“For you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus” – Galatians 3:26
For those who know me well and also for those who don’t know me at all and only know of me, almost everyone knows me as a golfer. That term can be shifted into “golf professional”, “golfer guy”, but whatever title you give me in regards to golf, chances are you were once correct. But you see the truth is I’m not a golf professional or a golfer, period.
For those who have supported me financially & spiritually to the ends of the earth and back for me to be doing what I love being on The World Race as a missionary, first off thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to find a way to fully describe my ultimate gratitude towards all of you. But you see the truth is I’m not a missionary either.
This past month in Kyrgyzstan was perhaps one of the biggest breakthroughs, if not the biggest breakthrough in regards to my identity as a human being and in my relationship in Christ as a whole!
I was sitting in my room one night alone (which is a rarity on The Race living in awesome community) and decided to listen & watch a podcast video from Mattie Montgomery. It was during that time that God began to speak to me and my heart through Mattie.
He talked about “self-promotion” and how easy it is to use what God has given you to boost you’re own image for other people. In Mattie’s life, he had used being the lead singer of Christian metal band to support his own image, but not intentionally. He thought he was spreading the Gospel while being on stage, but in his heart he was using the spotlight for self-worth because of his title he had.
That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks…
I paused the video and began to do some self-reflection on my own life and how that relates to me. I started thinking, “do I have any titles in my life that I give too much self-pride in, so much so that I’m taking credit for instead of giving the glory to the Father”?
The hard truth was I did. I had a lot I was still clinging to for self-worth.
I had taken so much self pride in being a golf professional that I never truly in my heart gave the credit to my Father. I was so prideful in things I had accomplished in the golf industry that I used the title “golf professional” to define my life.
Although I was blessed to have accomplished certain things in golf, I allowed it to outweigh God in ways of my pride and in my life. My resume for example will read of places that I have worked and it was something I was very prideful in. Some of the golf facilities, people only dream of stepping foot on one day were places I walked on 50 to 80 hours a week. Some of these places are golf courses people put on their bucket lists of places to play before they die and I allowed the pride of it all to sink into my heart as who I was as a human being.
The facilities I worked at are some of the most prestigious golf clubs in the United States and I never really gave God the glory. Instead, I used it as self-promotion as a “look at me” because it was a self-worth booster. I thought that if I work at these amazing facilities then people will think I’m an awesome person and there will be lots of attention on me.
This showed how much insecurity I had about myself that I needed a cool job to determine my worth.
Yes I was giving God the glory for what He had given me in my life, but I wasn’t giving Him 100% of the glory or recognition. I was only giving Him some of my 100% because I wasn’t following the Father with all my heart at the time. I should’ve been giving it all to God because He gave it all to me.
I wasn’t wrong though because people did have their attention on me, but I realize now how much of a wasted opportunity it was to spread God’s Kingdom. Instead of doing that, I took credit for the jobs I had.
All of a sudden I realized, God gave me the talent to play golf and God gave me those jobs that I once had in my past, which means He can just as quickly take them away. So at the core of it all, I’m NOT a golf professional!
(I’m screaming this in my soul!)
There will come a day where I will get too old and I can’t work anymore. There will come a day where I will be too old to be able to swing a golf club. This means that this self-promoted, God given talent is just TEMPORARY. So if me being a golf professional is just temporary, then that title means it’s not who I am as a human being!
Let me take you to a different and more current time of my life being a “missionary”.
Is it what I’m doing right now? Yes.
Is there anything wrong with calling myself a missionary right now? No, because currently right now in this chapter that God is currently writing in my life being a missionary, but once again it’s just temporary.
Me being a missionary on The World Race is NOT who I am at my core! It’s simply a title that I myself and society as a whole has given me considering it is my current place in 2016. The public sees my Facebook, they see my Instagram, they read my blog posts, but dang it that’s NOT who I am!
It is not who I am because there will come a time and day in the very near future when The World Race will end for me. When this time comes I will no longer be a so called missionary. I won’t even be a part of The World Race anymore and I will find myself in the United States of America right back where I began my journey at the beginning of this year and then what?
(I grew silent and I felt very alone in my spirit)
It hit me again, but this time I felt God hit me harder than a punch from Mike Tyson in his prime and I absolutely lost it.
There I was crying in my room uncontrollably by myself because I couldn’t answer a very simple question that God asked me.
I heard God in my heart ask me, “Alex who are you?”
The hard honest truth was I couldn’t answer Him because I didn’t know how.
Sure I could’ve come up with a nice Christiany answer of, “O God, I’m a golf professional that turned missionary for your glory”, but you can’t lie to God.
You can’t run from God either because He knows your heart through and through. Why? Because He made you! He made me!
I got up (still weeping) to go into the bathroom and I stared at myself in the mirror asking the question repetitively, “Who am I?!”
Then like the eye of a hurricane, calmness came washing over me because I had finally figured out the answer to the question. I felt God wrap me in His arms to tell me…
“Alex, you are a son. You are my son.”
I’m going to be real with y’all for a second now, I can’t remember the last time I had felt this light in my soul or experienced that much happiness all at one time than right then in that moment. I finally realized that one of, if not the, most important things God wants us to do is be in relationship with Him.
He doesn’t want us just to know Him or know of Him. God wants us to be His children. He wants us to be His sons & daughters because He loves us so much. He wants us to be in an awesome Father-child relationship that we have so long cherished for.
A few months back we attended a Father-Heart School in Nepal where I had heard, “You need to be more like a son”. I had heard it so many times that I said, “Geez! I get it! I need to be a son, okay can we move onto a different topic?!”
So I had thought I understood what it meant to be a son of the Father from the conference. But fast forward a few months to when I was in Kyrgyzstan and I found out I had only heard what it meant to be a son. I never truly understood it or accepted it in my heart that I was simply at my core just a SON!
I felt like Matt Damon in the movie Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams’ character Sean tells Matt Damon’s character Will, “It’s not your fault”. Will says, “I Know”.
Sean continues by saying, “No you don’t get it. It’s not your fault”. Sean continues to tell Will this over and over again until Will finally understands it in his heart that it’s not his faults and he loses it crying.
This is how I felt in a three month long conversation with the Lord. He kept telling me, “Alex you’re a son”. And I would continue to respond, “I know I’m a son, God”.
The Father would keep coming back to me, “No Alex you still don’t get it. You’re just a son”.
Until finally at the end of June on The World Race, I didn’t just listen to the Father say, “Alex you’re a son”. I finally understood it and believed it with all of my heart that I’m simply just a son.
You see, we look for and give ourselves titles in our lives to make ourselves feel important or loved. We are continuously looking for love because everything that this world has to offer is never fully enough. We cling to these titles because it gives us comfort thinking that if we don’t have a title then we’re not important. All of this because Adam & Eve sinned and the fall of man began.
Titles don’t just come as what our jobs are. Titles could be who we try to be in front of our friends and families. Titles can be how we look on social media and who we make ourselves to be in the public eye. Titles bring us comfort so it could be how we see ourselves with our closest friends or significant others.
I’ll tell you something right now that there isn’t a single title in life that can bring you as much true happiness than the one of being a son or daughter to the Father of all. So I pray encouragement over all of you tear down these titles in our lives. God wants us to come back to Him because we are orphans, but we don’t have to be orphans forever.
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” – John 14:18
This is a promise that God says to us in scripture because it’s truth in all of our lives. He is coming back for us to be in His arms and He won’t stop for anything. We were left homeless and distant from God because of when Adam & Eve sinned in the garden. God is our eternal Father and is offering us a home without any judgement or titles.
I’ve heard from so many people that God doesn’t love us, but I see differently. The violence, corruption, and sin as a whole in this world was man’s fault, not God’s! God wants us to come back to be in togetherness with Him.
The Father has a calling for each and every one of our lives. In order for us to listen to His calling we must first strip ourselves from any titles we may have in our lives. Whether these are titles we have given ourselves or titles we’ve accepted from other people. These titles could be positive or negative, but there is a much more important title at stake!
Being a son or daughter is all God is asking from us. He isn’t asking us to be something we’re not. He simply just wants to be in a Father-child relationship and He just wants to love you with all of His heart.
The Father’s love is endless and will never run out. So I ask all of you, are there any titles that you have in your life that you need to get rid of?
