Billionaire

Tim Keller, in his chapter The Two Advocates (from Encounters with Jesus), challenges believers as to whether we really believe that, "right here and now, through the Holy Spirit, you can see Christ and know his presence and his love better than the apostles could in that moment in the upper room." (John 13-16)

 Keller:

If you're a Christian, it's likely that you're not living as if that is true. You probably don't know the magnitude of what is being offered to you in the Holy Spirit. Imagine you're a billionaire, and you have three ten-dollar bills in your wallet. You get out of a cab, and you hand the driver one of the bills...Later in the day you look in and find out there's only one ten-dollar bill there, and you say, "Either I dropped a ten-dollar bill somewhere, or I gave the taxi driver two bills." What are you going to do? Are you going to get all upset? Are you going to disrupt the rest of your day? Are you going to the police and demand they search the city for the cabdriver? No, you are going to shrug. You're a billionaire. You lost ten dollars. So what? You are too rich to be concerned about that kind of loss.

This week, somebody criticized you. Something you bought or invested in turned out to be less valuable than you thought. Something you wanted to happen didn't go the way you wanted it to. Someone you counted on let you down. These are real losses- of you reputation, of your material wealth, of your hopes. But what are you going to do, if you're a Christian? Will this setback disrupt your contentment with life? Will you shake your fist at God? Toss and turn at night? If so, I submit that it's because you don't know how truly rich you are. You are not listening to the second Advocate [the Holy Spirit, John 15.26-16.15] about your First Advocate [Jesus, 1 John 2.1] You are not living in joy. You are forgetting that the only eyes in the universe that matter see you not as the "phony little fake" you have sometimes been, but as a person of captivating beauty. If you're that upset about your status with other people, if you're constantly lashing out at people for hurting your feelings, you might call it a lack of self-control or a lack of self-esteem, and it is. But more fundamentally, you have totally lost touch with your identity. As a Christian, you're a spiritual billionaire and you're wringing your hands over ten dollars. It's the job of the second Advocate to argue with you in the court of your heart, to make the case about who you are in Christ, to show that you're rich. And it's your job to listen.