Day 32: Living Daily in Reality: The Life of Contentment
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Living daily in reality means seeing that this is the world that has
already passed. The infinite Maker of the universe has seen his whole
creation in a millisecond; his great mind has seen all that you and I and
millions of our forebearers and successors would and have done with our
free wills. What we have here on earth is a flash-back to the world we
would have produced apart from Him. But He has destroyed all that in
the timeless, space-less eternity and us with it, so that we now exist
with Him – that is reality, and living in that reality is our privilege
today. What does this mean? It means letting his son’s spirit live
in us the life that he has planned. Doing and being this enables us to
experience reality.

It transforms, for instance, our life in the office and the home.
In both of those places, most of us live to build our own egos and get
our own way and receive our due amount of adulation and exaltation. We
insist on our family giving us the right respect and flattery, or our
office associates giving us due attention and obedience. We are used to
looking at everything from our own point of view and take it for granted
that we have the right to make things go the way we want them to. We
assume that others should be put out or inconvenienced so that our plans
and wishes may be followed.

Living in reality is utterly different. Our creator behaved in a
different way to this when he lived inside his son Jesus of Nazareth.
And he is the same, yesterday, today, and forever, so he lives the same
way in us. As we allow him to do that, we find ourselves in a new
reality. Although he had the right and the power to miraculously call
down supernatural powers to deliver him from the crucifixion in
Jerusalem, he instead submitted obediently to the agonizing death his
Father allowed for him. When he was the real king and deserved all the
prominence and submission that both Romans and Jews could give him, he
entered Jerusalem on a donkey and refused the exaltation that the people
wished to give him. He had the same attitude as his father, our
Creator, who had every right to destroy us all for our autonomy and
egotism, but instead submitted in his son to whatever insults and
hostility and hatred we gave him.

This is the strength of our Maker – he submits to whatever cruelty we
choose to inflict upon him while he himself returns mercy, gentleness,
and love. Within us, he loves even our enemies and blesses those who
curse us. The simple reason is that he is the final reality and he will
continue to outlast us in all our pride and self-assertion; his life will
always outlast our crucifixions. His weakness will always overpower our
strength simply because he is the reality – not the nothingness that lies
outside him. So it is in our lives here on the earth – the hostility
and hatred and anger may seem to triumph momentarily – even to the point

of death as in murder and war, but his life of gentleness and submission
will alone continue and outlast all else.

Often this life of gentle mercy and preferring others before ourselves
has been criticized as impractical because it did not produce results.
Usually we resist it for this reason – that it’s just not practical – it
does not remove evil and establish good. But our time-frame is too
short; our perspective is short-sighted; our criteria are too provincial
and local. The reason for this kind of life is simply the unanswerable
one that this is reality. This is what our Maker is like – this is his
character – and this is what lasts and will finally rule throughout the
universe. As we allow his life to be lived in us by his son, we find
ourselves living daily in reality!