Victory!

“Let me hear you say, ‘I will give you victory!’” – Psalm 35:3.

About two weeks ago, much to my dismay, the New Orleans Saints kicked a 40-something yard field goal in overtime to end my beloved Minnesota Vikings’ best season in about ten years. The loss was exceptionally hard to swallow for me, not because of the fact that they ended up with more points than the Vikings, but because (in my view) there was no real victor of the game. Even if the Vikings had won, I would not have been elated, nor would I have felt I had rights to boast to all the Saints fans around me here in Baton Rouge. Why? Because the game was a stressful, blow-by-blow, neck-in-neck struggle the entire time. The outcome came down to about five of the last eight plays being called under review, and honestly the way it ended was little more than a toss-up. The game contrasted heavily with the Saints’ 20-something point victory margin over the Arizona Cardinals the week before, as well as the Vikings’ 34-3 BLOWOUT against the Dallas Cowboys in Minnesota. I am reminded of the chant of the big bad hockey coach on the Mighty Ducks: “it ain’t worth winning if you can’t win big!”

What, truly, is victory? As humans it seems that we care about nothing but the title. The glory that comes with the win. Who’s really to know who was the better team that day? But which is more important: to be esteemed as victorious, or to literally be better? If you look at the intent of the playoffs, the Super Bowl – the goal is to identify the best football team in the NFL. How is that determined? By the teams playing games against each other. But if the outcome of a game does not reflect the true nature of the team, then how pointless! Another example: Colt McCoy, QB of the University of Texas’ Longhorns got injured early in the BCS National Championship Game. The opposing Alabama Crimson Tide ultimately scored more points in that game, but did they really beat the 2009 Texas Longhorns football team? Even though they didn’t, no one really cares. Alabama got the nominal victory recorded in history, the trophy, and all the glory. People simply do not care about anything but what is external.

As Christians, our world (the Kingdom of God) works upside-down. What people see is valued at 0, and what God sees is all that matters.

· “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, which is temporary, but what is unseen, which is eternal.”

· “Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.”

· “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart.”

While simple to understand, or to give mental assent to, the implementation of this seems to be where I fall short. I find myself wondering why one person has such great favor with leadership at the church, how another person finds so much success in getting people on encounters, how still another seems to enter in so effortlessly in worship, and still another seems to maintain such excellence and maturity.

It has really just been dawning on me lately how easily swayed I am by seeking to “win the game” instead of seeking to be the better team. Something I tell my guys at club and the interns I meet with is this: “At the end of the day, you only are who you are.” Simple, but profound. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got a million people coming to your revival, it’s carnal vanity if you’re not doing it as a result of who you are instead of you striving to be who you want to be so you can be seen, or so you can be affirmed in yourself of your validity, or so you can be fulfilled in reaching some level of ministry that you thought was the ultimate goal of your walk, your destiny. “The flesh profits nothing.”

I have just begun to see this thing inside me that follows me wherever I go. No matter how committed I am to reading the Word, no matter how long I pray in a day, no matter where God positions me in life, no matter what kind of provision he has made and what kind of miracles he has done to get me to where I now stand, I am still hopelessly carnal! If God shows me that life is not about money but about Jesus, then I am so happy and I condemn all the people who look at life and think it’s about money. But now I know it’s about being a Christian. Then pretty soon I’m making sure everyone knows that I know it’s not about money because it makes me look so spiritual to say that it’s about being a Christian. But then God has to correct me and show me that it’s not about just nominally being a Christian but about living holy. So now I throw away my secular music and condemn all the people that listen to secular music and make sure that everyone knows that I know that living holy is really what Christianity is all about. But then God reveals my self-exaltation again and I am driven to my knees in repentance and now He shows me that it’s not just about me being holy but it’s about the harvest. So now I start going to a high school weekly to share a cell lesson with a bunch of kids and condemn all those lazy Christians who are just content to live holy and do nothing for the kingdom. But then God convicts me and shows me that I’ve fallen in love with the praise that comes from getting big numbers and results at club and I need to care not about my numbers but about the true work of God going on inside their hearts, so I repent and condemn all those so foolish leaders who are getting big numbers and don’t bring any kids to encounters and don’t develop any as leaders because they really don’t understand what really counts in ministry like I do. It’s come all the way to the point where saving souls from hell is no longer the purpose for my life. Where I’ve discovered that I’ve wrongly made it my highest desire to be an effective worker in the harvest. Why is that wrong? Because that desire is not from God, it’s from my flesh which wants esteem, promotion, and self-fulfillment.

I’ve just begun to realize that I’m never going to escape the flesh. Like my dad says, “it’s always something.” It never ends. Glory to glory happens when you thought you’ve arrived at glory and God shows you that it’s deeper than you thought it was and it causes your mind to be renewed and your life to be transformed. With each defeat of the flesh, there is a decisive shift in my perspective. Every time I grow, I am soon brought to the realization of the fact that I have again messed it up on some level. The higher I get, the more elusive the flesh is, the more subtle the brand of carnality which plagues me.

I’ve just had this inner ‘knowing’ my whole Christian life that I would do great things for the Kingdom, that God set me apart for a special purpose, that I would be one who would redefine many things, that I would go to the nations, that I would move in signs and wonders, that I wouldn’t be among those who didn’t have the character to sustain their ministries, that I would meet the fullness of success at my time here in 220 and push to the extremity of possibility that there is for ministry here within the parameters God has ordained for me here through His authority, that from there I’d be sent out to serve under another ministry and do the same, that from there something else would happen. But whatever would happen it would be BIG and it’s all about MY DESTINY and me doing this HUGE AWESOME thing for God with my life! Is that desire wrong? If it is flesh, then it’s flesh. If it’s spirit, then it’s spirit. Now do I believe that God has shown me by the spirit some things about my future that will surely come to pass? Yes. But I have just taken myself way too seriously; that is, I’ve considered the things He’s planned to give me things to “cling to” (Phil 2). I’ve held on in my flesh to the idea that I am someone special, that others should lay down their mantles to make way for my ministry, that I would take from others and not give, that God would ensure the fulfilling of these things because I had such a good heart that was just so focused on the cross and cried at all the prayer meetings and wept over the nations and was so broken over lost souls and Jesus not getting what He suffered for. I was so sure!!! I have been so sure of my calling, but since December that has just been taken from me -- my assurance that I’m on this trajectory to MY destiny has been shaken.

What God has shown me above anything is that it’s not about me. It’s all culminated to this revelation of the sovereignty of God in all things, in ministry more than anything, that I can’t work my way into effectiveness, that the goal was never to save lost souls but to glorify God, that the gospel is not about man not going to hell but rather about man going to God, meaning it’s not about me working my way into being the most influential person I can be for other men to not go to hell but rather about me working my way into knowing God such that I am transformed into His image and PURELY as a result of that, I shine as a light on this earth, and as a result of that transformation by the Spirit, inevitably Christ in me will bear the fruit of Christ on this earth and people will see His life inside me and His light dwelling in my body in place of my flesh and as a result He would gain glory, thus removing any need to wonder whether people really got saved at my altar calls, thus exterminating any bit of my ability to make anything more happen than God wanted to happen through me by striving in the flesh, thus disarming any devil in hell from sending a temptation to work FOR God instead of allowing Him to work IN me. Reward in heaven is not based on how many souls you got into heaven, it’s based on how much your life was built with gold, silver, and precious stones and not the wood, hay, and stubble of presumably Godward fruit born in carnal strife. I have eaten my own words: I only am who I am!

I am only as valuable in the Kingdom of God inasmuch as there is “less of me, more of Him.” I am only as valuable to God as much as it is “no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Paul said, “for I know in me dwells no good thing.” Our battle is “not against flesh and blood”; it is not a fight you can use earthly, fleshly weapons of scheming, plotting, manipulating, positioning, figuring out ‘keys’ and ‘secrets’. Instead of running off and doing such things, we are instructed to “tarry” until we’ve been endued. Until we’ve been baptized in the Holy Spirit. God exists in the world today by means of His Holy Spirit. He does not exist in programs, he does not exist in strategies, he does not exist in buildings, or in ministry models. Like Pr. Joel says, He doesn’t anoint (endue, come upon) programs, He anoints PEOPLE! People whose hearts are His, people who have lost satisfaction in earthly things, in carnality, whose eyes he has opened to see that it is all about HIM! He fills only the empty space in the clay pots of our lives. As we see Him, it empties our hearts of the desire to cling to carnality and opens us up to receive the indwelling of the Spirit of Jesus – Christ in us. The anointed one. How to get an anointing? Get the anointed one, Christos, in you. But as Ravenhill says, the triune God is not going to share space in the case of your heart with you. “No flesh will glory in my presence.” It has to be God that is working in you for it to be His good pleasure that comes in my life. It has to be Spirit.

I have been born of the Spirit: that was when I realized that life wasn’t about money (in keeping with the example I wrote above) but about being Christian. But now “that we have the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal 5:25), being “carefully to obey all the commands” He has given me by His spirit. “The Spirit bears witness with our spirit” (Rom. 8). The means of my communion, my “relationship” (as we so vehemently tout in place of religion) happens on a Spirit-to-spirit basis. Nothing else matters. Again, “the flesh profits nothing.”

For all of what I’ve sought to accomplish, at the end of the day if it was me that accomplished it then it was folly. For all that I’ve sought to do in the Kingdom, if it was me that did it, then it is wood, hay and stubble. Back to my original verse for this writing – it says “let me hear You say, ‘I will give you victory!’” Whatever gain I am to make spiritually it is a gain of Christ in me. It is not a gain of me in the world. It is not a gain of me becoming more like Christ. God does not take what we have and fix us up; He kills us (crucified with Christ) and puts His Spirit in us such that it is no longer we who live but Christ. Ravenhill said that’s the greatest thing any man can say this side of eternity. Not “I’ve done more for Him than anyone else.” Rather, “He lives in me.” That’s what life is about. God bringing me to Himself, the curse being reversed as the flesh is exterminated and replaced with Christ, and as a result when I walk it is He who walks in me, when I speak it is He who speaks through me – if where I go and what I do is wrought by the Spirit.

Now returning full circle to my introduction, victory is thus not an external “who can get the glory of having the most visible points at the end of the match”. Paul said to Timothy, “I have finished the race,” and to the Romans, “I have completed the work of the gospel from Jerusalem to Idumaea.” How did he finish? Not every single person in the cities he went to was saved, nor likely had everyone in each of those cities and that entire region heard the gospel. But it’s not about a visible, tangible result that a man could see. A Christian’s life on this earth is not something of Kingship and conquest in the way that man sees it. Look at Jesus, our example! He didn’t come as man thought he ought to come. And the holy spirit he left does NOT work the way man thinks he ought to work. A Christian life is to be SOWN. No glory, no esteem from man, no positioning higher so more people can look and see and be impressed, no one-man armies.

“And Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John 12:23-25.

It’s about the glory of God. For Him to be glorified, the kernel of my life must be sown into the ground. You don’t see a seed that’s under the ground. No one cares, thinks anything great about a seed. But if it indeed stays under the ground long enough, it will bear much fruit. That’s all there is to life: sowing it. Victory in life is not ascending to a place of ministry, a pastoral position, a level of understanding of scripture that can be published and marveled at. It’s about sowing my life, man! That means it’s possible to fulfill the will of God TO THE FULLEST EXTENT, to maximize your spiritual potential and NO ONE EVER STINKING KNOW! And that is truly to the Glory of God! That is true victory! It’s being like Jesus. Not being successful in our earthly-defined terms of ministerial fruit and church growth and revivals and the like. It’s about a life being sown into the ground.

I mean really, what do I have to say that people need to hear that’s going to change the world? Do we really need another preacher? Do we really need another song, another sermon, another church plant? I don’t want to minimize any of these necessary things but the point is that none of that is the point! The point is being like Jesus, who being in the nature of God didn’t consider EQUALITY WITH GOD SOMETHING TO CLING TO (if there’s anything worth holding on to, it’s being perfect and glorious, not having nice cars and have a long supporter list and cool graphics on your song screen and a lot of people buying my book and a lot of people responding to my altar calls) but rather made himself nothing. Nothing. Me being a somebody in church circles, in ministry circles is something. I’m to be nothing. “Taking the nature of a servant”. Serving people doesn’t mean I do what I think helps them, nor does it mean I do what they think helps them. I means I obey God with regard to my relationship to them. “True religion” is helping widows and orphans. Laying one’s life down, suffering for. That’s compassion – the word literally means “to suffer with.” That’s servitude. But He didn’t just serve, he died. His life was altogether sown, the earth, the flesh had no hold over Him. He was, with regard to human nature, a dead man walking, even before the cross. He showed us that we’d be tempted by lusts of the flesh and eyes and the pride of life and showed us that by the Spirit they were conquerable. He was victorious over the temptation to be victorious in a way that takes glory from God. He showed us how to reject affirmation and validation from humans or devils and receive only what the Father says about us. He is the ultimate man, the one example of how a man ought to life his life on this earth.

Victory is not when I conquer the world for Christ; it’s when Christ has conquered the world in me. May it be, Lord – take Your place on the throne of my heart!