I Must Become Less

I’m reading through the Gospel of John and a few days ago the Holy Spirit brought new light to a verse that I had never really considered before (don’t you love it when that happens). It was John 4:30, in which John the Baptist is talking about Jesus and says “He must become greater; I must become less.”

What’s awesome about that verse is that it pretty much encapsulates the whole point of life after we come to know Jesus. He must become greater, we must become less. That’s a constant tension in our lives, the battle over the desires of our hearts versus the desires of God’s spirit inside us.

Paul talks about this battle a great deal in Romans, and C.S. Lewis had one of my favorite takes on it in the book Mere Christianity. He says that what all of us try to do is to live the Christian life, but still keep parts of our old selves to us. We’ll give some time or some money to God and occasionally do good deeds, but we still want our own time that’s not God’s. We want both, and Lewis says that we are missing the point. He says what we don’t understand is that God’s way is infinitely better and happier than our way. What we want is happiness, and the only way to full find it is to give our whole selves up to God.

It sounds like a bad or a scary idea, but the funny thing is that the more you do it, the more you love it. I know that the seasons of my life when I am the most satisfied and happy are the ones when I’m following God more closely and giving myself up to him more and more every day. And the opposite is true as well.

Hopefully this week, you can let yourself decrease and God’s spirit inside of you increase.