Make Ya Famous

In the 1989 film Young Guns Emilio Estevez plays the character Billy the Kid. One of the most memorable and quoted lines from the film comes when ‘Billy’ threatens to shoot someone and says, “I’ll make ya famous.”  Billy is suggesting the person would rise in notoriety in being added to his lengthy list of scoundrels who had died as a result of his prowess and savvy as a gunslinger.

C.S. Lewis notes that there is another kind of fame that is transtemporal, eternal, and bestowed upon the children of God by God Himself, “fame with God, approval or (I might say) appreciation by God.”  The truth of this divine accolade comes from Scripture in multiple places, but possibly most explicit in Matt 25:21: “The master was full of praise, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant…’”

The idea of floating on clouds and playing harps for all eternity is rather depressing for all of us. Contrastingly, the idea of spending eternity intimately connected to the exclusive Source of all life, goodness, and glory unleashes endless possibilities that the most imaginative thinkers and dreamers cannot begin to touch.

Oswald Chambers put this in very practical terms, “Consecration is our part, sanctification is God’s part, and we have deliberately to determine to be interested only in that in which God is interested.”

Let this Christmas season be a time when you invite God to expand His fame in and through you as a “good and faithful servant.”  If you have difficulty in imagining what that looks like in day-to-day living, consider the Apostle Paul’s words from Galatians 6:14, “But as for me, I will never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world.”

Jesus said it like this, “Greater love has no one than this; that one should lay down their life for their friends.”

Blessings,

-Kevin