be the best

http://www.iamsecond.com/seconds/pete-briscoe/

"It's exhausting being the best."

This is a video I shared with my LIFE group this past week. If there's anything I'm being reminded of in this season of life, it's the truth that success doesn't bring us closer to God, but it can quite easily become a wall we put up against him.

In January, I saw a picture of myself listing all that I had accomplished in life on a scroll. I stood facing the scroll and wrote line after line of what I had done. And as I wrote, the scroll was slowly being unwound and it grew longer and longer. Right behind the scroll stood Jesus, who longed to give me grace and look on me with eyes of love. Yet the longer the scroll became, the more of Him it obscured. The challenge in the moment was to throw the scroll in the flames.

I believe it's worth it.

For we are the circumcision, who worship by the Spirit of God and glory in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh—though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:3-11)