He Made Us And Not We Ourselves

And what do you do.

They have a good answer. It is honed. It is about eleven words long, it is accurate, and it is interesting enough that the conversation goes somewhere and not so interesting that they have to keep performing.

Eleven words, deployed maybe two hundred times in their adult life.

And this evening, in a room full of people doing exactly the same thing to each other, they had a small unpleasant realization, which is that the eleven words are the most complete description of themselves they possess.

Not because they are shallow. They read. They have opinions. There are people they love and they know exactly how they feel about them.

But if you asked for a self description, an actual one, the thing that would come is the eleven words, possibly with something added about how long they have been doing it.

They have built a person out of a job, over about twenty years, in the ordinary way that everybody does it and nobody notices, and it works completely until you notice.

You may have your own eleven words. Deployed hundreds of times, entirely accurate, and closer to the whole of your self description than you would like it to be.

Who made whom

Here is a line the Holy Spirit will press on you, and it corrects something at exactly the point where you have the problem.

Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.Psalm 100:3

It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.

That second clause is doing the work: and not we ourselves. It is a correction, aimed at something people evidently do, which is to understand themselves as their own construction.

That is exactly what has happened to you, and it happened without a decision. Twenty years of doing something well, and a self assembles out of the doing, and it does so quietly and nobody watches it happen.

And the psalm says: no. He made you. Not you.

You are somebody God made rather than somebody you assembled, and the psalm corrects that specific mistake by name. Psalm 100:3 says it is he that hath made us and not we ourselves, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a person in a room full of introductions.

And look where it goes next: we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Both of those are relational and neither is an achievement. What you are is a position relative to somebody, rather than a description of your capabilities.

That is what your eleven words cannot carry, and it is not their fault. Eleven words about a job cannot contain a person's relation to God.

You are His before you are anything you do, and that is a description that was true before your first day of work. The written word takes the making of the self out of human hands, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been requiring you to introduce yourself as an output.

The honest half. The question is going to come again in about four minutes and you will use the eleven words, because they are the right answer to that question in that room. I am not telling you to be strange at parties.

And I am not going to tell you your work is not part of who you are. It is. Twenty years of doing something shapes a person genuinely, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

There is a part only you can do and it is small and it is not a party trick. Once, tonight, to one person, you introduce yourself without the title. Just to hear what comes out when the eleven words are unavailable.