Embracing Obscurity: Becoming Nothing in Light of God’s Everything

by Anonymous

Could it be that God embedded in each of us a desire to be significant, knowing it would be one of the things to draw His elect to Him?

The world is in a frenzy trying to find lasting, eternal significance. But their efforts are in vain. Only God has ultimate, eternal significance, and the only way we mortals get it is by joining our lives to His.

In another word, we find significance in playing a part in God’s great screenplay of the ages. And when we find our significance in Christ, we can be content to play a supporting role or even to stand in as an “extra” in the background. The visibility of our part stops being such a big deal, as the reality of being on the cast at all sinks in.

There is within the human heart a tough, fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess. It covets things with a deep and fierce passion. The pronouns my and mine look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do. They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease. The roots of our hearts have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended. God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.4