I am not God - You are not God

I am not God. This may come to no surprise to anyone. Yet such a simple and absurdly obvious statement needs to be said everyday to remind me of the simple fact that I am not God. You are not God. Now I am just stepping on toes. I often need to say this to myself as a reminder that while I do not want to hurt or disappoint anyone, ultimately you are not God and so it is not my ultimate concern. I think it is healthy to remind ourselves that we are not God, and other people in our life are not God.

If I am not God, and you are not God, then it stands to reason that we should stop spending so much of our time trying to please our own whims and desires because these are simply vapor in the wind. Instead, I think it is time we find what is eternally and infinitely important to God.

We make a great mistake in pretending we are God. We assume that our happiness is what matters in the cosmos. We think we understand best what we want, what we need, and what our rights are. However, just because we say we have the right to bear arms does not necessarily make it true because we are not God, you are not God, and the Constitution is not God.

God does give us free choice. God does not give us free choice because we are God; rather God gives us free choice so that we may choose God.

Adam and Eve had free choice. Adam and Eve were not God. God gave them free choice so they may choose God. Instead Adam and Eve became concerned with their rights. Their egos (with help of a serpent) told them that they could make choices concerning themselves just as good as God could. They replaced God as God, and made themselves God (a big and undeniable mistake when they were confronted by God).

We make ourselves God everyday because we think our will, our wants, our sense of rights and liberties are of the utmost importance. We believe our ability to choose gives us the importance to choose for ourselves what is best. We make ourselves God.

Sometimes we recognize that we cannot make decisions and we either go into depression because we think ourselves weak, or we turn to someone else to control us and make our decision for us. We make others God.

If God is God than maybe God gave us choice so that we may choose whatever God would have for us. Perhaps our only real choice is to let God be God or to let someone else be God. What if God wanted you to throw away your dreams your 10 year plan, your wants, your desire, your sense of fulfillment and accomplishment? What if God wanted you to abandon all that and choose what God already has planned? What if God promised us a better plan and a better prize behind his curtain? Would we choose it?

I really think this is what God wants from us. I think this is what God means when he says “deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23). I think God says your way is not the way (John 14:6), your life is not your life (2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 2:20, and your logic is not even close to being as brilliant as you think it is (Matthew 11:25-27, 1 Corinthians 2).

There is a real loud calling in scripture that tells us God is God (Deut. 6:4) and no one else. There is a divine reminder that our life does not belong to us anymore (1 Corinthians 6:19-20) that our choices cannot belong to us anymore because of our corruptible nature (Romans 1), that our only real choice is life or death (Deut. 30:19), and choosing God is choosing life (John 17:3). The plain and difficult reality of all of this is that God is God and it really all belongs to God. God is the beginning of it all and the end, God is the Alpha and Omega, and we are vapor. God loves and calls us children, but our decisions are vapor, dust, foolishness if they are not the decision to follow God.