If we are to become God’s children, we are to be undone. The undoing challenges our nature. Humans deceive themselves. What we perceive as normal is imperceptible to us because it is normal. But normal is the great deceiver on the path that is a new life in Christ.
Having been claimed by Christ, the new life plants the taking on and composts the undoing. In the world of habits and behaviors, a person finds the best means to rid himself of a bad habit is to, through time, replace it with a good one. But this suggests our doing and undoing is something of our own will. God welcomes this effort, but His is another way.
What was once desirable to you in the old life, those desires forming those habits, will become undesirable living in Christ. The luster of the old life fades, sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly. God does this. We don’t. The prism by which you see and judge, formed by culture, experience, and belief, finds in the light of God’s truth the god it serves.
If God is creator, He also purges. The awakening we experience reveals those gods in life to which we have before been attached and served. God does this. We don’t. What was once thought of as a gift we possessed becomes known to us as the sin it is. God does this. We don’t. The person you thought yourself to be, the one the world wanted you to be, gives way to the person God created you to be. Through God’s grace, a courage unknown to you appears and you step up and greet that person, once a worldly creature, the one who is now a spiritual being living a worldly existence.
We have a part in this, willing to make ourselves vulnerable enough to see and hear what God is showing and telling us. A part that demands a palpable honesty at the altar of God’s presence and His present. God remains in front of us, waiting for us to come and be in that present moment.
To paraphrase Ronald Gregor Smith, faith is a meeting, not trust in the world of objects that have their life in the past. Neither is it a reliance on the “wholly other” God, but a meeting with God who is both Other and Present. If we stress His distance alone and do not claim His presence in our relationship with Him and others, we reduce Him to a sub-human situation, to take refuge in a paradox of “the impassibility of the gulf between God and men.”
Our lives are unmade beds. A life in Christ is the pulling up and tightening of the sheets, hospital corners tucked in, the even covering of the bedspread, the fluffing of the pillows made presentable. The bed does not make itself. The owner of the house does this because He knows the outcome He envisions. You are wonderfully made.