Day 50: Living Daily in Reality: We Need a Cosmic Rectification
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Your Creator has made you part of his own Son – inside himself – so that
he personally would face all the consequences of your rejection of him as
your maker and father. Only thus could he bear your necessary destruction
in his Son’s humanity yet justly recreate you in his Son’s divinity. This
is the eternal millisecond event that alone can transform the perversion
we have brought upon ourselves.

You and I endeavor to live as self-existent, self-made beings. But we
find we have needs that only a maker’s love can supply – security,
significance, happiness; so we look to the world of things, people, and
circumstances to meet these needs. Not only has this produced the chaos
of our present world, but it has deeply perverted and contorted our
original natures. We try to establish our significance or importance by
convincing other people to respect or fear or praise us: even the
involuntary movements of our eyes show how much we seek favorable
attention from others. Thus our bodies seek reassurance for our minds
that we do not need the approval of any god greater than ourselves while
our whole being becomes incorrigibly dependent on others’ opinions.

But this sin or autonomy is like quick-sand; the more you try to get out
of it, the deeper you sink into it. So, for instance, our self-help
efforts to produce humility usually end up as self-conscious modesty.
Moreover, we find this self-made willfulness has a stubborn,
self-preserving assertiveness that defeats all our valiant attempts to
root it out: however many self-improvement books or techniques we use, we
find that somehow self-centeredness gets the upper hand and we find our
life contaminated by self in many areas of our lives. We cannot believe
that otherwise mature and balanced people could have such trouble with
attitudes that they wish to avoid and habits that spoil their lives.

Because of this apparently irrational behavior in ourselves, many of us
set out to analyze carefully our inner lives and tackle the symptoms
one-by-one. First we deal with the obvious ones like physical
indiscipline in eating or exercise; then we move on to destructive family
attitudes like irritability, argumentativeness, critical comments and
bitter resentments. Meanwhile we move on to the work attitudes of driving
ambition and desire to be noticed with the accompanying vices of envy,
pride, and jealousy. But we find by the time we’ve found some success in
these, the others that we overcame have sprung up again; so we have to
start all over – until we gradually realize there is some common attitude
here that continues even after the symptom has been suppressed.

This self-existent, self-made conviction that governs our lives seems to
be a many-headed monster that touches every part of life and personality.
The reality is that old-fashioned sin is simply “missing the mark” –
missing or evading the reality that you have a loving Father who made

you. It’s a bit like missing the key on the keyboard – you can’t remember
what others you might have hit in trying to find the right one. The
results of missing the mark are so numerous that there’s no way you can
track down all the parts of your original nature that have gone wrong.
Only God himself can rectify the myriad erroneous connections and
short-circuits that we have created between our spirit, soul and body;
our daily frustration with ourselves comes from our belief that a DIY (do
it yourself) job will solve this. Nothing but a complete replacement will
restore us – we are like the old man who was offered millions for his
little house on a unique building site in the city: he was amazed at the
price, and he spent weeks trying to make it worth the price. At last he
finished all his repairs and renovations: the buyer came with his check –
AND his bull-dozer – he wanted only the site – the house had to be
completely removed and he intended to build a far bigger and better one.
We tinker with our personalities and try to organize the parts, but only
the Maker can remake it the way it was meant to be. It needs to be
bulldozed and remade completely.

HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING?

My life flows on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentation;
I hear the real though distant hymn
That hails a new creation

No storm can shake my calm repose
While to this rock I’m clinging:
If Christ is Lord of heaven and earth
How can I keep from singing?

What though my joys and comforts die!
I know my Savior liveth;
What though the darkness round me lie!
Songs in the night he giveth

I lift my eyes – the cloud grows thin,
I see the blue above it;
And day by day this pathway smoothes
Since first I learned to love it.

The peace of Christ makes fresh my heart
A fountain ever springing
All things are mine since I am His
How can I keep from singing?