Top Billing (Friday Devotional)

“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.”

- Romans 12:2-3

Somewhere in America, a little girl is standing in front of her mirror rehearsing the speech she hopes to give someday when she wins the Academy Award for Best Actress. In another part of the country, a film student is daydreaming in class about the day he gets the call saying he’s won Best Director. And in pretty much every coffee shop in our nation, there’s somebody sipping their third latte and ironing out a tricky scene in what they feel certain will one day win Best Screenplay.

But I’m willing to bet that no one goes to sleep at night dreaming of winning Best Supporting Actor or Best Supporting Actress. Don’t get me wrong, an Oscar’s an Oscar, and I’m sure it would be the thrill of a lifetime for any young actor to even be nominated for such a prestigious award. But we’re talking about dreams here, and nobody dreams of playing second fiddle. In our minds, we always get top billing.

After all, it’s human nature to imagine yourself as the protagonist of your life story…it is everyone around you who are the ancillary characters, there to encourage you, challenge you, and yes, support you. Particularly when inconvenience and trouble rear their heads, as author David Foster Wallace once pointed out, “my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and [it seems] for all the world like everybody else is just in my way.”

There is an ugliness to that kind of thinking, a self-centeredness that we recognize with no small degree of discomfort. But in Christ, we are freed from that default way of thinking, freed from loving ourselves more than anyone else. By grace you can be transformed by the renewing of your mind, able and willing to truly love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. By grace you can see the people in your life—not just your family and friends, but even the strangers you barely notice—not merely as bit players in your story, but as people created in the image of God, as your neighbors. And by grace you can then love those neighbors as you love yourself.

Our world is full of idols to worship, but none are as immediate, as personal, and as tempting as the one in the mirror. In Jesus’s name, resist the siren call of self-centeredness. Give top billing instead to God and to your neighbor—after all, in the kingdom of God, it is the supporting actors who receive the greatest reward of all.