I have a huge fear of that blinking black line on my computer. You know, that line that starts all text documents and is supposed to precede all the words of wit and wisdom that I expect to write. There is this blinding white blank screen in front of me and at the very top this little blinking line that taunts me all the time. It is like it is yelling at me and saying “I’m waiting! You are supposed to be a writer who always knows exactly what to say and how to say it and you always know how to impress and inspire people with your words. Where is your creativity now? Where is your insight now? You don’t have anything to say do you? You don’t have anything to fill up this blank page with now do you?”
Needless to say, that little black line can be kind of a jerk sometimes.
The bottom line is that I am extremely performance driven. I tend to find my worth in how many people I impress or inspire not in who God says that I am. To be honest, sometimes I write to see how many people will “like” it on Facebook. This is bad.
In the book of Exodus we find a bunch of slaves with nothing to their name. God sets them free from their captors and leads them into the desert. Then God personally shows up on a mountain and talks face to face with a man by the name of Moses and starts giving to them laws and promises for when they would enter into everything God had planned for them. Then the people get restless and start going off the deep end.
In Exodus chapter 32 verse one it says “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’”
Aaron, for some reason, thinks that this is a good idea and decides to go along with it so he tells everyone to bring all their articles of gold and melt them down and out comes the infamous Golden Calf. But wait? Where did these ex-slaves get enough gold to make a 24 karat heifer?
In fleeing Egypt, Exodus chapter 12 verse 36 tells us that God made the Egyptians “favorably disposed” to the Israelites. They basically were given the right to take anything they wanted from the wealthiest people in the world at the time. So this gold that God had given them was now being melted down and formed into the shape of an idol that everybody was going to dance around and offer sacrifices to.
It is easy for us to look at this story and say that the primary sins were idolatry and sexual immorality or a lack of fear of the Lord and disregard for His authority but I think it is something much more common to us today. The biggest issue in this story is that these people took what God had given them and instead of waiting for instructions on how to use them to their fullest capacity, decided to figure out for themselves what to use these gifts for what they thought could make them happy.
At the very moment that they decided to cast this idol, God was giving instruction to Moses about how to build the Tabernacle while on Mount Sinai. The Tabernacle was the place that God would come down to Earth to meet the Israelites and let them get to know Him better. It was the place that their guilt would be washed clean and they could walk with God. The thing about this Tabernacle is that it would be made almost entirely of, you guessed it, gold.
When God had given them this gold, He had already known how He was going to use it. He already was giving them an opportunity to make what little they were given into something that would last for generations as the place where Heaven met Earth. If they would have waited just a little bit longer they would have known that.
The things I think I am good at are the gold in my life. My gifts and abilities are my Egyptian nose rings. God gave them to me and has things in mind that He wants to use them for but sometimes I get impatient. I think my gifts are about me.
At first it kind of seems like God gives us gifts so that He can take them right back again but think about this. When you fill out a résumé there is always a place to write out your strengths and weaknesses. Your “strengths” are the things you are good at and your “weaknesses” are the things that you aren’t.
There is a song that has been on repeat in my head for months now that sings “my strength/ in life/ is I am Yours.” It doesn’t say that my strength in life is that I can write. It doesn’t say that my strength is the ability to lead people. It says that my strength is that I am God’s. The best thing in my life that I have going for me is simply the fact that I belong to God and that has nothing to do with what I think I can do for Him. Why wouldn’t I want to give everything over to God when my best character trait is simply that I belong to the Creator of the Universe?
What if we actually valued ourselves by the fact that we belong to God and not by what we can or cannot do for Him? Whether you are incredibly “gifted” at a lot of things or less than great at most things the fact that you belong to God trumps it all.
So I have to ask myself, who am I trying to impress? Am I using what God has given me to try and feel valuable when I am already highly valued by the only One who really matters?
It is all a matter of what you are melting your nose rings down into. We are going to use what God has given us regardless but are we using it to feed our own desire or are we willing to wait just a little bit longer to see what God could do with what we have?
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