Anyone else experience moments in life when words or ideas just pierce your heart? And it recurs again and again when all you desire is for it to truly be resolved. To truly come to an end, and instead, every speaker, every book, every Scripture, every quote just brings it back up like the pepperoni from last night’s pizza.
Let me provide a few titles from books and previous posts to see if you can engage in a little game—Name That Issue! Sick of Me, End of Me, Die Empty, Why Not Me?,Follow Me,Winterize Me, Trust Me, Teach Me…Have you arrived at the issue yet? Perhaps one more clue with some song lyrics from More Like Jesus: If more of you/Means Less of Me/Take everything/Yes, all of You/Is all I need/Take everything. And even as my heart cries these words authentically, I still manage to hold on just a bit—to my ego, my pride, my entitlement. When the longing is for Less of Me and more of Jesus, I still somehow, manage to grip ever so tightly and make it all about me.
The speaker for this year’s Handpicked Conference was Whitney Capps, who is a funny and engaging presence on the stage, and she challenged the women in the room that day and in her book Sick of Me to really think about our spiritual lives differently. In a culture that has more self-help solutions than anyone could ever need, Capps confronts a significant issue that just owning our issue is not enough. For spiritual growth to occur we are required to Just Do Something. Capps dares, “But what if, what if, talking about it isn’t the same thing as actually doing it? And what if posting or sharing it doesn’t actually change us?” We can be vulnerable and transparent with our friends by owning our spiritual growth, but what if it’s the process of transformation that is most important?
What if we, (let’s be honest here, me!) engaged more than just our thoughts, our guilt, and our words and actually did something to transform our hearts? What would it truly look like to desire Less of Me and more of Jesus? In this attempt to name what it means to Flourish at Life despite our circumstances, it’s easy to get side-tracked into considering happiness more than holiness. But if I yearn to come to the End of Me, then I need to contemplate sanctification more than self-help. Capps helps us comprehend that big churchy word with a definition. “Sanctification is the progressive work of becoming more like Christ. It addresses the internal quality of our spiritual maturity and is evidenced in external actions. Sanctification then is only applicable for believers.”
To help differentiate between self-help and sanctification, Capps proposes some key comparisons to guide us from “a life that pursues ‘our best life’ instead of the Christ -life:
- Self-help depends on my efforts to get where I need to go. Sanctification asks God to do what only He can, and then equips me to do what I can in response.
- Self-help focuses on my definition of healthy, helpful, good, and wise. Sanctification allows Scripture to define the virtues I ought to pursue and display…
- Self-help pursues good things. Sanctification chases God things.
- Self-help strives to make my life easier. Sanctification is submitting to a life that may be harder but better.
- Self-help has me at the center. Sanctification has God at the center.”
These five are just the tip of the iceberg of the impactful message Capps shares, and to be honest, I’ve only made it to chapter two in the book. But like authors such as Kyle Idleman and Todd Henry, Capps encourages us to not just own where we need to make changes but to be hungry enough to take the steps to progress in actually looking like Jesus. I admit that I want this to be a One and Done. I confess my pride, my lack of humility, check it off the to-do list and move on to the next issue, but as Idleman shares in The End of Me, it’s a daily dying that we are required to do. “Not a one-time death. Not a partial death, It’s a daily dying. And every time I come to the End of Me, I discover what I deeply wanted all along—real and abundant life in Christ.”
I’m being challenged to examine my own transformation to sanctification, to ask myself if I really do want to become more like Him, and if so, that will require Less of Me.
References:
Capps, W. (2019). Sick of me: From transparency to transformation. B&H Publishing Group.
Henry, T. (2013). Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day [Kindle iOS version].
Stanfill, K., Younker, B., Ligertwood, B. & Ligertwood, S. (2018). More Like Jesus. Capital Christian Music Group, Inc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAwlcswW6sg
Flourishing @ Life 