When I was on staff with IV at VCU, there was a guy on staff at another school in Eastern Virginia who was ridiculously gifted: Kevin. Kevin went to a school where there was no IV chapter. Within four years, it had grown to like 300.
We'd meet as a staff team every couple of months. And sometimes it was hard for me to get overly-excited about what God was doing through Kevin. I felt jealous, threatened, insecure.
And eventually, God had to hold up the mirror and press me: either I could celebrate what God was doing through Kevin or I could kick against the goads and live in jealousy and insecurity. The choice was mine, but the invitation was to repent. One choice would bless me, the other would lead to bitterness and smallness of heart.
Eventually, I repented, but it still wasn't always easy to celebrate what God was doing through him...even when I clearly saw God doing good stuff through me as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a couple problems.
Problem number one is that most of us are functional atheists. That is, we live most of our lives as if there were no God, as if we had no good Father who watches over us and provides for us and who loves us.
Problem number two is that our identity then becomes driven by what we can do or produce. Our culture is a performance-based culture. So our identity becomes driven by how well we perform.
And the invitation in Christ is to be free of comparison and competition. Because comparison and competition is always a lose-lose deal. Either we compare and come out looking better, which leads to pride. Or we compare and come out looking worse, which leads to envy and jealousy and self-contempt.
Neither of these gives us life. In the operating system of comparison and competition, every new person we meet is a potential threat to our very sense of self. That doesn't exactly set us up for a lifestyle of serving one another, humility, and genuine love and trust towards one another.
In Christ, we are invited to a life that lives larger than the lose-lose operating system of comparison and competition. In Christ, I am deeply loved by my Father, apart from my performance.
And that frees me up to celebrate and be glad in others as well as to be appropriately glad in the works of my own hands done in cooperation with God's Spirit. There will always be people better than me at everything. My identity isn't wrapped up in having to be better than everyone else. I can just be me. That'd be a novel way to live.
Can you imagine how much more freedom we'd experience if we didn't live a life fraught with comparison and competition and all the ill-fruits that bears?
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