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Sorry for last week’s absence, folks. We’re back now. Rock n’ roll.
This week we’re gonna wrap up the conversation about what it means to be human. I’ll try to keep it short.
“The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn
Last time, we covered some major stuff. Lots of loaded questions and really deep cans of worms seem to come up when we discuss our human identity. It’s a really dense concept.
And that’s kind of the point.
My goal is not to spoon-feed you the answers, but to guide the process just enough to get you started on exploring it yourself.
So let’s review what we’ve established so far:
1) We all have a human identity.
2) We tend to shy away from getting our hands dirty by avoiding tough questions. Remember, we don’t like what we see in the mirror. Thus, we need courage.
3) We need the courage to face ourselves and come to terms with who we are, bruises and screw-ups and all, and reckon with the fact that we are still made in the Image of God.
This is essentially the first step in “rightly” being human.
Now, there’s no one right answer to the question “what does it mean to be human?” But the way to begin is by seeing ourselves through our Creator’s eyes.
Again, we are made in the image of an infinite, good, beautiful God. We have twisted and stained that image, deciding to recreate ourselves according to our own desires. That’s where we go wrong. That’s what our evangelical circles refer to as our “sin nature.”
We can’t help it, but we are sinful and broken to the core.
Thus, the final step.
4) Crucifying ourselves to be reborn into the likeness of our Creator.
We must surrender ourselves to God, the only real source of true life, so that we have a chance to truly be human- Human on God’s terms.
It’s surrender. It’s submission. It’s killing the old self. It’s brutal.
It’s also life. It’s resurrection. It’s putting on the new self. It’s beautiful.
There’s no way around it. We die to live. We are “born again.”
Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The alternative is death, real death, without the chance of resurrection.
In this death, because we never handed ourselves over to the One who made us, we become so self-obsessed that we consume ourselves. We embody our sin until it takes us over. Eventually, there is no self left. We become something totally foreign to any likeness of life or love or beauty. We are, essentially, destroyed.
Jesus, God in the flesh, is the True Vine.
He is Living Water.
Come to Him, give yourself up, and you will find Life.
Finding God, we discover Life.
Coming to Jesus, allowing Him to take us over, we become more like Him.
As we look more like Him, we discover what it means to be truly Human.
There’s a lot of theology packed into this, obviously. Sticking to the layman’s path, I’ll say this:
We are spiritual beings.
We live and breathe and die, like every other animal.
But we have spirit. We have souls.
We are unique among all God’s creatures, in that sense. We’re the only ones with access to Him. We have the ability to love and forgive and create and imagine and rule. We’re His Imagers.
We only really live if we embrace that role.
Turn to Him. Let Him do His thing. Be truly Human.
And don’t forget to tip your drivers.
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