If Happy Sounds Trite, Let This Wreck You in the Best Way
I read a verse this morning that wrecked me. It’s a familiar one—one that perhaps you’ve brushed past countless times too.
Here it is in Matthew 13:44 TPT:
“Heaven’s kingdom realm can be illustrated like this:
“A person discovered that there was hidden treasure in a field. Upon finding it, he hid it again. Because of uncovering such treasure, he was overjoyed and sold all that he possessed to buy the entire field just so he could have the treasure.”
Why it wrecked me
I’ve always thought this verse was a call to abandon all, to wholly lean in, to be sold out and surrendered. And I think it still is, but perhaps it’s the message between the lines, not the one on the page.
Today I paused to read the footnote on the verse. Today I learned that “it is more plausible to view the hidden treasure as a symbol of you and me. Jesus is the man who sold all that he owned, leaving his exalted place of glory to come and pay for the sin of the whole world with his own blood just so he could have you, his treasure.”
Jesus is our treasure, true. But we are His. You are the one He came for, gave everything for. He pursues you because he esteems you, values you like a treasure He just can’t live without.
When happy sounds trite
I was writing a different piece for this week, but this flipped script begged the question:
What does this mean for us? For the new year? This knowing how treasured, pursued, priceless we are?
Perhaps your New Year’s wishes this year sounded hallow in your ear. Happy sounds artificial, trite in light of the heavy grief, sorrow, and spiritual warfare I know many of you have been facing.
It doesn’t fit, like we see when we juxtapose square and round.
Because Jesus didn’t come to paint the surface with happy. He doesn’t promise easy.
But He gives us His whole love, and that is far more than enough and ever so much more than we deserve.
The parable of hidden treasure is about us, and really not about us at all, because we do zilch to earn this joyous, all-in pursuit of our hearts.
And it’s knowing this, soaking in this truth, that reorients our hearts to join the missional pursuit of loving the underserving, the ungrateful, the priceless though yet imperfect people all around us that look in these ways a whole lot like us.
He loves us. So we love too.
That’s the message between the lines.
He defines our worth, and we treat others as worthy of His pursuit too.
It’s the ripple effect all over again, and I can’t stop talking about it because it’s a simple picture of how all we do with God begins with what God sparks in us.
We love God and people—we live mission—because the God who loves imperfect and undeserving us says we matter to Him. Says we can’t do anything to earn or forfeit His immense love. Says we matter just because He says we do.
Let me take you to a place
Years ago, on a hot and sticky cornfield in Illinois, a group of mission-bound teens, me included, rehearsed a drama. One part of the skit involved an action best described as swimming in malt-o-meal. I remember how our minds knew the slow struggle to move forward was arbitrary. Yet in the humid, still air, it felt almost real.
And maybe the moving forward into 2022 feels like you’re swimming in malt-o-meal, the kind that’s been sitting in the bowl long enough to get cold.
You long to look ahead. To dream and connect and build. But the here-and-now feels thick and heavy.
The neighbors you’d like to meet. The front door you would like to open. The table you’d like to invite others to gather round. It all feels idealistic and unrealistic.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The swimming will feel slow and heavy when we focus on us. How we can be neighborly. How we can do the right things, be the right things, say the right things.
The swimming will feel heavy too when we focus on the uns—how we are unfulfilled or unfairly treated or underestimated or unseen. Gravitate towards the uns and we will become desperately unhappy.
But focus instead on Him, let the effort be His and our contribution be our acceptance of and surrender to the love of a God who’s overjoyed with us, enamored with us, relentlessly pursuing us—a God who gave everything for us, a God who’d do it again in a heartbeat.
There’s freedom in being loved. Freedom that makes the swimming, the living, far more effortless.
We don’t have to fix the mess 2021 bleeds into 2022. We don’t have to paste on smiles and pretend we’re always happy. We just have to let the One who pursues us define us. We just have to let Him love us so we can learn to love like Him.
Hope, joy, peace, patience, wisdom, grace, and love—these grow when we let Him in. Him with His wild, undiminishable love.
May I leave you with a prayer of blessing for 2022?
On the days your heart feels heavy, on the days it feels like you are slow-swimming in malt-o-meal, may the radiant love of God ravish your worn, torn, and weary. May His love wreck you, spark a ripple that moves effortlessly out beyond you as you submerge yourself in the waves of His affection and let Him nudge to each #nextrightthing. May you release the pretending and performing and perfecting, knowing that you are not responsible to earn or retain his love. May the free gift given to you bring you freedom this year, in every possible way. In the great and holy name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.
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Are we email friends yet?
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