We humans love our opinions. We have opinions about everything! If you don’t believe me, just ask someone for their opinion on anything, and I guarantee you will get an answer. Our opinions create our identity, or so we believe. It’s who we are. They run the gamut from food, style, décor, geography, language, and politics. And that’s just scratching the surface! Our opinions color each of our days. They control what we eat, who we’ll talk to, and what we’ll say.
To the casual observer, we are the sum of our opinions. You might say they are what make you unique. So, when Jesus invades our lives, it can be a most uncomfortable revelation to discover we must surrender our opinions to Him. Not just some of them. Not just those we hold to with a little less ferocity. All of them. If we want to follow Jesus, we must die to our opinions and allow Him to replace them with His own.
As we come through another election season in America, opinions have never been more on display. I did not encounter many politically neutral people. Everyone held an opinion and usually clung to it with passion. Somewhere throughout the process, we forgot that as we die to ourselves each day, that death includes our opinions. We are not our own. Jesus paid the ultimate price for our souls, and we belong to Him. We can reject Him as Savior, but it does not change the fact that He is Lord of all. Being Lord of all encompasses our opinions as well. We can hold nothing back from Him.
Our opinions don’t matter in the end. All that will remain is truth. As the Creator and embodiment of truth, that means only Jesus matters. Which person or party inhabits Washington D.C. – or any city or nation – means nothing in the grand scheme of eternity. It just doesn’t matter. God remains sovereign over all of history. He has delivered His people through far worse times. He will deliver us today.
These are hard words for some. If you’ve spent years or decades entrenched in your opinions, be they political or something else, you may not realize you haven’t surrendered them to Jesus. You are convinced you are right, and that the opinion you hold is Scripturally sound. You might be correct, but the point is, it doesn’t matter. The only opinion that matters is God’s opinion of You. You are His child, loved eternally, and created in His image. If we are not living in love and seeing every person in the world as having infinite worth in Christ, we are living for our own opinions and not God’s.
Letting go is not easy. If it was, everyone would do it. But if we want our lives to look like Jesus, if we are serious about living our lives wholly devoted to Him, we must die to our opinions. We must die to everything, obey His every word, and love others as ourselves (Mark 12:28-31). As you engage with people today, let go of your opinions. Focus on Jesus and what He would have you do and say. Our opinions are relics of our life before Christ. Today, only Jesus matters.