For This Reason 15

[HKHaugan]

When I was in high school I had an interesting experience with my chemistry teacher. He was really a neat guy. He had a way of sensing where students were from a personality perspective. We had what were called Delaney Charts to keep attendance in class. They were little seat numbered cards teachers used to check students in and out and they fit into a little easily handled folder. I decided when it came to memorizing the symbols for the elements I’d copy that format and did. I brought it to class and he was impressed. But I wasn’t always as absorbed as he would like me to have been and one day he said to me, “Haugan, if you had more brains and less blond hair you could do something.” At the time I was embarrassed and a bit shaken but as I look back I really respected him and took the class more seriously because what he was really telling me was that in fact I was smart underneath all the blond hair. That’s what several of my classmates told me later when we talked about it. He knew his students and had his own picture of each. I ended doing a whole lot better and so did everyone else because we had someone holding us accountable in a caring way. So the point here is about experiencing genuine personal acceptance and what it conveys which can be factual, emotional, personal and challenging. It reveals attitude if we have the context to read it properly and that’s where this is headed and where Ephesians is headed in Chapters 4-6.

When we say experience we are describing a real happening in our consciousness. Attitude is the context we use to react to experience. As believers what we do is go to Scripture to validate it one way or the other, either as true or false. But it is an experience whether just in the mind or in the heart or in the spirit or even all three together. Experience always precedes our analysis of it. Now here’s the thing about experience, no two people have the same. We may have similar ones but the fact is that each one of us in our uniqueness will be different. That is because we are made to be unique and that is the key to experience. If we jump in and try and judge another’s experience we are treading on dangerous ground, God’s ground. But again if we have a context that can handle uniqueness and give it direction then our future has a blueprint to handle all our experience. This is where Scripture comes in. It’s God being personal with us and in us in our individual uniqueness.

Uniqueness is wonderful.

Why? Because there will never be another you or me in God’s Kingdom. There were none before us, none now or none that will ever be what and who we are. We are all unique to Him, loved by Him and given a special place with Him forever. God is that personal. It’s that God quality we are called to grasp in our dealings with other people. I wish I had known that when I was young. With Paul’s insight into the nature of a disciple of Jesus and the standing we have in Him I truly believe things would have been different in my life. Then again perhaps it wasn’t the Lord’s timing. Perhaps it was His will for me to go through what I did. In that way the wishful insight the Lord gave me could be passed on to another generation. It’s always about His timing anyway.

Uniqueness is a gift of God to be able to have unique experiences but there is a down side. Since sin entered the world our uniqueness was separated from God thus bringing a condition that sin-caused isolation victimizes us with and that is aloneness. Outside of God aloneness can be felt in alienation, rejection, dissension, fear, anxiety, depression, neurosis and psychosis to name a few. Aloneness happened when Adam and Eve, our forebears, lost their intimacy with God, a condition passed on to us as evidence of sin passed on from one generation to the next. Everyone is born alone, lives alone and dies alone. No one else can do that for us. We are, each of us, uniquely alone. This is where uniqueness comes in. If we can see that we are created to be unique it means we have a Creator and are never alone regardless of how we feel or the world leads us to think. Here is where the Cross come in.

Only God alone can remedy our separated condition which He did in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ limited Himself to our human aloneness but it wasn’t the product of sin but of God’s will. Jesus took the burden of aloneness in perfect faith. He did that naturally because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of true faith. It is His experience of faith that we center our aloneness upon. It is His unique aloneness which defines us as unique persons, unique persons who have found through faith, God’s gift, that we are never alone. It’s the experience of our aloneness that propels us to seek an experiential relationship that overcomes its sense of isolation. Thus in Jesus the Holy Spirit bonds us to Him and opens the door to experience restoration to the Father. From Him we are granted sonship through His Son. In turn we seek others to be in relationship with Him so that they realize their uniqueness in Him are restored as well.

As many individuals as there are in the world you have the quest for identity, purpose and destiny. You run the gamut from atheism to theism and from faith in self to faith in Jesus that exalts God and His created unique individuals. As believers in Jesus we stand in the gap ready to bring Jesus into their experience, not to take away their uniqueness but to let the Holy Spirit build an eternal relationship with them that fulfills their uniqueness.

It is growth through spiritual gifts in the atmosphere of the fruit of the Spirit where a person finds the first tastes of eternal life. It’s in ministry and mission that we grow because we are no longer concentrating on ourselves but seeing others as the objects of God’s grace and love. This is the pattern of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, a pattern that is transforming in mind, heart and spirit as we embrace His Word as the means to serve Him. It is being a conscious servant of His, dying to the sinful self and rising in every next moment to be His servant to others. In serving and loving others in the Spirit we serve and love ourselves by becoming what we were created to be in Him. “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do (Eph.2:10).”