Lent Devotionals – Day 5
“All I am is Yours”.
I might sing it in a moment of impassioned worship, hands flung in the air, singing at the top of my lungs. I may utter it in quiet prayer as I let the truth of God’s promises sink deeper. I might reference it on a whim when trying to make a coherent point at Bible study.
One of the most poignant moments of my Christian life so far was during a warm-up at gospel choir. I’d had a pretty shoddy day; not quite getting the grade I wanted on a paper, then getting soaked as a bus drove through a puddle next to the bike lane.
My day had, as it often does, revolved completely around me, and I was angry that my own purposes hadn’t quite prevailed. I arrived for practice wet and downright grouchy.
Instead of the usual warm up, the conductor gathered us all around and taught as a new song.
The lyrics went like this:
“More of you, and less of me.
Lord, I pray that there might be
More of you, and less of me.”
We sang it over and over again. Simple melody, simple lyrics: magnificent truth. Any Christian will know what I mean when I say that God, in his grace, gave me a little push in the right direction and then left me to come, somewhat bashfully, to a realisation of my own sin.
A number of things astound me about today’s passage.
The first is that John’s disciples almost grieve themselves that Jesus has the nerve to ‘copy’ what was originally John’s domain – the baptising of people. They come to John, clearly irked at Jesus’ behaviour, and say, “Look, Rabbi, Jesus is over there, doing exactly what you’re doing. And the crowd is going to him instead of you!”
The second is this: I imagine that they were expecting John to fume, in much the same way as they were. But instead, he abases himself in comparison with Christ: “more of Jesus, less of me”. See how steady and constant he is in his testimony to Christ; neither the frowns of the chief priests nor the flatteries of his own disciples can make him change his note.
He recognises that the radiance of Christ’s glory eclipses the lustre of all other earthly glories. Our own sub-par beauty can only be beautiful in the light of Christ’s magnificence, if we offer up what is “ours”, letting Him transform it in the light of His own glory.
I find this particular venture very difficult. As I go about my day-to-day, I become absorbed in my own small challenges and even smaller victories. My personality and my will are just that – mine, and I don’t want to hand them over to the overwhelming nature of Christ, thank you very much. I would much rather toil at this hard ground than take up Christ’s easy yoke and let Him collect the harvest.
John is not like this at all. He sees Jesus working alongside him, not as a competition, but as a working together towards the same goal of the advancement of the kingdom of God.
He sees his own lacklustre mission and Christ’s perfect completion not as opposites, but as developments of the same strand, much in the same way that childhood is a prerequisite to manhood.
If we are to fully and truly live in the glory of God – that all we have is His – we have to surrender our own agendas, our own pride, our own ends to Him. This is the great paradox of Christian living: that the more we give to Him, the more He increases the gift.
The consequences of surrendering control of our own happiness to God are true freedom, true achievement, true joy. How ironic.
I will leave you with a marvellous promise that has often helped me when I have become aware of my own self-absorption, when really, it is all eclipsed by Christ.
In Galatians 5:24, it says, “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there.”
Faith in him diminishes our need to prove ourselves. We can nail our pride to the cross and say it for real: He must increase, I must decrease.
