Foolish Flyer

hi·jack   \ˈhī-ˌjak\

a. To stop and rob

b. To steal from

c. To seize control of, especially in order to reach an alternate destination

Sometimes I hijack God. 

a.  I stop God’s work in my life when I rob Him of the glory He deserves and  give it to myself instead.

b.  I steal honor from God by using Him for my advantage—wanting His benefits and His power—but caring little about knowing Him personally. 

c.  I seize control of my life—the life that I told Him was His—when I refuse to submit to His Lordship and run towards myself and my goals, not Him.

When I do these things, I hijack God from His rightful place.  I use and abuse the Creator of the Universe when I go to Him only for the sake of getting personal peace and joy.  I defame His name when I  want things from His hand, but don’t desire to have an intimate relationship with Him. If my primary objective with seeking Christ’s protection is to secure a peaceful retreat from this messy world, then I don’t fully understand Jesus’ request when He prayed for me-- before he suffered for me—saying,

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17:22-23)

God has generously poured the glory of His Holy Spirit upon us, His children, so that we may be unified with Him and with one another.  When we strive for this unity, we show the world Who God is.  But, when we selfishly pray for God to fulfill us, to make our lives satisfying and to make our joy complete in ourselves—not in Him--we are missing the point.  And we are missing the opportunity to point people back to Him. 

God wants to be the Goal, not just a catalyst to meet our goals.  He wants our joy to rest in Him and His Person, not in our circumstances or our relationships or our success. 

He wants to be the Supreme Satisfier of our souls.  He wants this because He knows only He can satisfy—the world can never do this.

He wants the joy of the Lord to be our strength (Nehemiah 8:10) because His joy is solid and sure.  If we choose to make our own joy and strength our aim, we will quickly become aimless and weak. 

God loves us.  He wants us to initiate a relationship with Him—just because we love Him--just because He is our true Father…our Abba…our Daddy—and not because we want what He can give us. He formed us and made us, for goodness sake, and he taught us to walk in His ways.  We must stop seeing God as a means to an end and start seeing Him as the End himself—the End of our searching souls, the End of our hungry desires, the End of our sinful selves.  He is worthy of our clumsy adoration and our inept attempts at praise.

He is all things great and glorious. 

He is of utmost value.

He is valuable because He is God. We are only valuable because we are sinners saved by His Grace. We gain our righteousness not through the things we have done, but only by Jesus’ death and resurrection.  Through Jesus, God sees us wearing a “robe of righteousness”—complete, perfect, clean.

 It’s a pretty awesome trade-off.

And He’s a pretty awesome God.

And it’s only when we truly fall in love with HIM that we can sit back and enjoy the flight.

 

“For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools…”

Romans 1:21-22