Treasure is...

There is a popular contemporary Christian song out right now that has a line that speaks straight to my heart. The song is called Forgiven, by Sanctus Real. The line goes, “When I don’t measure up to much in this life, Oh, I’m a treasure in the arms of Christ.”

It speaks to my heart because even when everything is fine, I can still find myself falling for the lie of negative self-talk. We all hear it. It’s that voice in our heads that tells us we aren’t good enough, we should or shouldn’t have said or done that or that we aren’t worthy of whatever we are striving for at that moment in our lives.

It’s all bunk. Sure, we aren’t good enough. We never will be and we don’t have to be. All we have to be is what we were made to be. A work in progress, a learner at the knee of one who knows us and loves us completely in all our inglorious, brokenness.
We fall for that lie when we start looking at ourselves through the eyes of the world. Those are sometimes really the eyes in our own minds that see others doing more, achieving more and living like we wish we were. Those are the eyes that we measure ourselves with and they are nearsighted. They can’t see where God is leading us or what the future holds. They expect us to have “arrived” by now. We don’t know where but you know it isn’t where we are. We try to act like we’ve reached that mythical place; like we are a success and can be defined by our possessions, titles or incomes. But those things won’t last and they tell nothing about the person we really are; nothing about our real value to the one who wrote the bluebook on humanity.
How wonderful it is when I can close those eyes and just be that treasure in the arms of Christ.

After I wrote this I read a blog post by Matt Hammitt on the song Forgiven.