The Great Reversal

The first days back in school from Christmas break can be challenging. The kids are squirrelly. Maybe it’s all the new fun toys, all the cookies, all the late nights, or the many weeks without the classroom structure. Whatever the reason, teachers know they need a little extra patience and a little more perseverance when it comes to getting their learners back into the swing of things.

One third-grade teacher was put through the paces this past week. She was giving directions to a student when suddenly he pulled out an UNO reverse card and declared: I’m the teacher now!

I can’t imagine how hard it was to hold it together for that teacher. It’s cute and funny when a third grader plays a harmless joke like this. But it’s an entirely different story when we live like we’ve got a handful of UNO reverse cards.

Sometimes, it seems just as harmless as that third-grader. We make plans for the future and then they blow up in our face. Nothing goes the way that we were planning or hoping. We wish we had a divine reverse card. But we don’t. So instead, we begin to grumble and complain. We act as if that’s no big deal. We think we have every reason to be mad, to be frustrated, to be disappointed. We tell ourselves, we are just blowing off some steam.

But think about what we are really doing in these moments. We’re trying to slide into the throne of heaven. We’d like to make the big decisions. We want the power to change our current circumstances and shape our future. And it is a big deal. Because we are thinking and living as if God’s track record and his promises don’t matter. We have every reason to trust God. He has always done what he promised. Why would he stop now?

But that’s not the time we live like we have a divine reverse card. We do this when we’ve fallen into temptation, too. We’re trying to play the reverse card whenever we offer excuses about how we couldn’t help but sin. We point to our busyness, our stress level, or the challenges in our lives. We’re trying to play the reverse card when we downplay our sin as no big deal. When we point at other people and what they are doing. When we point out that nobody got hurt.

Of course, God has not given us a divine reverse card. And for good reason. We would do far more harm with it than good. But the Son of God did play a divine reverse card of sorts.

Paul writes in his letter to the Christians at Philippi: In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness… He humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

There are many times in our lives when we longed to be like God. We want to have his knowledge, his power, his control. But the Bible tells us that God became like us. Flesh and blood. But it was more than that. He became our servant. He came to do our dirty work. He lived that life that we could not.

Jesus submitted himself to God’s perfect will. Any of us would have griped and complained about being sent from heaven to earth to die for the sins of people who hated you. But not Jesus. When we fix our eyes on Jesus, we see that he endured the pain and shame of the cross with joy. He truly loved us and rejoiced in the opportunity to redeem us from all unrighteousness.

Not only did he die for us. He lived for us too. He was born to save us from our sins. But he didn’t let that important mission prevent him from spending time with struggling sinners. He didn’t cope with the stress of saving the world by coddling private pet sins. He was perfect in thought, word, and deed. God played the divine reverse card and made our sins his problem and then gifted us his perfect record of obedience through faith, simply because he loves us.

And that’s why we don’t need a divine reverse card. Things may not go the way we hoped or planned, but everything in life is going perfectly according to the plan of the God who is love, who lived for us, who died for us, and who is now preparing a perfect place for us.