Survival Skill 1 - You Have to Know Where You Came From

By Paul David Tripp

      Life is bigger than your marriage, your job, your car, your vacation. Life is bigger than you.

      A little toddler just learning to talk runs to her Mommy and says, “Mommy, Mommy, I thinked about what you just said."

      And Mommy says, “No, no dear. It’s not thinked, ‘I thinked.’ It’s, ‘I thought.'"

      Now think about this for a moment. This little encounter is amazingly human. It’s all about what human beings are actually like. It’s this little girl, this human being, with a desire to know and to understand, and her God-given ability to learn, has learned a rule of the English language. She has learned that if you want to form a verb in the past tense, you generally add an -ed to the present tense. Now, what parent has ever had that conversation with their child? Or said at about 18 months to their child, “Dear, you’re going to want to conjugate the language in the past tense.” You don’t have to do that because you’ve given birth to a child; who never, ever, ever stops thinking.

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     Human beings think. They are always trying to figure out life. They’re always trying to understand whatever it is that surrounds them; whatever it is that’s on their plate. That’s why a child growing up, will ask thousands and thousands and thousands of questions, because growing inside him is this deep desire for life to make sense. The desire to know, the desire to understand; the craving for it somehow, someway, for it all to make sense.

     You can go onto the Internet, pick any topic, and you will find endless pages and endless articles about understanding whatever. Understanding marriage, understanding family, understanding parenting, understanding adolescence, understanding… …you fill in the blank.

     Just recently, I looked up marriage websites. There’s the Marriage First Aid Kit, there’s an examination of the stages of marriage, the study of couples and the dynamics of their interactions. Or the study of the dynamics of a quarrel between a married couple, or an article called, “The Windows on the Intimacy Process.” You see, we just have that drive to know and understand. There’s a way in which you and I never leave our lives alone. We’re always searching, investigating, analyzing.

     Think about it for a moment. Where right now in your life are you struggling to understand something?

     I want to give you this concept: you will only ever understand what you’re dealing with now if you look at it from the vantage point of what it was meant to be in the beginning. It’s only in understanding origins that you can begin to understand the here and the now.

     We’re always looking at things in our lives that need to be fixed. We’re always looking at things that are operating a bit dysfunctionally, and the only way you can actually fix something, the only way you can actually make it function the way it was meant to function, is to understand what it was designed to be in the beginning. You have to be able to conceive and evaluate the thing in its original form in order to restore it to what it was meant to be.

     Think about this question: Where, right now in your life, do you need to go back to the beginning? Where, in your life, do you need to understand things from the vantage point of origins?

     God has done an awesome and loving thing for us in his Word. He invites us to go back to the beginning; and we get to go back to the very first moments of the world, we get to go back to the very first moments of human life. He welcomes us to walk with him to that moment when the world was being put together, and he does it so that we can understand now in a deeper, fuller way because we are looking at it from the vantage point of the beginning.

     Have you ever had this experience where you go to a garage sale or a flea market, and there’s something on the table that attracts your attention, but you pick it up, and you realize that you don’t have a clue what it is? You turn it over and over in your hand, you examine it, maybe open it up, or take it apart, or press a button, you pull on it, and for the life of you, you just can’t figure out what this thing is?

     I think that’s often how it is for us in everyday life. We’re looking at life in its old, flea market form and we’re trying to figure out life. And so, God has helped us. The God of wisdom doesn’t want us to be confused; he wants us to know, to understand. He is the Source of all wisdom; so he takes us back to the beginning. He actually pulls back the curtain. He allows us to look into those first early moments when this whole thing we call “life” was actually being put together. That’s an awesome thing.

     Now, there are two things that I think are important to consider. If you’re ever going to survive life in a fallen world, if you’re ever going to live in a Biblically productive way, you’ve got to get a hold of these two things.

     The first one is this: You need to know that, as human beings, we do not live life based on the facts of our experience, but based on our interpretation of the facts. We’re never just responding to the situations, and relationships around us. We’re never objectively responding to our circumstances. We always bring a certain lens, we always bring a certain interpretation, and we always have a certain perspective that shapes the way we deal with life.

     There’s a second thing you need to know. (I’ve mentioned this above already, but I want to reinforce it somewhat). It is that the only way you can ever properly understand anything is to examine what it was designed to be when it was first made. The perspective of origins is an essential part of understanding of what’s wrong in the here and now. In order to “get” what’s broken, you have to be able to look at the thing as it was before it was broken.

     Let’s go back to Genesis 1. This is where, in the Bible, we begin to look at life in its original form. And as we do that, there are four things that immediately jump out.

     Here’s the first thing. This may seem obvious, but it’s not always so. God was on site before you were. There’s a way in which you could say that in the entire Bible, the first four words are the most important words: In the beginning God.

     You see, if God was on site, if God’s existence was already there before the creation of the world, if God is in fact the pre-existent creator, then that means that this world belongs to Him. This world is not my world. In fact, saying it even a bit more fully, life is not about me. Life is about something bigger than me. Life is about something bigger than my wants, my needs, my purposes, my desires, my goals. In fact, you have to say that if God was on site first, then I was made for something big, huge and transcendent; something that actually has to do with Him! And everything I do and say, everything from politics, to math, to entertainment, to culture, to history, all of those things somehow are attached to the reality that long before I was ever on site, God was on site. Life is more about him than it is about me.

     The second fact from Genesis 1, that story of origins, is this: You were designed to be a revelation receiver. Now think with me for a moment what this means. Those communicative abilities that you have been given: your ability to hear, speak and think; those abilities were not first given so that you could have cool relationships with people in your life. Those communicative abilities were first given so that you could know and hear God. You were not designed to figure life out on your own. Here’s an important principle: human beings need truth outside of themselves in order to make sense out of life. I will never, ever,
properly figure out life on my own. I was created to be dependent on a Source of Wisdom that would have a perspective which goes beyond origins and beyond destiny. I’m meant to be dependent on God.

     Third fact: You are an incessant interpreter. You don’t live life based on the facts of your experience. You live life based on your interpretation of the facts. Wherever you are, you are interpreting. Wherever you are, you are trying to make particular sense out of what you’re facing.

     The fourth fact: By your very nature, you are a worshipper. You don’t divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. The issue is who or what we worship. Think about this with me; worship is not first an activity. Worship is first an identity. I am a worshipper so I worship. What does that mean? It means I’m always living my life in pursuit of something. I’m always living my life under the rulership of something or someone. I’m always giving myself to some kind of hope, some kind of dream, some kind of meaning, some kind of purpose. I live for something, and that thing that I live for will control me.

     God was on site first. You were made to be a revelation receiver. You never stop interpreting. By your very nature, you are a worshipper. Those are four facts of origin that will make sense out of what you face every day.

     Now, how can these four facts give you new ways of understanding yourself and what you are dealing with in the here and now? Let me give you an illustration.

     I was, for four years, a Kindergarten teacher. They were the four longest years of my life! Actually, they were very enjoyable. Anyway, during that period of time, one of the moms of one of the children in the class wanted to have a birthday party for her daughter. She asked if she could use the school classroom and I said, “Sure, as long as you invite everyone, that’s fine.”

     Well after school, the day of the birthday party, she turned that classroom into Birthday Kingdom. There was one long table going down the middle of the classroom and at the end of the table was a chair for the birthday girl. And in front of her, on the table, were a bunch of presents. An amazing pile of presents! Sitting around the rest of the table were the children who were attending the party; and what they had was a sandwich bag of party favors. Now the purpose of a party favor is to remind you that it’s not your party!

     Little Johnny, sitting at the very end, directly across from Suzie the birthday girl, was looking at his bag of party favors, and looking at her pile of gifts he was getting very angry. He was her-umphing. Fffff. Ffffff. He couldn’t believe it! He was looking at his bag of two Tootsie Rolls, a lollypop, and a plastic whistle, and he was getting angrier and angrier as he looked at the pile of gifts that Suzie had.

     Finally, one of the parents who was helping at the party, had had enough, and she came down to Johnny’s end of the table, turned Johnny’s chair towards her, knelt down, and she said these deeply theological words to Johnny. She looked him in the eye and said, “Johnny, it’s not your party.”

     You see, that’s what origins tell you. When you go back to the beginning, that’s what you’re confronted with: life is not your party. Life is bigger than your marriage, bigger than your job, bigger than your garden, your car, your vacations, or that great steak. Life is bigger than you. You see, Jesus came, not to make your little kingdom work, but Jesus came to invite you to a bigger Kingdom. God created you. God owns you. God has a design for your life. Life is about his plan, his purpose, his will and his wisdom. You’ll never understand life until you understand that it’s not your party!

     So God, in his great grace and wisdom, God in his tender love for you and me, has invited us to go back with him to the beginning. He’s done that not only so that we could know ourselves, but that we would know him. And in so doing, with knowing ourselves better and knowing him better, we’d be much better prepared to deal with what he has put on our plates.

     Remember this: God of the garden, that God of wisdom, that God of power, that God who knows everything from origin to destiny, because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is with you in every moment, in every one of your days. And that God who is with you, not only has a better plan than yours, but has promised to be with you in the middle of it. He has promised to help you and to give you just what you need to be what you were designed to be, and to do what you were designed to do.

     If you ever are going to understand “now,” you have to look at it from the vantage point of the beginning. You have to remember that God was on site before you were. You are an incessant interpreter, always making sense out of life. You were designed to receive his wisdom, not figure out life on your own; and you’re always worshipping something.

     These facts will make sense out of what you face every day.

For more information on this topic read Paul Tripp’s book – Broken Down House: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad – click here for more information.