Hidden Where Moths Cannot Reach

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. (Colossians 3:3, WEB)

There is a way of living where your whole sense of yourself rises and falls with your last twenty four hours. A clean stretch and you feel like a real Christian; a fall and you feel like a fraud who has been fooling everyone. It is exhausting to have your identity sitting out in the open like that, exposed to every wind, revalued every night by whatever you did or did not do. You never get to rest, because the verdict is always being recalculated.

Paul writes to men who were learning to follow Jesus, and he tells them, For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. That word hidden is worth staying with. Something hidden in God is put somewhere no failure can reach it and no accuser can steal it. Your truest life, the part of you that matters most, is not on display for the shame to attack. It has been tucked away in a place you cannot even see clearly yourself, held by God.

This does not make sin harmless, and it does not mean the fight stops. There is still a battle to wage tomorrow, and it matters. But it means that when you lose a round, you have not lost yourself, because yourself was never being kept by you. The thing you are most afraid of losing is already out of your hands and into safer ones.

There is a strange relief in that, once you let it land. You are not the guard standing watch over your own soul through the night, jumping at every sound. God is the one keeping it, and he does not sleep. Tonight, if you feel emptied out, remember that the essential thing about you is somewhere safe, hidden with Christ in a God who does not lose what he holds. Rest a little in that, and let him guard what he is keeping.