"Self-love means Hamlet thinking he's Shakespeare" (Finding Your Story in God's Story)

"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it."Matthew 10.39

We all sometimes think of "sin" too simplistically. More than a set of isolated behaviors or substances, Sin (with a capital "S") is a posture of our wills; a neglect or disregard of our place in God's story. Only as we rightly orient ourselves in God's story do we find the fullness of life we ineffectively seek in self-centeredness (sin.)

God has given us, human beings, a proper way to conceive of our lives; a proper way to relate to him. The problem is that we have conceived of our lives incorrectly; it's like we've taken the left path of the fork where we should have taken the right path. Consider this quote from Peter Kreeft, 

"Self-love means making yourself your own God: that is, your own end, good, and goal; seeking your happiness and purpose and destiny and meaning in yourself rather than in God. It means Hamlet thinking he's Shakespeare."

We don't often see ourselves as characters in God's story, working out of his plot line. We prefer to see God as a supporting character in our stories, working on our plot lines. More often than not, we get so preoccupied with ourselves and our stories that we become bloated, hollow, and self-centered. The result of our self-centeredness, of seeing ourselves as the main character in God's story, is that we become alienated from others and estranged from sensing God; we begin to sense a spiritual and relational fracture in our lives when we fail to see our stories as woven into the story of God, for purposes outside of ourselves.

Fundamentally, we need a daily perspective reorientation; we need illumination as to the proper way of viewing our lives. We need to see God's story of renewing the world in love as our story -- a story into which each of us has been invited because Jesus died to renew our worlds in love. We've been invited into God's story to play roles only we could play in our various situations, employed and directed by the Playwright himself.

The main thing is this: cutting your story out of the fabric of God's story by self-centeredness leads you to spiritual and relational loneliness. Seeing your story interwoven with God's ongoing story of world redemption, which happened for you when Jesus redeemed you, allows you the freedom to trust God with the complexities of your life and partner with him (and thousands of others) on his mission to bring life and love to the world.

What's more, Jesus promised that if we lose our lives in him, we'll find our real, God-given lives. If you bring your life to Jesus -- who is himself the climax of God's story, the hinge on which everything turns to become new -- you've rightly oriented yourself in God's story. You've found your God-given context; you've found your proper function.