Brown's Daily Word 8-2-10

Good morning,
One of the readings for yesterday, Sunday, August 1, 2010 was taken from Colossians 3: 1-11. "So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). On account of these the wrath of God is coming on those who are disobedient. These are the ways you also once followed, when you were living that life. But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!"
A culture without Christ becomes very confused and lost. Alan Loy McGinnis writes about the approach of daily meditation: "There is something pathetic about members of a weekend seminar--at least the kind endemic to southern California--in which participants stand in a room and shout over and over, 'I like myself, I like myself.' With the enormous emphasis on introspection and 'finding yourself' in current pop psychology, many people emerge from therapy self-focused, self-centered, and self-absorbed. One man, whose wife left him a few months ago, went to see a counselor. He says, 'After some therapy I now know that Jan lost a wonderful man. I've recently fallen in love with a fantastic person--myself.'"
The Bible doesn't say a whole lot about "finding yourself" except to say the way to do it is to lose yourself (Matt. 10:39). In the Old Testament it is written that the person who goes off, seeking to find himself, is a fool. Tony Campolo put it this way: "If there was such a thing as a self waiting to be found, undoubtedly by now someone would have come along and found it. You would expect that out of the hundreds of thousands of young people who take time off to find themselves, one of them would come back and say, "Hey, Doc, I did it. I looked and looked and finally found myself!"
The reason, however, that this doesn't happen is that no such thing as a "self" is waiting to be found. Rather than waiting to be discovered, the self is waiting to be created. Further, there is only one way to create a self, an identity, a meaning to one's life, and that is through commitment. A person with clear-cut commitment is a person who knows who he is and what life is all about. A person who has dedicated his life to Jesus Christ without reservation cannot lack an identity or a purpose for being. The person who has said, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain!" has a definite image of who he is. The problem is that most people would rather play the game of self-discovery than make a genuine commitment, for commitment costs everything a person is and has.
May the Lord, through the power of the Holy Spirit, propel us to die to self and be alive in Him. May we be found by Jesus, the Lord and Savior, and be transformed to be more like him.

In Christ,
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p4G2GbPYQA