PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: “Knowing who you REALLY Are”.
By: Ron Woodrum
In 1975, two years before his death, Charlie Chaplin was visiting France. He visited nearby Monoco, and while there entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest. He thought he was a shoe-in to win the prize money, and everyone would have a good laugh. Charlie came in third! Most thought the best explanation for such a low finish was due to the fact that all his movies were in black and white, and in real life his genuine baby blues may have made him look less like Chaplin than at least two others in the contest. Coming in third in your own contest might just cause you to suffer an identity crisis. In the book/play by Arthur Miller, Death of A Salesman, the family, the only ones to attend the funeral of Willy Loman, who has committed suicide, are trying to make sense of it all. Bif, one of Willy’s sons comes to this conclusion-he says, “Willy had all the wrong dreams…he never knew who he was!”. Knowing who you are, and living in light of that is the key to success and satisfaction in life. The story is told that about Joe Louis, boxing’s heavyweight champion of yesteryear that proves that point. Louis was heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949. During his time of military service in the U.S. Army he was driving with a fellow G.I. in a truck. He was involved in a minor collision with a large truck. The driver of the larger truck got out and started yelling and swearing at Louis. Louis just sat in his seat and kept on smiling . His buddy asked him, “Why didn’t you get out and knock him flat?” Louis responded, “Why should I?” “When somebody insulted Caruso, did he sing an aria for him?” The truck driver did not know who he was insulting. Had he known it was Joe Louis he would not have likely felt so free to curse and yell at him. He would have likely treated him dramatically different! On the other hand, Joe knew who he was-the best boxer in the world-and therefore he had nothing to prove to anyone! Not even himself. Many others would have been tempted to fight back, or at least return insult for insult. But Louis was secure enough in his identity to understand that such a response would only be degrading. The truck driver’s opinion of him was not the one that mattered. It was irrelevant to who Joe was. He had a proper self-understanding. That controlled his life actions. So it should be with all of us. But as we read the story of Jacob we see him living out a life that doesn’t seem to fit who he really was meant to be. He was the grandson of the great Obedient and Faithful Abraham. The one who had proven his faith in God by willing to go on a spiritual journey, “going but not knowing where he was going”. He lived the life of a pilgrim, believing the promises of God, though he never got to see them come to fruition in his lifetime. Then too, his father was Isaac. The beloved miraculous son of Father Abraham. Isaac was a type of the Lord Jesus Christ when he was the offered sacrifice on Mt. Moriah, foreshadowing the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. W.H. Griffith Thomas, in his commentary on Genesis calls Isaac “the ordinary son of a Great Father, and the Ordinary Father of a Great Son”. But for most of his life Jacob never saw himself as Great. He never knew who he really was. He spent all his life trying to get ahead. Trying to be someone he wasn’t. Entering into conflict with others, trying to come out on top, striving to get the desires of his heart, no matter what it did to relationships, or how it made him look.
He needed a crisis-experience to get him to see who he was now, and who he could become if he would make the right life-changing decisions. Most people do not know that the Athiest Christoper Hitchens has a brother Peter, who is a dedicated believer who has dedicated his life to defending the Christianity that his brother was so determined to destroy. But he was not always such a Christian. Both he and Christopher had been brought up being exposed to the genuine Christian faith. Both of them, in their own way had turned away. Christopher had become an antagonistic athiest. Peter had chosen the life of wealth and pleasure, not seeing any need of the faith that they had been exposed to as youngsters. He was indifferent to them, not really antagonistic. Then one day he encountered a picture, in an Art Museum, that gripped his heart, and was a Divine call to come back to the faith he had been given the opportunity to embrace, but deserted for life in the “far country of riotous llving”. While in an art museum in Europe he was drawn to the picture The Prodigal Son, by Thomas Hart Benton. He looked at the painting. It shows the Prodigal Son coming home too late. His father’s house was in ruins. His father is dead and gone. The fatted calf is lying in the side yard, just a skeleton of bones portruding out of its shallow grave! That painting hit Peter like a ton of bricks! He tells of his own appraisal and reaction to that painting in his book The Rage Against God. He writes, ” He has come home too late. Nobody has seen him from afar and run joyfully to meet him. There will be no forgiveness, no best robe, no ring, no music or dancing. He stands in his shabby clothes, with his poor roped suitcase…He is gaping with his hand to his mouth, at the ruin of his family homestead-ruin caused by his own greed and wastefullness. He looks as if it is just dawning on him that he is stupid and cruel and without hope. The light is failing in a chilly sky beneath wind-whipped twisted clouds. Instead of a fatted calf, there is a stark white skeleton, the skull horned, lying in unattended grass. We can guess grief, resignation, and failure has overtaken the family during his heedless absence. Who can he blame but himself? The desolation is infinite. As I looked at that picture I was reminded of the melancholy remnants and ruins of my own Church, out of which I had petulantly stomped out of, I felt the same as that prodigal”. He had a crisis conversion. He turned back to his Heavenly Father. Rediscovered the faith he had forsaken. Returned to serve God in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ! He did his best to convince his Athiest brother to do the same before he did of cancer. As far as we know he was unsuccessful. But Peter discovered who he really was, and who he could really become in Christ. Todays message, from Malachi, takes us back to Genesis. We get a better understanding of what God meant when He told the nation of Israel how He loved them. He defined and illustrated the nature and nurture of that love, as illustrated in the Father of their nation, Jacob, who found out that he really was Israel-“he who has found power for life in God”. For the first time in his life he knew who he really was. His identity was a gift, a gurantee, a gratitude, and a genuine identity in God. So is ours.