Sainthood

I am apart of a class at my church based on Neil T. Anderson's book Victory over the Darkness, which is about learning your identity in Christ to overcome sin and live free in Christ. This week, we watched a clip from the movie Seabiscuit that taught a point about that identity in a powerful way. The background is that Seabiscuit is (was) a horse that was the progeny of Man of War, a very famous and successful race horse. Somehow, in the horse's early life it came to be determined by Seabiscuit's trainers that Seabiscuit was not going to be the thoroughbred they were hoping it would be. So what they did was they took it and made it a horse that ran with the thoroughbreds in practice but would lose at the end, a horse used for pacing but not for winning. So the horse was bred to lose. Seabiscuit carries that identity with it until when the action in the movie kicks up.

The scene we watched is when a trainer who has gotten ahold of the horse is trying to "sell" the horse's value to prospective owners. Seabiscuit runs on the track, but we see it flying it every which way. The trainer, frustrated but convinced the horse is truly a thoroughbred, directs the jockey to take the horse out into the countryside. He says to the jockey, "Just take him out and let him run." "He just needs to learn how to be a horse again." The scene ends with an ecstatic jockey whooping and hollering as he and the horse fly through the countryside.

What made sense to me there was that God's design on us, how He structured us, predates whatever other parties may have intended for us and pushed us towards. Based on his bloodlines, Seabiscuit was meant to be a winner. But the trainers, not knowing better, pushed upon him the stigma or the identity of "loser." He was bred to lose, so given the chance to run, what he naturally did was lose. The analogy I see is that we too have been bred to lose. Satan gets in early in all of our lives and works to put on us an identity that will keep us losing. In formative experiences early on, we learn that our identity is bad through some involvement he has with our lives. We begin to hear that it is our role to lose. We become trained in it and start to live it out, time and time again. (I am making this specific point about the devil's involvement in our lives, ie training us one way when it is not our path to go that way. It is also true that in Adam we were born to lose. Truly. Saying "in Adam" means in our natural state, still apart from Christ. Sin in all mankind sets him up for certain failure. In this analogy, however, I am focusing on how those in Christ are affected by an identity that is not true of them. Those in Christ, though in God's eyes a success, can be living as though they weren't. It is that aspect I am focusing on.)

So like Seabiscuit, we too were bred to lose. However, God had a design on those who are in Christ to be something else entirely, a winner, a success. And that design predates whatever influence to the contrary. This is why Paul can say, "God chose us in Him (in Christ) before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight." (Ephesians, NIV) So when we come into Christ through trusting in His life, death and resurrection for us, we are in the position of Seabiscuit. We are designed, now, for success, but we have been trained contrary to our true identity, and that training was to lose. The hope then is that under the right leadership, we too can run as we were meant to run. And as that happens, there is great JOY - for both us and God.