God cannot help anything He did not create. The person you claim you are, is your designation, your creation beyond the reach of a helping hand so close you can touch it with your tongue. Naming yourself as a “believer” is still an act of your will. Identity expressed in a word defined before the foundation of the world does not wear a title.
Do you live in Christ or does Christ live in you? Volition, is usurped where yeast is the representation of living.
The invisible man, un-seen in a multitude of television and motion pictures, is who we are in Christ. The accessories, masks, and bandages we apply to give our appearance shape and form merely are the façade we build for how we want the world to recognize us. Yet, that is not the building, or tabernacle, which God has chosen to inhabit. Paul’s claim, “…it is not I that lives, but Christ who lives in me…” portrays a structure, or edifice, permeated with the intentionality of the universe, the mundane made super-natural, “…the hope of glory.”
Many think of the term “lost” to represent something misplaced, or missing. However, and more importantly for this time, it also means “vanished.” Here one moment, gone the next. Have you lost yourself in Christ as Paul claimed? Chances are quite high that you haven’t simply because you refuse to remove the bandages.
Lazarus, the one greatly loved by Jesus, died to his self-illusions, illusions his sisters desperately clung on to. Jesus, however, demanded that the bandages of his former identity be removed to reveal the new life given to him by Jesus. Lazarus lost all to gain everything anew and his presence brought jealousy from those who were tightly wound in their false reality.
What bandage are you unable to give up? Is it the one across your nose bent out of shape from opinions about the false reality you assume to be real? Or is it the ones on your eyes that have been poked by fingers of accusation for things that don’t align with the truth of who you know you are? Or is it the tattered bandages across a mouth quick to tell rather than slow to pronounce? Or is it the pierced bandages of the ears that can no longer muffle the moans from the discontent of a soul trapped in a suit of rotting flesh, longing to be free of the constraints thrust upon it from poor, ill-informed choices and the beliefs they have spawned?
If these, and the multitude of other putrefied dressings which haphazardly cling to our body, were removed in a great and violent tearing, would we vanish? Would we be at one with the corpus of Christ who is in all and is all? Would we finally achieve the consciousness of Christ from a mind who thought it not foolishness, being equal with God, continually stripped himself of the trappings found in deity in order to cloth himself in the garb of the invisible commonality championed in humanity?
Is it possible to get lost intentionally? Can you vanish in a crowd while being the crowd? Can you disappear from sight as the field of vision embraces and welcomes your arrival? Can you be one with those on your left and right without being the middle? Can you be christ in who all things are held together without being one of the things?
Maybe, just maybe, Christ came for the lost – those who have learned to vanish into God and be seated next to him. Could we have gotten the message of grace confused with the need to be recognized in a sea of 15 minutes of notoriety? Is it time to get lost in grace, in Christ, in a death that brings a life unseen in its glorious fullness? Do you hear the voice of one calling, “Remove the bandages,” resonating in your darkness? This is not a time to wince in apprehension but recoil in faith to what has been buried. I hope to not see you soon or later…
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