Jesus showed mercy when He died on the cross. As a Christ-follower, do I show mercy by putting myself aside and focus on the needs of others?
The Holy Spirit longs to guide and teach us, to help us with our walk to know God and to become all the God intended us to be. Am I allowing this to happen in my life or am I rejecting His lead?
Yeah. I am sure many of you ask these same questions. Some days the answers to these questions are much more pleasing to the ego than other days...that being said, what is "ego"?
Ego could be defined as "excessive self-esteem" or from a psychoanalytical aspect, ego could be defined as "that part of the mind that encompasses self-consciousness and memory that determines a person's behaviour in reality", or from a Freudian perspective, ego is "the part of the personality that takes rational account of external reality in the expression of instinctive sexual and aggressive urge"(-thank you Psyc 101). In Freudian theory, Ego fits between Id (desire) and Superego (morality) as it mediates between the two...but that's for another posting...
Back to "ego." I will define ego as "excessive self-esteem" in this posting. We are all prone to excessive self-esteem as some point in our lives and some more than others. Now one would think that Jesus would have full control over ego because the term "excessive" is usually determined as a negative descriptive to this phrase. No one (that I know of anyways) runs around complimenting others' "excessive self-esteem"...not without sarcasm dripping from their words. So, we could assume that Jesus struggled with controlling ego just as we do, but that He was able to exercise healthy self-esteem versus excessive self-esteem. How did He do that??
I mean, He was an exceptional child...no sin, the ideal, well behaved, model of a child...I have read stories where people try to recreate what Jesus might have been like as a child. Anne Rice, in her novel Christ the Lord Out of Egypt, creates a situation where Jesus gets frustrated with a bully and accidentally kills him, and of course raises him back to life. Now, I have trouble with that concept; however, it apparently makes for a good story. Still, if Jesus was brought up to be the model child, and (wait for it...) the model teenager...
...Oh, sorry, I was caught up in a utopian moment...where was I?
Right. Jesus, becoming an ideal model of a man...
How did he do it? How was it that He kept his ego in check? Did He surround himself with ideal family members...that must have been quite a family. And what about His friends? How is it that they had little influence on forming His personality? And what about the miracles??? Anybody else performing the miracles Jesus performed would be heading for a collision with an inflated ego at some point, surely!
But Jesus avoided that. And I am fairly confident I know how....Do you?
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