Losing Everything, Gaining All

I was listening to a sermon by Tim Keller today on self-control, and this true story really hit hard.

The sermon is available here, if you'd like to purchase and download it.  I highly recommend it.  It's worth every penny.  And Tim Keller has many, many free sermons available as well.  I haven't listened to a one yet during which I didn't want to throw my computer across the room because it stung so bad.

http://sermons.redeemer.com/store/index.cfm?ParentCat=6&fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=18806

“I remember some years ago there was somebody I knew who was a man, who was a professing Christian, and who also was very respected, very well-known, very admired, very acclaimed because he was so competent and so skillful at all he did.  But there was actually a secret addiction in his life.  And because of that secret addiction in his life, when it finally came out, he lost everything.  When it was made public, he lost everything.  He lost his job.  He lost everything. 

And when I talked to him, it was actually some time after this, and he was starting to rebuild his life.  And he was poised.  There was a peace about him, and he actually found that he had licked all those areas in which he had lacked self-control.  And I remember he said this to me, and it has haunted me.

He said, ‘You know I’m a professing Christian, and I always said, what matters the most is what Jesus thinks of me.  But that’s not how my heart really operated.  My heart operated on two functional principals.  And those two principals were this.  1)  That by my competence and my hard work, I could control what people thought of me. And 2) What people thought of me was all that mattered.’  He said, ‘I said what mattered to me was that Jesus valued me, but my heart was saying that what really matters is that people value you and you can control that by your incredible performance.’

And it was as a result of that that he actually got into the addictions to keep himself going.  But when it all fell apart, he said, ‘You know what?  Not too many people, but some people, have been in my shoes, and that is… I finally arrived at a place where nobody loved me, nobody respected me, nobody valued me, nobody admired me, nobody – not even me, not my wife, not my kids, once they realized what a hypocrite I was.  No one but Jesus.  And when you get to the place that the only person in the universe that values you is Jesus, then finally, finally, you start to build your life on that.

‘I just couldn’t seem to do it until I lost everybody else’s admiration, but Christ’s.  And I knew that God loves me in Christ, and it was the one thing I could build my life on.  And as a result, when I started to build my life on that, and not care what anybody thought, and not care about anything but that, I lost all my need – to do all those awful things.  I lost all my need to control what people thought of me.  I lost all my anxiety.  I lost all my addictions.  I lost all my driven-ness.  I lost them.’”