The Titanic
Imagine it’s 1912, and you’re preparing to board the Titanic, touted as the unsinkable ship. The confidence you feel is unparalleled, and you’re ready for the voyage of a lifetime. Days pass with joy and excitement. But little do you know, the ship has been receiving iceberg warnings. Despite the warnings, your trust in the ship’s invincibility remains unshaken.
We all know how the Titanic’s story ends. Yet, we find a striking parallel to this tragic tale in our lives more often than we’d like to admit. Most people on the verge of ruining their lives have no awareness of it–or worse, we are ignoring the clear warning signs around us. Perhaps you’ve seen it unfold around you, or maybe you’ve been there yourself.
The greatest danger lies in believing we are unsinkable, for it’s precisely when we think we couldn’t possibly be in danger that we become most susceptible. Proverbs 14:12 reminds us: “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death.” What we need is a radical reorientation centered on Jesus Christ– what we call salvation.
The Wisdom Of God In The Foolishness Of The Cross
This series will dive into Psalm 49, a Psalm of reorientation, which speaks of God’s wisdom descending from above. Wisdom is practical knowledge, the ability to live well. To understand how to live in a world that belongs to Jesus Christ, we must study His cross because it reflects the wisdom of Jesus. Dying becomes the path to true life.
The good news for those of us teetering on the brink of disaster is that wisdom from above arrived in the person of Jesus Christ. He descended into our folly and bore the consequences of our foolishness on the cross. To avoid ruining our lives, we must embrace the folly of the cross, for it’s there that we find true wisdom.
So, here we begin our journey through 9 ways to ruin my life, and our first stop is a common pitfall:
#1- Believe that I am the exception
“Hear this, all peoples! Give ear, all inhabitants of the world, both low and high, rich and poor together! My mouth shall speak wisdom; the meditation of my heart shall be understanding. I will incline my ear to a proverb; I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre.”- Psalm 49:1-4
It’s tempting to think that we’re the exception, that the rules don’t quite apply to us. We may believe that we’re enlightened, civilized, and essentially good people. But when God addresses us, He sees something different—all people together.
The quickest way to ruin my life is to fall into the trap of believing I’m the exception. This mindset often leads us to hold others to standards we don’t uphold ourselves. We apply what we read in the Bible to someone else’s life instead of our own. We talk more than we listen and teach more than we learn. We see “others” as those who need grace, rather than embracing our own need.
Consider a personal story from my college days. I thought I could outsmart the system by getting fewer parking tickets than the cost of a parking pass. When I approached my dad after my fourth ticket, expecting understanding, he asked, “What makes you think you’re above the rules? Are you better than everyone else?” I ended up paying double in the end. That was the cost of believing that I was the exception.
The Cross Of Christ
The message of the cross is clear: we’ve all sinned. Jesus died because every one of us was helpless and hopeless, having rebelled against God. To see ourselves as exceptions is to exclude ourselves from the group of the saved.
Believing I’m the exception is a surefire way to ruin my life.
