Perspective

There have been a number of times in my life when people have challenged me about an attitude or action that were legitimate in doing so. I remember when I was a student, my campus minister, after hearing me rail about something, asked me, “Why are you so angry?” He gave me a perspective about me from outside of myself. It was a perspective I needed to contemplate. Another time, early in my first campus ministry, a Board member listened to me complain about how things were going. And it wasn’t the first time. After patiently listening for a while, he finally had had enough. “Jim,” he said, “all you do is bitch, bitch, bitch! [I was told once that this was not considered profane speech in Missouri, where the man was from] If you don’t like the job, then quit.” Again, much needed perspective.

What these two men did for me long ago was to humble me by giving a perspective of myself that was more realistic than I presently had. I was full of hubris and self-righteousness. They revealed to me that I was still fallen, a sinful man.

This morning, I read the first chapter of I Timothy where Paul tells his young protégé that he considers himself the worst of sinners. Paul reached that conclusion in the most emphatic and unquestionable way—on his way to Damascus to persecute the Christians there. The Lord Jesus confronted him regarding his sin. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

Paul had never saw his actions as sin. In fact, he believed he was employed in the work of God. Until the Lord gave him some much-needed perspective. After that confrontation on a dusty road, Paul was never the same. He went from a very proud man to a very humble one. And the Lord kept him humble through many hardships and persecutions. He knew he was a sinner given the privilege of doing the work of God’s Kingdom. He hadn’t earned the privilege; it was a gift of grace. It was this perspective that he shared with Timothy. 

Too often, we can lose our perspective on who we are. As my mom sometimes used to say to us boys growing up, “You’re getting too big for your britches!” In other words, we were acting proud and without a sense of humility. See any social media feed, observe many politicians, some religious leaders, and interact with numerous everyday people, and you will often experience people who have gotten too big for their britches. They feel entitled. They think their opinions are always the right ones. As I did once, they bitch about many things. They often label people as “idiots,” “morons,” and “evil” among other things. And they often call themselves Christians.

A better perspective of who we are would help alleviate much of this in our society and churches. If we just would recognize that we are sinners first and foremost, that we have earned nothing but God’s wrath, and that everything starts with God rather than us, then we would be in a similar position as Paul. We would live life in humility with the recognition that only God can transform us. Only God can produce truly godly fruit in our lives. Apart from him, we can do nothing. And whatever we do, the credit deservingly goes to him, not us.

None of us like being confronted with our own sinfulness; yet it is a necessary mitigator of arrogance and hubris into which we all fall from time to time. If we allow them, the Scriptures can continuously do that through correcting wrong thinking and conduct, and reminding us of who we truly are: sinners loved by God. This should be the perspective we aim to have throughout our lives, as did the Apostle Paul.

© Jim Musser 2022 All Scripture references are from the New International Version, 2011.