God or Everything Else? Part 1

A wise man once asked me a question: Who has more? Someone who only has God or someone who has God and everything else?

Because of the rhetorical nature of the question, we all know that someone who only has God has more than one who has God and everything else. However, how many of us have lived that reality? Alvin likes to ask the question: Is God part of your life or is God your life? It seems that many of us like to squeeze in God together with everything else in our lives and ironically, we end up having less and not living the fullness of life if we had just given up "everything else" in the first place. Often we put God on equal footing with the rest of our activities, if not at a lesser place. We spend an inordinate amount of time on work, leisure and entertainment apart from true communion with God. And when we do spend time with God, we commodify it, we tokenize it, we give God a token of our time or service just to ease our conscience. And we fail to see that the "everything else" in our lives that we have placed on equal or greater footing than God are actually the idols of our lives.

It all boils down to this question- are we satisfied with only God or do we need everything else to supplement God's place in our lives that we may be fully satisfied? Why is it that we all seem to bow down to that deception that other things apart from God should satisfy, or that God alone will not satisfy and we need everything else to supplement His place in our lives? In fact, it seems that the opposite is true- perhaps the very reason that we are not satisfied is cos we try to supplement God with everything else! And we won't be truly satisfied until He becomes the only source of our satisfaction! Perhaps the reason why we're not truly satisfied is because in relegating God to merely a corner or a predetermined "space" in our lives, we fail to honour Him, that is, we fail to allow Him to be all that He is in our lives! In attempting to satisfy ourselves with counterfeits, we fail to free Him and let Him occupy our lives fully and thus receive the fullness of life He brings! We keep Him boxed up by our own agenda, pleasures and desires. By clinging onto our "everything else", we make Him rather insignificant and we don't give Him the place, the platform to be all that He can be to us!

I've always been a the-cup-is-half-empty sorta person and my journey led to the following conclusion. Why is it that we celebrate every little experience with God, every little trickle of the Holy Spirit, etc.. why is it that we celebrate God is such small quantities when Jesus has come to give life and life abundantly? Let's look at it the other way around- instead of celebrating the little droplets of divine experience we receive in a cup, let's consider the rest of the glass that is empty. Why aren't we experiencing fullness? Even David said "my cup overflows" (Psalm 23) and even that's in the Old Covenant! Surely we have something better? Jesus died to give us that place of liberty and abundance! He died to bring many sons to glory- that we may experience the fullness of life with Abba Father! And anything below that fullness is an affront to the cross! Living below that is a disgrace to the kind of price and sacrifice that Jesus made on Calvary! Perhaps in celebrating the little we have of God, we show how small-minded we really are and how our minds are not renewed by Scripture. We've taken the trickle to be the normal Christian life but Scriptures tell us that the abundant life is the normal life! Perhaps we need to move onto a new normal and that's what i wanna consider in this post and the successive posts- If God has fullness and abundance for us, what will that fullness look like?

What does a life look like that is totally surrendered to God? What does a life look like that is totally possessed and filled by God? We need to know and see that place of fullness if we're ever gonna get there! Cos vision propels us into action! Otherwise, we'll always be content with where we are, being satisfied with the mediocre! We need the vision, the blueprint, the knowledge of what a mature son of God looks like so that we can possess that place! And we need to explore what that kind of life looks like so that we can prepare ourselves to get there! This is not to lament our current position but rather to understand that God is holding out to us a vision of something greater to be possessed by those who will dare to pay the price!