I am charged and guilty of trying to glorify myself instead of God. I’ve been constantly trying to seek the approval of others. I’ve come to this place in my life where I’m chasing after all the right things for all the wrong reasons. I thought I was seeking after God alone, but I wasn’t. In my heart I have this secret agenda. If you do all these things, then everyone will see how great you are. There is a war in my heart. This war, that I have been blinded to, is between me and God. Do I give God the glory or do I keep the glory for myself?
There is a verse in the bible where Jesus says, “Not everyone who calls out to me, ‘Lord! Lord!’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Only those who actually do the will of my Father in heaven will enter. On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord! Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name.’ But I will reply, ‘I never knew you. Get away from me, you who break God’s laws.’” (Matthew 7:21-23). That would really suck, to put it lightly, if I showed up at the door to the feast in heaven and discovered I never really knew Jesus. You see Jesus is everything to me. Yet, I can say that and still skate through life and miss the whole point. It is still possible to be a missionary and not care and miss what’s right before my eyes. It would be possible to do many things and still amount to nothing. It is like Paul wrote “If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.” (1st Corinthians 18:12). I am nothing without love. I can sit here all day and try and look good before others, but that is not love. I can even see miracles and live a godly life and not love. I can do all these christian things simply for my own glory, simply for the praise of others, and miss the whole point. This is what I have been doing. There is no excuse. I pretend my heart’s in the right place to the point of fooling myself, but I can’t fool God. I can say Jesus is everything to me, but do I really mean it?
Here’s the thing, it feels great to be appreciated by people, but seeking after praise is disgusting. What can I get from seeking after other people’s praise? It will never be enough, I will only find insecurity, emptiness, and pain. I long for the praise of God, and yet I seek the praise of people. What is wrong with me? The Lord has been highlighting this in my life, and I have finally come to the place of repentance.
This week God has been teaching me, again, to glorify Him and care only about what He thinks. For example, the other day we spent part of the morning riding the elevator up and down in the school we are volunteering at. “We’re Backkkk!” I said as the elevator bell rang and the door opened to reveal the fourth floor… for the fifth time. We were looking for a teacher we didn’t know, who had the key to a storage room somewhere. As we got back in the elevator to go back down stairs and continue our search, our friend walked into the elevator. I knew I recognized the man who ended up helping us find the teacher with the key, except it wasn’t who I thought. After calling him the wrong name several times, my teammate quietly corrected me. I was extremely embarrassed. I apologized as he unlocked the storage room for my teammate and I. There have been many moments where I cringe at myself, and this was one of them. In those times, God is teaching me to die to myself and live only for Him. It is not about what I can do. It is not about other people appreciating me, it is about God. It always was and it always will be.
One of the things I love about Malaysia, and really Asia in general, is how short everyone is. I have noticed that I feel grown up and like an adult here. This is partly because I’m growing in my self confidence, but also partly, as I realized yesterday, because everyone is short here. My four foot eleven inch stature is not so abnormal, it’s actually fairly common. All my life people have thought I was about two years younger, until a certain point where people just continued to assume I was twelve. Strangers will often treat me like I’m incapable and look down on me because of this. Even here, I still have a baby face and look young to people, but at least I’m tall!?! Or at least about as tall as I’ll ever feel. Even here, four foot eleven (and a half!) inches is on the shorter side. Since I am not so short here, I feel much taller and much more confident. I’ve never realized how much I’ve let how other people see me influence how I feel on the inside, until now. I thought I was confident in myself despite being short, but a lot of the time I carried myself constantly assuming people saw a twelve year old. Here, however, I carry myself assuming people see the an average sized white girl. Why is this? How I look to others on the outside should not determine how I feel on the inside. Letting what people see determine how I feel goes both ways, it can make me insecure, or it can make me arrogant depending on the moment. If I look to others like a loving, helpful person, then I feel good about myself. This is where I begin to glorify myself in my actions and not God. Instead of being loving and helpful for the glory of God and my love for him, I slip into taking the glory for myself. I have good intentions, but it is easy to be lead astray. Still, God is good and merciful. Despite my arrogance, He still pursues me. He won’t relent His pursuit of my heart until He has it all, and I find great comfort in that. He is patiently and gently showing me true humility, and helping me let go of my selfish ambitions.
I need God to pursue me and teach me these things. This month, I am praying that God will wreck me in His spirit, so I can die to this selfishness and truly live for Him and Him alone. I am praying praying that He will help me to not miss what is right before my eyes. I cannot afford to skate through this month and leave Malaysia unchanged. I am asking God to humble me. This is what I am praying: “God, wreak me this month. Lord please help me! Do not let me leave unchanged. Do not let me miss what you have for me. I need you. Change my heart! I am not willing to remain without passion. Help me, don’t let me leave here without a bit of Malaysia stuck in my heart.”
In His goodness God hears the cries of my heart and answers my prayers, but sometimes He answers me in the most frustrating ways. I am praying “God humble me!” They say that is dangerous prayer. No one particularly enjoys being humbled, but God loves to humble us. So that is what God has been doing in my life recently, humbling me, that I may glorify Him and not myself. On Monday, this came in the form of a broken elevator. Now, don’t get all riled up, I know I am not entitled to elevators. Let me explain. So Norman, I mean Tong, unlocked the storage closet to reveal boxes stacked floor to ceiling plus multiple garbage bags all full of uniforms, all of which we had to carry from the “second” floor of one building to the second floor of another building down the street. The second floor is four flights of stairs up. Tong immediately recognized that we would need a dolly and got us one. Then he left us to it. Our first load we took two boxes and a garbage bag. We struggled, well I struggled steering the dolly, but we made it into the elevator and down to the ground level, then down the street without much difficulty. I assumed that we continue like this, trading off with the dolly, until we finished. It was no problem. I was wrong. We went back after our first load and went up to the second floor with the elevator. We loaded up for the second time and pressed the button to go down. It simply was not working. No one was working on the elevator, the power was still on, we had been riding the elevator up and down all morning, but it was suddenly and mysteriously stuck on the fifth floor. So we dumped the trolley and proceeded by hand. We carried box after box down the stairs and down the street to the other building. To add to the discomfort of the rainy season hot humidity, the boxes were falling apart. At first, I felt good about carrying the boxes. Look at me, I thought, look at me, carrying all these boxes. Look at how helpful I am, look at how much work we are doing, look at how strong I am becoming. However, when we were less than halfway done I felt I could not carry another box. I no longer felt strong. I was tired, grumpy, and sick of it, but I didn’t want to admit it. When we went back for the next load, I suggested we rest. The boxes had begun to slip out of my sweaty and sore hands. We sat there for a little while, for we still had an hour to go before lunch, and it seemed like we weren’t getting anywhere. It was humbling because I had to admit I couldn’t do it in my own strength. I had to lay down my pride and admit what I was feeling. I had to find joy in God. We prayed and resolved to keep going. We had already been carrying boxes for a long time and neither of us thought for moment we would be able to finish before lunch, but God gave us strength and we finished with time to spare. While the broken elevator was not a very obvious blessing, it was definitely something God used for good. I got to see God show up so much more powerfully than I would have if the elevator had worked. My thoughts of look at me were shallow and could not have gotten me through the morning. I intended to glorify myself for my own work, but God humbled me and showed me my need for Him. When I was carrying the boxes for God, I not only had the strength to continue, but I also glorified Him by carrying the boxes for the people He loves.
So I know you are thinking what kind of school has multiple buildings with four or five stories, AND elevators? I thought you were helping impoverished people? Since when did you go to Malaysia? To answer the questions I am assuming you are asking, we left Thailand on November 6th at 3:00 am in the morning, and we rode in buses, with a few stops, for almost 48 hours. Originally my team was going to be with most of our squad in Penang Malaysia, but plans changed and we are now in Kuala Lumpur (The capital of Malaysia). We are volunteering in a school built for refugees and poor families. The refugees have to leave their home countries for fear of their lives, and cannot legally work or go to a public school. Luckily many Malaysians sponsor these kids go go to this school. The school stretches out over a small block on one side of the city. There are multiple floors because buildings are tall and narrow in the city. The elevators are for moving dollies of boxes between floors… just kidding. I don’t know why there are elevators, but there are and it’s nice. Just don’t picture a five star hotel because it’s nothing like that. It’s also not a fancy office building, it is very much a school in the middle of Kuala Lumpur.
God has been showing me many things in Kuala Lumpur and over the last couple of months. Most of the time I struggle to put words to all the things He has be revealing to me and all the things I have seen and experienced. Looking back, thinking about all the blogs I have written for Truett McConnell, I see a theme in what I have been learning. That theme is to die to myself. I know that sounds harsh, but I mean it in a very beautiful way. When I say I am dying to myself I mean I am laying down what I want to let God work in my life. Dying to myself is surrender. It is the surrender of my own selfish desire and intentions. It is letting God hold my self image rather than people. It is glorifying God and not myself. There is this darkness in my heart that I would twist what God is doing to glorify myself. Dying to myself means I don’t care what anyone else thinks, it means I am living to glorify God alone. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name goes all the glory for your unfailing love and faithfulness.” (Psalm 115:1).
Even just taking the class for Truett McConnell was a form of dying to myself. I did not want to take this class when I realized that my assignments would be blogs. I cared too much what everyone thought, but God told me to take this class to that I would write to glorify Him and not to please people. I cannot please everyone at once, and I find when I try to write to please I come across as fake and don’t end up pleasing anyone anyway. So, instead of writing little blips here and there about what I’m doing I wrote insanely long blogs about what God was actually showing me. Through all the scripture, documents, hymns, and experiences, God taught me to press into Him, to ask Him for wisdom, to simply enjoy Him, to worship boldly for only Him, and He asked me if I would follow Him no matter what it cost me. It all came back to one point, Him and not me. It always does.
I’m ready to die to myself and live for Christ. I’m ready to live in the confidence of who I was created to be rather than the uncertainty of other’s perceptions. I am going to live for God’s glory. I am going to do that by continuing ministry, and when I notice my heart shift I am going to take my thoughts captive and pray. I will bring it “to the mercy seat and leave it there. Never a burden He cannot bear. Never a friend like Jesus!” (Hymn 411).
