Truly Human

It's a new year. Some of us have decided to exercise more, be kinder to others, give more, spend less, save more, and in general, be nominated for sainthood and the Nobel Prize.  Today being January 4, most of those resolutions have already been broken, and we're no closer to working ourselves into sainthood than ever! 

Here's a single resolution that could cut through all the other noise and clutter:  surrender to God. 

That's right, drop all the pretense (it doesn't fool anybody), the self-driven effort (it won't get you any higher than your own bootstraps) and the hopeless struggle against your faults.  Neither of us, you nor I, can create a better human than we already are.  Only God can do that, and in Christ, he has already done it.  Jesus was the first real human, living as the kind of human God created us to be in the first place. And if we surrender -- give up and ask Jesus to think and speak and act for us, through us -- we are on the road to being truly human too.

Paul tells us in Colossians 1:27-28 "The mystery in a nutshell is just this: Christ is in you, so therefore you can look forward to sharing in God's glory. It's that simple. That is the substance of our Message...We teach in a spirit of profound common sense so that we can bring each person to maturity. To be mature is to be basic. Christ! No more, no less."  The essence of maturity, Paul says, is simply to let Christ be Christ, in us.  And in Psalm 46:10 God is telling us, in the context of war and external threats, "Stop [your fighting]—and know that I am God, exalted among the nations, exalted on the earth." 

No matter what battle we face, victory is found in surrender -- to God, who is Christ-in-us, the only true human.  Surrendering to him, every day in every way, is the solution to all the resolutions.