the word relationships. From Genesis to Revelation, Scripture is all about relationships. It's about knowing the love of Christ that liberates us to love others. Once again, there's a tremendous risk involved in this. People can be painful and we can be painful to them, and yet, we are able to serve them because we know who we are and whose we are.
The great American theologian Jonathan Edwards was right when he said that wisdom is to treat things according to their true value. The perennial human temptation is to mistake the temporal for the eternal. We seek fulfillment in human relationships, wealth, fame, and power, only to have our hopes shattered again and again. True wisdom, however, involves the recognition that you're going to give your life in exchange for something. As Paul, the apostle, informs us in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” If Christ loves us and willingly gave Himself for us, how can we not live for Him and for others?
If we leverage the temporal for eternal gain, what we're really doing is treating people according to their true value. We are going to give our lives in exchange for something, and we'll be wise if we give in exchange for something that's never going to let us down in the end. Christ will never fail you. Embracing this crucial truth allows us to forgive others when we’ve been wronged. It liberates us to accept both the people who are gifts to us and those we find to be draining. If we’ve been forgiven all, we ought to forgive others.
Christ invites us then to treat people with forgiveness and to relinquish the demand for ultimate justice. Justice is getting what we deserve. Never ask God for justice. Not a single one of us could endure God’s justice. Rather, ask Him for mercy—not getting what we deserve—and ask Him for grace. When this is our posture, we are freed to be people who navigate through this brief earthbound sojourn with an eternal perspective.
Photo Credit: Unsplash/Bobby Stevenson
Kenneth Boa equips people to love well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a writer, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life in the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
