I better check myself before I wreck myself

Zach here-I want to thank Haley for giving me the honor of being a guest blogger!  I have been so encouraged by her blog posts and impressed with her insights.  Having never posted on a blog, I have been a little unsure as to what I should write about but here goes...


I want to share some of the things I think God has been working to fix in my thinking.  Perhaps you can identify and perhaps not.  I am an intellectual property attorney and I spend most of my time working for people who are fairly wealthy and relatively well educated.  Likewise, my work colleagues are all attorneys who have both technical and law degrees.  Almost all of my friends are college educated and for the most part are doing fairly well financially now that we are in our thirties.  The church Haley and I are members of has a congregation that, with some exceptions, is mostly white and upper middle class.  In short, there is a real danger that I can live my life in a bubble, which is what I have been doing lately.  However, this kind of life is completely contrary to what I think (per scripture) God would have his followers doing.


I started thinking about this a few weeks ago after I spent a half-day as a potential juror in the Dallas County criminal court system.  Yes, we attorneys are not exempt from jury duty, even though we are not usually picked as jurors (I didn't get picked).  As a potential juror, I was privy to hearing the opinions of my fellow Dallas County citizens.  Although many of my fellow jurors seemed like very fine people, a number of other individuals seemed like, how can I say this, pure white trash.  During breaks, I heard a couple of them discussing their own future court dates for various charges and just how drunk they had gotten the night before.


I have lived and worked with all types of criminals and addicts previously in my life.  You might be surprised to hear that not all of them were lawyers. ;)  When I worked on a dock at a fish processing plant in Alaska one summer when I was 19, almost all of my friends/co-workers were felons of some kind or likely on their way to becoming felons if they didn't change paths.  Many of them were also hooked on something or another.  However, that seems like a long time ago now and I found myself at jury duty beginning to harbor all kinds of negative thoughts  about many of my fellow potential jurors. I was annoyed with them and quite frankly, looked down on them.  I wanted to get as far away from them as fast as possible.  This is when I think God started to work in my heart and I began to question my thinking.


Basically, I think God is revealing just how prideful I am and how wrongheaded my thoughts are.  I think my internal thinking was along these lines: my education, perceived morality and upbringing makes me better than the people I was annoyed with and more valuable in God's sight.  What a joke. This is undeniably false according to God's word. Not only that, this kind of self-righteous thinking is sinful and will render me much less likely to be used by God.


First, I need to check myself and realize that God isn't at all impressed with how much I think I've accomplished apart from Him:


Isaiah 64:6:
"All of us have become like one who is unclean,  and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away."


In fact, I would say that I have done nothing in my life of any truly lasting value apart from God's active involvement.  Jesus's teachings as written in the Gospel of John support this conclusion:


John 15:1-5:
¹ “I [Jesus] am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. ² He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. ³ You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. ⁴Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. 

Second, I need to remember  that God loved the entire world of screwed up people (like me) and sent Jesus to deliver us from the condemnation that we deserve as a result of our rebellion against Him:


John 3:16:
¹⁶ For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.


I note from the foregoing famous scripture verses that there is nothing in there about God only loving and using the educated, well-off, non-annoying and the superficially righteous.  In contrast, from what I can tell, God has instead made it a habit to pick out the non-educated (many of Jesus's disciples-see Acts 4:13), annoying (Zacchaeus the tax collector) and initially blatantly sinful (Saul/Paul) for his most important work.


The truth is that we are all sick and in the same boat.  We all need a savior to heal us:


Luke 5:16-17:
 ¹⁶ When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”  ¹⁷ On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

I pray that God would help me see when pride enters into my thinking and that He will help me root it out so that I can be effective in sharing His love for the world.