A couple of days ago I posted a quote from Oswald Chambers. It’s one that I’ve been (to quote a Puritan) moiling and toiling over for a while, especially this sentence: I must take my emotional opinions and intellectual beliefs and be willing to turn them into a moral verdict against the nature of sin;, that is, against any claim I have to my right to myself.

Through various means lately, this issue has come home to roost in my head and heart. I’m astounded at how gentle I am with myself when it comes to my nature of sin. Through the books I’m reading–the Bible and Charnock, Pink, Piper, Chambers, Spurgeon–my view of my sinful nature is being brought into clearer focus. Chambers often writes about “giving up my right to myself,” meaning giving up a right to self-centeredness. In holding opinions and beliefs, even about spiritual and theological matters, there is a tendency to hold them in a way that serves myself. Insistence on being right about what is truly right (God’s Word) puts a self-centered twist to it. If, in defending what is true, I get angry, defensive, contemptuous or hurt, it’s an indication that I’ve made that truth self-centered rather than God-centered. Repentance is necessary, not self-righteous excuses. Not insistence on being right.

Identifying with Jesus in His death means denying myself, dying to myself. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me”…Luke 9:23ff. I’m not sure we realize what a radical a command that is, how it flies in the face of every other message we have absorbed–even unconsciously–from our culture, and may I say, even from the church. Self-centeredness/self-fulfillment is the authorized god of our day. (That’s quoting my husband.) Recognizing our ingrained propensity toward self-centeredness in every moment of life, then being ruthless when the Spirit of God brings it to our attention is what Chambers is talking about. It’s a fight to have unrestrained commitment to God, rather than to self. The cares of life, relationships, the desire for situations to improve–I want it my way, I want it now. I think I know what is right, I want God to cooperate in making it happen. Thanks be to God for His unfailing kindness that continually reveals the self-centeredness, calls us to repentance and grants us the holiness of Jesus!

“Once I reach this moral decision (of identifying with Christ in his death) and act on it, all that Christ accomplished for me on the Cross is accomplished in me. My unrestrained commitment of myself to God gives the Holy Spirit the opportunity to grant me the holiness of Jesus Christ.”

May it be so!