The next several weeks of blogs will be based on the animated reading posted last week. To see the full text of the poem or watch the video again, click here.
In seeking to possess what it never could own the flute lost the life that once it had known.
The grass is greener on the other side … so we tell ourselves. Why do we struggle so much to be satisfied with what we have? I’m not talking about resigning ourselves to abusive or dead-end circumstances nor denying the importance of hard work to better our lives. I’m addressing the sin—the sickness—of selfishness. Like the flute, we not only love the song … we want to own it.
God will always be the owner of “the song” and we—his creation—ever its steward (Genesis 1:26-28). When we make the center of our lives about us—our pleasure, our success, our happiness—we confuse ownership with stewardship. As Christians, we most easily fall into such confusion when we forget the words of Jesus that if we act like we are owners of our life we’ll lose it but if we act like we’re stewards (by entrusting it to him), we’ll discover how abundant it can be (my paraphrase of Matthew 16:25).
The story of the flute can represent people at many different phases in their walk of faith. Regardless the stage—new convert or seasoned believer—we live like “an owner” when we stop behaving like God is our source. How does this look?
When we’re angry and choose to be offended instead of pouring our hearts out to God until he pours his peace back in; when we feel like a failure and try to prove our worth to others instead of taking our pain to God and letting him prove his love to us; when we feel alone and seek the company and love of others before first quieting our hearts in the closet of prayer and allowing God to fill us with his abiding presence. It is upon this choice of choosing God as our source that we either nurture or sabotage our precious song.
So, how do we resist the invasion of thoughts that would tempt us to choose ownership over stewardship? Scripture says, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8). Ironically, while we often associate indulging in pleasure with ungodly behavior such is actually the key to our breakthrough.
Our problem is usually that we have settled for lesser affections. We are transfixed by the sirens of this world and the golden fleeces of our imagination only because we’ve not feasted enough on the bounty of God’s goodness. Every time we choose such “tasting” we affirm God’s goodness and strengthen our hearts against the ever-present temptation of “owning the song.” Next week we look at how deception follows the choice of ownership.
What Do You Think?
Do you struggle with trying to “own the song”? If so, how?
