Non-entities

February 19

“Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the LORD,” Psalm 34:11

“To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work,” Titus 1:15-16

God’s Holy Word the Bible admonishes us to learn of Him but it also makes us aware that when we know Him, we are to be reconciled to Him. That reconciliation does not mean only that we attend religious services when they are available or that we focus our associations on others who believe as we do, but that we allow ourselves to be conformed in our innermost being to the likeness of Christ.

The difference is a very basic one because if we don’t allow that inner transformation to occur, we cannot be truly His; rather, we will be among those who prophesied in His name and healed in His name and cast out demons in His name but were none of His (see Matthew 7:22).

Jesus isn’t looking for people who merely proclaim Him to others without fully embracing Him themselves. He is looking for men who have allowed His life, His sacrificial death, His resurrection—His salvation—to transform them in the essence of who they are.

Otherwise, we may be better people—we may be more generous, kinder, more compassionate, more loving—but we are not truly transformed people, we are not people who have died to themselves that we might live fully unto the Lord.

We will be an improved version of ourselves, but even ‘good’ people are fallen. We can’t be content to be better people, we must be transformed as was Paul so we may say as he said, “For me to live is Christ…” Philippians 1:21. When we allow Jesus to live in us, we will become non-entities so that He may become everything in and through us. Jesus will become the essence of who we are.