You Got Owned!

I am not particularly a fan of trash talk, but I kind of like this statement. But only if you backed it up. When you own someone in a game you totally dominate them, which I am a fan of. I love it when LSU owns an opponent. I love it when I own Jonathan Ickles in basketball, football, etc. Particularly I like to own Jonathan because he is a fan of trash talk and I love him dearly.

So all that said; I want to get to the actual point of this blog. How does this “You got owned” statement have anything to do with our spiritual lives?

Well I have been preaching on “Stuff” this month. I hope the people of Fellowship learn some great truths about who God is and how he wants us to handle stuff. The key verse to this series is found in Psalm 24 and states “the Earth is the Lords and everything in it; The world and all who dwell with in.”

What exactly is God’s? Well, everything. God owns everything and he owns everyone. The problem is that we don’t like being owned. Every person rebels against someone else being in control or in charge of their lives. We want to make up our own rules. We want to do it our own way.

It is natural. All 3 of my kids already have this sickness. We first hear it like this, “I do it!” We are not even capable of saying what we are doing much less capable of doing it ourselves, but everybody just better stand back because “I DO IT!” We all want to do life our way. We want to live by our rules.

The problem with this mentality is that it does not work. It never has. It is what happened to Adam and Eve. Sometimes I want to yell at them because they only had ONE rule. Do not eat from this particular tree. The rest of it is fair game. But what did they do. They made their own rules. The problem is that they did not own the Garden of Eden. Honestly, they did not own anything.

So Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden. They had to go. They had not followed the rules for life in the Garden and knowledge of good and evil disallowed them from eating of the tree of life.
God gave them new rules. He gave them clothes. He gave them new shelter. He still provided, but the beauty of his ownership of them was lost. He had made them stewards of the Garden and now what they had to steward was not plush and abundant. Their work was harder.
Man has lived that way ever since. We live our lives rebelling against the owner ship of God not realizing that he owns it all whether we acknowledge it or not. We make ourselves miserable coming up with our own plans and ideals and them not working.

But then maybe, just maybe, we find comfort in such a truth as this. “You are no longer your own. You have been bought with a price.” Jesus paid the price for us. We have been owned, but to experience it we have to allow it. We have to allow He who is the Lord of everything without our approval to be the Lord over our everything by our approval. I am not sure why the Lord allows that. I am not sure why he gave us choice. I am not sure why he gave us the right to be wrong. But some of us need to quit using that right so often.

Today, consider this. When Jesus is Lord of your life he owns you. He is the king and ruler of you. You are his. That might sound like hell to you to give over the ownership of your life, but the truth is there is no greater freedom found in all the world. When your life becomes the property of God it is no longer a burden to figure out but a blessing to experience.

Jesus could have yelled at the serpent from the tomb on Easter Sunday, You Got Owned, but that is not his style. He dominates in a way like no other. The cool thing is when you allow him to own you – there is no trash talk just love. Sure he might rebuke you, but it is love. He might every once in a while put a spiritual beat down on you, but it is all love.

The best day of my life is the day I got owned. How’s your game?

(Just remember – its not really a game.)

P.S. In honor the mentioning of Jonathan Ickles in this post, I hope the Eagles own the Super Bowl this year.