My parents blessed our family with a beautiful new computer for Christmas. The PC runs Vista, which I’ve never had as an operating system before. One interesting little feature is the “computer index” which it assigns your machine. It gives your computer a rating in a variety of different areas, like processor speed, graphics speed, amount of memory, etc, and then gives you an overall rating.
Why this is interesting to me is that the overall rating isn’t actually based on a median of your individual ratings. I’d expected, say, a processor rating of 7, a graphics rating of 3, and a memory rating of 5, so that my overall rating was 5.
Instead, the overall rating is simply your lowest rating. In the example above, my computer would have a rating of 3, because that’s the lowest score. It doesn’t matter that your processor rating was 7; it focuses on the lowest rating.
It makes sense, in a performance sort of way. It echoes what my collegiate athletics coach used to say to our rowing team: “You’re only as fast as your slowest man.” If you have something hindering you, everything else screeches to a halt until that hindrance is improved.
So here’s the question that comes to mind: is this the Christian life?
I’m tempted to at least concede that I usually think this way. When I’m struggling with an area, that’s what I focus in on, that’s how I “rate” how I’m doing as a Christian. If I’m struggling with anger in one area, I forget about the fruit of love or kindness or patience and just focus in on my inability to have victory over my anger.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. One godly saint I know, who spends his life on good works and humble living (I know, I know, externals, but still), recently confessed his lack of assurance and struggle because he is not a good evangelist. Whether the issue is stumbling in dieting, a wayward child, an anger issue, or marital conflict, we seem to find our focus in our failures.
Discouragement is one result; even in mature Christians who have much fruit, difficulty in a particular area can seem to stop us in our tracks, rob our assurance, make every other fruit of little consequence.
I’m thinking that this performance-based Windows Vista model is not a good one for me as a believer, though I tend to drift there.
I’m not suggesting that ongoing sin is inconsequential (it’s not), nor am I suggesting that you can just jaunt along in sin uncaringly (sin should grieve the Christian, if you don’t care then you aren’t understanding your relationship with Christ).
My thinking of my walk with Christ and in Christ may be better seen by taking a step back from the tree of my failure and seeing the forest of my life. For example, in Galatians 5:22, the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Should I not praise God for joy, kindness, and gentleness that the Spirit works through me (wonder!) as well as working on the patience that I don’t yet seem to have?
It leads me to think that perhaps some of my sin-focus (and certainly my discouragement because of it) is actually pride. Do I require perfection to prove something to myself? To other people? To God?
Rather than a lowest common denominator approach, perhaps I really should be training my mind and heart in highest common denominator thinking. Because my righteousness, my adoption, my inheritance, and all that I am are really as a result of that highest common denominator: Jesus Christ. My faith (also a gift) in Him is what will allow me to stand forever, united with Him.
As Paul writes in Ephesians:
Ephesians 3:17-19: So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Filled up to all the fullness of God; that sounds like a pretty high rating; that rating comes as Christ dwells in our hearts through faith, and we comprehend the incredible depth of the love of Christ.
Such amazing grace! May we marvel that He produces anything good in us at all!
You hit the nail on the head. You should tuck this one away for a devotional/fireside chat thing someday. Actually, you should write a book on this. Or mabye it’s a chapter in a bigger book about grace. Way to go, bro.
Yes! Hearty yes. I think its an axiom that I get wrong all the time … trickles down into the nitty gritty pieces of life. Like how I talk to my kids. And what I think in the middle of an arguement with my almost perfect husband. And the words I say in attempting to encourage a friend. What an amazing thought that the essence of who I am isn’t my ten worst moments in life. Yay! Thank you, Lord!
Blessings on Peter Rust for posting this link! What great encouragement for a perfectionist who is extremely aware of shortcomings and how they do not bring glory to God… Thank you.
Hey Dax, very refreshing thoughts. I agree and am encouraged to try to learn to think about my life from this perspective – I too tend toward the lowest common denominator. I need to hear these words and more like them to practice seeing life differently.
Oh, thanks so much! What an amazing picture of how we think! So encouraging, so good! I continue to be amazed at how wrong my view of God has been. That I would think that God designed the Christian life as drudgery to be endured and pressed thru, bringing ourselves to perfect obedience using the tool of Christ’s strength. oh how wrong. God does not intend for discouragement! He wants us to be happy. Happy in Him! How do we do that? We have faith! We trust Him and rest in Him! (as your next post says.) Then though life is hard and sin does need conquering, it’s not so wearying and discouraging! He really does want us to hope in Him and rejoice in Him!! Ah! Sing joy!