Daily Lesson for January 26, 2015

Today's daily lesson comes from Paul's words to the church in Galatia found in Galatians chapter 1 verses 13 through 15:

13 For you have heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the church of God violently and tried to destroy it. 14 And I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people, so extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers.

Tradition.  Custom. Heritage. Way of life.  From his youth Paul was trained to respect and protect these things with zeal. And because Paul was one of the brightest students of his generation he was also all the more zealous in guarding these things -- even to the point of persecuting the church.  Paul had everything he knew about himself invested in his traditions and their preservation. His whole identity and sense of self was wrapped up in this. So what a struggle it must have been for Paul to begin to let go of these things and ultimately "consider them as rubbish" compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ and himself in Christ.

To know oneself in Christ is to know oneself as "before the foundations of time".  It means to begin to see oneself and one's core identity no longer in a particular race, clan, country, or club, but rather in what Paul Tillich called the "Ground of all Being-ness", which is God. In Christ, Paul discovered what it means to no longer live as "Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female" but as a human born from the ground of God's being.

Where do you find your ground of being?  Is it in your culture, its traditions, your people's way of life?  Are these the things you want to spend your life defending?  Or is there something deeper to be found -- something greater, something before and after, something eternal. 

In another letter Paul put it by saying, "Our citizenship is in heaven."  What he meant by this is that our ultimate identity is in heaven. When we think on what that is like and who we shall be when we get there then suddenly so much of what we thought was so important here and now begins to fade in the glory of what will be there and then. And suddenly we discover the meaning of the words from that old hymn, "And the things of this world will grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace."