After the LORD your God has driven out [the indigenous people living in the land] before you, do not say to yourself, “The LORD has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.” No, it is on account of the wickedness of these nations that the LORD is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going in to take possession of their land; but on account of the wickedness of these nations, the LORD your God will drive them out before you, to accomplish what he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Understand, then, that it is not because of your righteousness that the LORD your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people.
–Deuteronomy 9.4-6 (NIV)
Imagine you are an Israelite listening to Moses giving the nation of Israel (and you) these instructions he has received from God. How would (or did) you react to today’s passage? Did it make you angry? Were you offended? Or were you grateful for the great gift you were about to receive from this wondrous and loving God of yours? How you reacted to this passage will give you keen insight into the extent of the work that faces you during this season of Lent.
If you bristled over this passage or were offended by it, chances are you have a good deal of sinful pride with which you and the Holy Spirit must deal. For you see, God knows the heart and he knew the collective heart of his people, Israel. He knew that their willful pride would delude them into thinking they were being given the promised land because of who they were. After all, being God’s chosen and called-out (holy) people is heady stuff and it is easy to get all puffed up with pride over it.
But that was not why God was giving Israel the promised land. God did not call Israel to be his people because they were deserving. God called them because it was his sovereign will to do so. In other words, God called Israel to be his people because, well, he is God and he can do whatever he pleases. It pleased him to call Israel to be his people through Abraham so that they, in turn, could be agents of his healing and redemptive plan for his broken and sin-sick world.
And lest we are tempted to think that we are different from the ancient Israelites, think again. God continues to call people to faith in Christ because it pleases him to do so, not because of who we are. Christians are no more special in God’s eyes than were his ancient people (or anybody else for that matter) and that is a very humbling thing for us to contemplate.
God’s call to us in Christ is all about who God is, not who we are.
Hence, our sinful pride and our tendency to make it all about ourselves is one of the chief reasons we observe this season of Lent. Lent reminds us that we are not the center of the universe, that the world was not created to serve us nor was it created to be at our disposal. Just the opposite, in fact. God is the center of the universe and we were created to love and serve God, in part, by serving his broken and hurting world. We are called to embody the very Presence of Christ to those we encounter in the context of our daily lives. That’s what it means to deny ourselves, take up our cross every day, and follow Jesus. We find ourselves by losing ourselves to Jesus and that is what the Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting, self-denial, Scripture reading, and confession/repentance are all about. They remind us that we have gotten things terribly wrong when we seek to put ourselves in God’s place and worship ourselves instead of him.
The season of Lent is difficult and sometimes painful because we are working hard, with the help of Christ’s Spirit in us, to kill off that in us which prevents us from wanting and having a relationship with the living God. But if we really do want a real relationship with God, it is necessary for us to put to death all the things in us that are hostile to God. And while this is never easy to do, it is the experience of countless others that the hard work of Lenten discipline is some of the best work we can ever do. Why? Because it makes the scales fall from our eyes and opens us up to the reality of the Risen Lord, who loves us and gave himself for us in a terrible and costly act on the cross so that our alienation and exile from him could be ended forever.
The season of Lent is about helping us reorient our focus so that we put first things first. The season of Lent helps put God and us in our respective rightful places where we acknowledge and worship him as our Lord and understand that we are but his creatures who were created to love, adore, and serve him. When that happens, we begin to learn the joy of having real life, life as we were created to have it, and that is nothing to be sneezed at.
During this season of Lent (and beyond), may you be given the grace to turn away from your own self-centeredness toward the Living God. And when that happens, may you also be given the grace and requisite humility to see the gift for what it is as well as the wondrous love and mercy of the One who gave it to you.