Guess Who Said This...

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

Was it:

a. John Wayne
b. Ayn Rand
c. Joseph Campbell
d. Benjamin Franklin
e. Steve Jobs
f. Howard Hughes

Before I give you the answer, let me tell you what I think of the statement. There are three parts to it:

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." True enough. Tamar Jacobson has recently written of her lifetime penchant for "matching up" with others. What Tamar calls "matching up," I call "comparing myself to others."

Sadly, I do this all the time in so many ways:

• If a "successful" pastor is pursuing a particular program, I decide, at least momentarily, that I need to ape what she or he is doing.
• If I read of someone my age attaining a notable success in some field, I beat myself up for having wasted my life.
• If I hear someone berating their spouse for faults, real or imagined, I get puffed up inside, telling myself how wonderful I am by comparison.

It's a deadly game. And it's stupid. God has made each of us one-of-a-kind, no matter how the demographers, pollsters, marketing experts, and sociologists may think they have us figured out. In the Old Testament portion of the Bible, King David marveled at how he had been "fearfully and wonderfully made" by God. In the New Testament, the great preacher and thinker Paul acknowledged his deficiencies, marveled that God would call him to fulfill some purpose in God's plans for the world, and said that by God's grace--God's undeserved favor and charity--"I am what I am."

Paul would agree with our mystery speaker: "Don't waste your time by living someone else's life." Be the best you can be! Don't accept somebody else's blueprint for your life.

Then, our mystery person said, "Don't be trapped by dogma which is living with the results of other people's thinking."

I love this! Generals, it's said, must fight the impulse to prepare for and fight the last war. Classic examples of this might be the way the French tried to forestall the invading Nazi armed forces during World War Two, the manner in which the British tried to combat the American Revolution, or, some would say, the way the US fought the war in Vietnam. In each case, the generals in charge used sound military strategies...for a previous conflict, but not the one they were fighting.

This is true for more than just generals. Corporations gain success and grow, only to become staid, rusty, and ungainly when new technologies come along. Politicians keep offering the same old tried-and-true formulae long after they're relevant to what's going on in the world. I could go on, but you get the idea.

A commitment to avoiding the traps of old dogmas and common thinking must go beyond the window dressings of tactics and strategies, though.

I always tell the people of our congregation that if there is one word I would use to describe the internal dynamic of the Christian life, that word would be change. "Behold, I make all things new," God declares in the Bible. In one of my favorite New Testament passages, Paul says that if anyone is "in Christ Jesus," a phrase meaning, if a person is following Christ Jesus, "there is a new creation," the old has passed away.

In the Bible lesson that we'll be looking at in our worship this weekend, Jesus calls people, in a literal translation of the New Testament Greek, to "Keep on repenting and keep on believing in the good news."

To repent is to change one's mind. Jesus says that we're to keep on changing our minds. That doesn't mean that we're to become inveterate flip-floppers, changing our basic life philosophies like chameleons change colors. It does mean that when we're taking the wrong road--morally, ethically, attitudinally--and when we're in ruts that take us far from growing as a living God would want us to grow, we need to say, "God, I can't seem to go the right way. Please turn my life around." I've seen God answer that prayer many times...every day in my life, in fact!

Finally, our mystery speaker said, "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

There are a lot of voices telling us what to do and how to live our lives. But are we any better off when we listen to that inner voice to which the speaker refers? I don't think so.

You see, whether the voices are those of other people or our own, they have something in common: They all belong to finite, faulty human beings.

It's so much better to listen to God. "Your Word," the Old Testament says, referring to the Scriptures, "is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." The Bible, we Lutheran Christians says, is the authoritative source and norm of our life, faith, and practice. The Bible is God's Word because it tells us all about The Word of God--the One the Gospel of John calls the Word of God: Jesus Christ.

The sixty-six books that compose the Bible are called the canon, a term that means basically, the measuring rod. We measure our lives and thoughts and actions against it.

When we feel laid low by our finitude or sin, we turn to the Bible and find that God is for finite, sinful human beings. In Christ, He went to a cross to die and rise in order to give new lives to just such people.

When we feel depressed, the Bible shows us that "God is love."

When we feel arrogant, we learn that God calls us to be servants to each other.

On the Bible's pages, we learn that the ultimate expression of our humanity is to love God and to love others. We learn too, that when we fail to express our humanity in love, God is quick to forgive the repentant and quick to help us become all that He had in mind when He made us.

Listen to our inner voice? Every time I've done that, my life has gone wrong. Listen to God's voice? Every time I've done that, my life has gone right.

One other thing about the Word: There are lots of things on its pages that I can't explain. I don't understand all the wars in the Old Testament, for example. I don't know why God demanded that Abraham sacrifice his son, Isaac. (Thankfully, God later told him not to do this barbaric act.) I can't explain the seeming inconsistencies that we find in certain places in the Bible.

But this is what I've decided about all those things I can't understand: I acknowledge them and don't allow them to get in the way of my faith or my relationship with God.

Mark Twain once observed that lots of people stew over the things they can't understand in the Bible, but that what worried him were the things he could understand. Twain was an atheist. But I can say the same thing as a Christian.

Besides, I know enough of God's grace through Christ to know that God will never be critical of me for the things I don't understand. After all, I'm only human and the Bible says that God remembers always that we are "ashes." It's far more important to live on the basis of what we do understand in the Scriptures. (I am highly deficient on this score, something about which I pray every day.)

So, while I like our mystery speaker's first two statements, I find the last one very American, actually very human. Who said it?

It was Steve Jobs, quoted in today's New York Times. But, I'll wager, that in one way or another, every one of the folks listed in our multiple choice quiz could have said it.