There's No One Like You

[HKHaugan]

There’s No One Like You

 There is no way you can exhaust newness. Everything that is ahead is new. Life every day is new. The seconds, minutes, hours, days, month and years, they are all future. It’s God’s desire revealed in Creation and especially in Jesus. With newness comes choice and decision and the challenge they present.

 But newness is also accompanied by another gift exemplified in Jesus, uniqueness. If there is anything we experience on a day-to-day basis it is our being different than everyone around us. The very fact of having to get along with others and learning the best way to do it is certain evidence of being unique.

Now switch to the person of Jesus.

If there is anything that is more obvious than His uniqueness, show me. He does something when we think of Him. Sometimes we wish we could be like Him but know we don’t measure up. Some people just avoid Him because He seems unreal, a figment of imagination and emulation, knowing He presents a picture of depressing impossibility or just a symbol of what man was meant to be but never will be. Or He is just a religious figure that is more idol than actual, more fiction than real, more a tragic historical martyr than a spiritual reality. After all, “He’s just a man” as the musical Jesus Christ Superstar wistfully intoned.

 But the very fact of Jesus is what gives us the message that when we were born we were unique from birth. It was His uniqueness that gave us the assurance we were meant to live a unique life like He did; to think uniquely like He did, to have faith like He did, to live like He did. We were made in His image and likeness (Gen.1:26). Note I use the word ‘like’ not ‘same’ as He is. He is the model that encourages us not just to be individuals, but unique individuals, unique persons, who contribute uniquely to the world in which all of us live, like He did.

 All this is to say what Scripture has already told us. “We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).” Just like there was only one Jesus so there will only be one you, one me, everyone ‘a one and only.’ He is the only Son of God who by His life, death, Resurrection and gift of the Holy Spirit, has made us who believe in Him His younger brothers and sisters. It is by His life given on the Cross that we have been brought back to His Father so that we could become His children as He intended in the first place. It is by the Cross of Jesus that our unique individuality, our humanity, being a person, was returned to us.

 And it is by our personal cross, the cross of faith He asks us to take up, by which we follow Him and discover the unique purpose, the significant reason each of us has for being here:

Ephesians 2:10

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

1 Corinthians 12

He has given each of us spiritual gifts according to our individuality to minister to one another in the larger Body of Christ…….But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.

Psalm 139:13-14

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

1 Kings 3:12 (to Solomon)

Behold, I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind, so that none like you has been before you and none like you shall arise after you.

It is the realization of our newness that opens us to our uniqueness. The fact of our uniqueness brings us into how we exercise our uniqueness,---faith. It is by faith that we step out into every next moment based on what we believe is the way to respond in that moment because every step we take is a step of faith. Why faith? Because we have no way of knowing what each new moment presents.

 When I say ’moment’, I mean what we do when we meet anyone, attend an event, engage in conversation, read a book, watch TV, go on vacation. Actually, every minute of life is an event in the making. We live in a stream of events spiritual, personal and relational. That’s what we do as individuals, and we do it uniquely. No one has the same next event because no one else is in your body or in the space you take up or in the moment you are aware. You are you and no one can ever be you anytime or anywhere. It’s that unique and that immediately makes it a new moment, a moment filled with the need to react by what you have chosen to believe with your mind, trust with your heart and put in action by faith. The newness you bring to every event in life is your uniqueness, your unique mind, heart and spirit.

 There is a pitfall in the time of our lives however. That pitfall is fear, pride and the sin that energizes them. Their instigator is the ancient enemy of God and us, the father of sin, the prince of darkness, the devil. His strategy is to destroy our uniqueness and newness by infecting our choices with temptation to follow personal desires and impulses so that every moment is taken up with what we can get in every next moment to please ourselves. He wants us to covet what we don’t have materially and relationally. Live only for self in any moment without concern for integrity, honesty and openness. His objective is to make us all feel and do the same and be the same. His technique is simple. He gets us to fear the attitudes and opinions of others who seem more powerful socially and economically. He is after us to submit to standards that make us talk, look and act like them. We smile at them, play up to them and let them set the style we live by. If we make a mistake there is always someone else to blame, someone to accuse and someway to make others look bad to take the heat off of us. The devil’s ultimate plan is for us all to become more and more the same so that we never know who we really are and end up being totally alone and isolated from others. His ultimate goal is to make us like Him so that the only sense I will feel is that of total and complete aloneness with fear, anger, depression, regret, remorse consuming me forever. That is hell where the devil reigns.

The good news. Jesus bore all that in our place on the Cross and defeated it when He rose from the dead and offered an eternal relationship with Him, the Father and the Holy Spirit forever in the Kingdom of Heaven. There we will be surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, the saints of the past living their newness and uniqueness in an eternal family. There no one is ever alone, just growing toward the perfection He has waiting for us.