The End of Me: Where Real Life in the Upside-Down Ways of Jesus Begins

by Kyle Idleman

Even though most of us can point to a significant event like the ones above, getting to “the end of me” is not just one moment in life. Reaching the end of me is a daily journey I must make because it’s where Jesus shows up and my real life in him begins.

Blessed are those who are bankrupt in spirit. Really the word we use is broke. Blessed are you when you’re so broke you have nothing to offer. If you think much about it, this is a shocking statement. Jesus is saying that God’s kingdom begins in you when you come to the end of yourself and realize you have nothing to offer. It’s precisely the opposite of every assumption we tend to make in this world.

Jesus says the kingdom begins with taking inventory and coming up with zero. We have nothing to offer, and that means we’re making progress.

it’s a trick question is because most of us want both, especially those of us who’ve been Christians for a while. Said another way, we want to be made whole without having to be broken.

we are all broken. It’s true. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it than others.

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). The real question is whether we can own up to it. It’s not a question of being broken; it’s a question of brokenness.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrases Matthew 5:4 this way: “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.” At the end of yourself, you have an opportunity to experience the presence of God in a way you never have before. Maybe you’ve embraced some wonderful things and lost them. But there’s no embrace like the divine one.

They prayed for change on the outside. God cared more about change on the inside. They prayed for their desires and realized more and more that God answered in terms of their needs.

There’s nothing life can throw at us that God can’t use to draw us nearer to him.

New Testament Greek had thirty-three different words for sin.

If we fail to acknowledge its reality, there can be no mourning. And without mourning there can be no confession. And without confession we miss the richest blessing of God’s forgiveness and grace. So don’t call it a mistake, an addiction, a boo-boo, or “my bad.” Call it sin.

Without seeing the depths of sin, we’ll never understand the heights of God’s love and grace.

You will fall into sin. Everyone does. And you’ll still be slow to face your mourning. Everyone is. Just understand that in your hesitancy to mourn your sin, you’re also delaying the blessing of God.

When we hear a good zinger in church, we always tend to assume it’s about somebody over in the next pew. We think, I hope she takes this to heart, rather than, Does this fit me?

We can see it in other people, and we know what they should do differently, but we have a hard time recognizing it in ourselves.

When your identity is wrapped around what others think about you, your faith has to be something that happens in plain sight, so nobody misses a single pious act.

We always assume the answer is in the word do.

There is no substitute for humbling yourself before God. The humble heart pleases God. The humble cry invites him to demonstrate his power.

if I don’t serve others I’ll be serving nothing but my ego.

Fear is the enemy of transparency. We don’t like our flaws, and we don’t expect anybody else to. So we work hard at putting up the most impressive front we can.

When the inside and outside match up, you’re pure in heart and you’re where he wants you to be.

A great part of the upside-down, inside-out message of Jesus is that God doesn’t look so much on the outside, which is so easy to fake. He looks more on the inside, where we are what we are.

God wants us to open a place of worship that is a hospital for the hurting rather than a first-class compartment for the heaven-bound.

Jesus saw things differently. He said that when we talk to God, we simply need to be who we are—to be authentic and to talk to him as we would talk to someone we love.

God simply wants us to talk with him. Talk is simple communication, and it doesn’t need to be dressed up. We should talk to him as we’d talk to a best friend—simply being ourselves, being totally honest without worrying how it might sound.

Prayer should be KISS

That story, found in 2 Kings 4, is a reminder that God loves to fill empty things—whether it’s a jar or a measure of hope. Jars are made for filling. They don’t fill themselves, but they receive what is poured into them. All jars begin with emptiness. It’s much the same with you and me. The measure of filling we receive is in direct proportion to our level of emptiness.

We’re trying to fill the cavity of the soul with things that won’t fit. Mother Teresa said, The spiritual poverty of the Western world is much greater than the physical poverty of our people in Calcutta. You in the West have millions of people who suffer such terrible loneliness and emptiness.… These people are not hungry in the physical sense, but they are in another way. They know they need something more than money, yet they don’t know what it is. What they are missing really is a living relationship with God.1

We live under the tyranny of what other people think. Pride demands a terrible price. We’ll actually suffer, as long as we think we can suffer quietly without others knowing.

Nothing is going to change until those people come to the end of themselves and willingly pick up the phone to ask for help.

Until someone wants to get well, there’s not much that can be done.

How sad if some of us think God looks at us and sees an overdue expiration date.

Coming to the end of me also means allowing Jesus to put an end to the guilt and shame of the past. He deletes your permanent record and offers you a new beginning with a new purpose.

When God chooses you, he equips you. Every time.

File away your disqualifications. Surrender them. Renounce them (over and over again if you have to). Get to the end of yourself and you’ll find you are in the right place to be used significantly by God.

The parents of the Sacrificial Lamb of the world couldn’t offer an ordinary sacrificial lamb. The Prince checked in as a pauper and proceeded to grow up on ten acres of nothing called Nazareth.

How many blessings have I missed out on, not because I wasn’t capable, but because I wasn’t vulnerable?

Each day is a new narrow gate. The problem with dying to myself is that it’s so daily. I have to make the choice over and over again. I can live for myself or I can live for Christ, which means picking up my cross—at

Not only must I serve the people I love and admire, and those who can make my life easier, but dying to myself also means serving those I don’t really like or understand and even those who have hurt me.

When you come to the end of yourself, you are no longer concerned with the big deal or the dramatic demonstration.

if we were to ask God to put us to work, as the Rileys did, he would begin pointing out places right and left for us to spring into action. Those places are everywhere.