The one who models this the best is Jesus. Just stop and think of how secure He was. Granted, He was the perfect God-Man, but part of the miracle of the incarnation was that He experienced everything you and I experience without letting it destroy Him. He was despised and rejected, laughed at, scorned, betrayed, beaten, spit upon, and crucified. In a way, He took Himself very seriously. In another way, He did not take himself so seriously as to fall into Satan’s trap. He responded to the temptation to take Himself too seriously in human terms by quoting Scripture and defeating Satan’s power over Him.

I remember receiving Jesus Christ as my Savior as a 5-year-old. That was a very important time for me. Don’t ever minimize decisions our children can make for Jesus Christ at an early age.

At age 14, I came to the point where I was willing to surrender my life to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, realizing that not only was I privileged to have Jesus Christ as my Savior, but also as the Person in charge of my daily life.

It wasn’t until my senior year in college, as a 22-year-old, that I discovered that which went beyond the individualistic in the Christian faith. Dr. Richard C. Halverson came to my college for a spiritual emphasis week. He challenged us as young people to get into a covenant group and never to be without peer group accountability in any point in our life.

Covenant groups have been very important to me in the churches I’ve been privileged to serve. I was in a covenant group at Princeton Seminary. I’ve been in one in each of the churches I’ve served—Tulsa, Oklahoma; Key Biscayne, Florida, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and here. I’ve found in a covenant group relationship of peers that I’m forced to be honest, not allowed to take myself too seriously. In fact, I’ve gotten to the point that I can even begin to laugh at myself and my idiosyncrasies. Everybody knows I have them. Some of them I’ve worked to change. Some of them I’m afraid I’m just sort of stuck with. Frankly, it’s quite liberating not to take myself too seriously.

I had a most significant phone conversation the other night. One of my dear friends, who also has been a pastor, is a decade older than myself. I hadn’t been with him for several years. He had stopped by the church here hoping to see me a few weeks ago, and I was not in, so I gave him a phone call. During that call, talking to him and his wife, he broke through with one of the most amazing statements. He said he was experiencing some early dementia and would appreciate my prayers that he would be able to handle it wisely. He described, also, some debilitating hearing loss and some difficulty in driving. My instinctual reaction was, here’s a real man—a high achiever in life, yes, but one who is self-aware, not taking himself so seriously that he’s trying to cover up his humanity. What a privilege we have to be accountable to each other, to be able to chuckle at the changes of life we experience, and not to take our self too seriously.