Winning And Losing

I hate losing.

 

I'm hugely competitive and, although I'm nowhere near as bad as I used to be, I will still probably sulk for a while if I lose a board game or a card game.

 

I have been thinking about this a lot over the past few days, as I have realised that a lot of my competitiveness links in with a desire to be the best, to always be number one.  To be the winner.  And so I feel insecure when I think I am in competition with someone else and I might not win.

 

But over the last day or so, God has been showing me how I don't need to see myself as competing with anyone. 

 

In the competition for being me, I win.

 

Paul reminds us of this in Romans when he writes,

"So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t."

 

[Romans 12:6 MSG] 

 

Rather than looking to the people around me and comparing myself to them, or feeling as though I am competing with them, I want to discover what it really means to be me.  I want to know what it means to be the person that God made me to be and I want to grow more and more into that person.

 

 

 

It's Not Me, It's You

It's not you, it's me.

 

And so ends many a film or TV relationship.  Unable to compromise and make things work, a couple will break up, with one person uttering these infamous words and blaming the breakdown of the relationship on their own failures and shortcomings.

 

We seem to apply the same idea to a relationship with God, too.  We seem to think that God's love is influenced by our failures and shortcomings.  We think it is dependent on who we are and what we've done or not done.  We seem to think that we can alter His opinion of us by doing the right thing.

 

But having a list of 'dos and 'do nots' is religion.  Not relationship.

 

When it comes to a relationship with God, it's not about me.

 

When it comes to God's love, it's not about us or what we do or don't do.  It's about Him.

 

I recently read or heard (I can't remember which and, annoyingly, I can't remember where), an argument between two people about whether or not God could and would love them.  One of them said, "But you don't know me.  God couldn't love me.  Not after everything I've done."

 

This is something that many of us can relate to - it resounds deeply inside us.  You don't really know me - you don't know what I'm like.  If God knows everything about me, then He couldn't love me.  I'm not good enough.

 

But the second person in the above argument replied brilliantly: "You're right, I don't know you at all.  But I don't need to.  I know God.  And I know that He's a God who loves us relentlessly."

 

When it comes to a relationship with God, it starts and ends with Him.

"We love because He first loved us."

 

[1 John 4:19 NIV]

And

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

[1 John 4:9-10 NIV]

 

It doesn't start with us, and it doesn't depend on us.

 

It's not me.  It's You.