To Save a Life: Week 4 Message

Your Life: Rebooted

Who are you? I mean, when you look in the mirror in the morning, what do you see?

A lot of people see pain. They see weakness. They see failure. They see someone who is worthless, unwanted, and not good enough.

Why are these things the first thing we see when we look at ourselves?

I think it is because that is what other people have told us to see. Our life experience in this world tells us one thing. God, as we are learning, tells us another.

There was a woman named Margaret who sought professional help from a psychologist because she was in a deep depression. After diving into her life’s history the psychologist was able to pinpoint a moment in time when her issues began.

As a child, Margret was constantly late to school for whatever reason. In order to teach her a lesson her teacher her had her stand at the front of the class and, one by one, each student walked up to the chalk board and wrote something negative about the young girl. As you can imagine, her fellow classmates did not have her feelings in mind. They wrote all kind of wicked things about her. They wrote that she was ugly, useless, and dumb. They made fun of the way she looked, the way she smelled, the way she talked, and the way she dressed. By the end of the exercise little Margret was in tears. And every day after that she thought about all the things her classmates said about her. Day after day, month after month, year after year she repeated these things to herself. She believed they were all true. And this sent her into her depression. She was filled with sadness, anger, and resentment.

The psychologist asked her to re-live that day in her mind. He wanted her to, one more time, watch every student get up from their desk, take the chalk, and write on the board. Margret had no problem doing this, as she had done it so many times before, and so she went about the task of re-living all 25 things that those students wrote.

When she thought she was done, the psychologist reminded her of one last kid in the class. She resisted. She knew for sure that she had gone through everyone.

He told her, “No, there is one more. Do you see him? He is sitting in the back of the classroom. He is standing up now, walking to the front of the room, taking the chalk from the teacher and setting it down on the ledge of the chalkboard. Now he is picking up the eraser and erasing all those things that were written. He picks up the chalk again and writes new things…

Margret is beautiful.
Margret is loved.
Margret is strong.
Margret has great courage.”

…and on and on

The psychologist explained that the little boy was Jesus and that through Him all those bad things she thought about herself were washed away. Through Him, her life story was rebooted.

Our parents, teachers, and friends have tried to convince us that certain things about us are true. And it always seems like the mistakes we make in life validate what they said. We let our screw-ups, our failures, and our sins define who we are.

But who are we really?

We are the creation of the most almighty being in the universe. We were conceived and created by the same God that created the planets, the sun, and the stars and who set it all in perfect motion. And, He made us in His image. If He is the king of the universe and we are His creation, than that makes us princes, and princesses. And, because we choose Him…because we have accepted the gift of eternal life that He has offered us, that makes us heirs to the greatest kingdom ever! We get to spend eternity in heaven, surrounded by pure love. Does that sound like a place for losers and failures, for weaklings, and people who aren’t god enough?

Yes. We will fail. Most of you haven’t even come close to the biggest mistake/failure of your life. But that doesn’t define who you are. What our failures do is help us to put more and more of our trust in God.

Romans 5:3-4 (NLT)

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation.

This says to me that the more crap we face in our lives, the stronger our character will be. And the stronger our character is, the more confident we can be in our own salvation. When we realize that we can’t stop the crap from happening, and that we can’t fix ourselves, then we find out that we must turn to God and let Him erase our failures. In doing so, we find we can endure more of the crap the world will throw at us.

When we let go of all the bad stuff on the chalk board that is our life, and let God erase it, then we begin to understand just how much we are loved. We find out that we don’t need to seek validation from this world because we have already been validated. When we seek validation from our parents, teachers, bosses, and peers, we will be let down. They are people, like us, dealing with their own sense of self-worth. When we understand that God has already given us everything we are looking for (i.e. love, affection, worth) then we can boldly move forward in our lives, confident in ourselves, and with full knowledge that God has truly saved us.

Who are you now?