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Some people just have a way with words.
That includes Muhammad Ali, whose wit, wisdom, and sheer audacity place him near the top of any list of the most “quotable people” in the English language.
There wasn’t much in his childhood to presage such fame. Ali, who was born Cassius Clay, was the son of a billboard painter and domestic helper in Louisville, Kentucky. He struggled to read and write because of dyslexia.
At the age of 12, he became furious when someone stole his bike. He vowed to “whup” whoever was responsible. Providentially, the police officer who processed the theft was Joe E. Martin, who also happened to be a boxing coach. If Clay intended to start a fight, Martin suggested he ought to learn how to box.
What followed was history’s most spectacular pugilistic career.
Ali was far more than a champion in the ring. He became an ardent social activist and global icon. In the year 2000, Sports Illustrated named him Sportsman of the Century.
Along the way he helped pioneer the kind of “spoken word poetry” that gave birth to hip hop.
Some of his declarations sprang from trash-talking his boxing opponents. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, you can’t hit what your eyes don’t see.” Then there’s, “If you even dream of beating me you’d better wake up and apologize.”
It may be apocryphal, but I’ve always loved Ali’s conversation with a flight attendant who insisted that he fasten his seat belt. “Superman don’t need no seat belt,” he announced, loudly enough for others to hear. “Superman don’t need no airplane,” retorted the flight attendant. As the story is usually told, the champ fastened his belt.
With regard to perseverance, he noted, “It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you down. It’s the pebble in your shoe.”
He added, “Impossible is just a word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”
Ali was certain that all of us are called to outward-focused lives: “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
And he had an unyielding opinion about the priority of personal growth: “A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
Finally, “I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.”
Before we dismiss that last line as a childish boast, we should note how close it comes to an important strain of teaching in the New Testament.
All of us are tempted to believe certain fictions about our own lives. The late Catholic devotional writer Henri Nouwen famously presented what he called The Five Lies of Identity:
I am what I have.
If that’s true, what happens if you fail to wrap your hands around the best things in life? And what happens when all of your stuff inevitably begins to slip through your fingers?
I am what I do.
This is one of those unyielding lies at the heart of our show-me-your-resume culture. If we buy into it, then losing a job or experiencing the end of a career can feel devastating. Who am I now?
I am what other people say or think of me.
Believing the verdicts of co-workers, neighbors, social media followers – and even those who have pledged their love to us – is to risk surrendering our identity to people who cannot possibly know the depths of who we really are.
I am nothing more than my worst moment.
If so, then you will be tortured all your life by your biggest blunder. You may have made a grievous mistake. But that doesn’t mean that you, at the center of your being, are a grievous mistake.
I am nothing less than my best moment.
At the other end of the spectrum, you are not the highlight reel of your life that you post on social media.
If we routinely misunderstand our own identity and value, how can we ever know what it is? St. Francis of Assisi declared, “I am who I am in the sight of God. Nothing more, nothing less.”
How do we know who we are in the sight of God?
If you have trusted your life to Christ, Romans 8 says that you are forgiven, and free from condemnation (vs. 1,2); that all things in your life are working together for good (v. 28); and that you cannot be separated from God’s love (vs.37-39). God says in Philippians that he is going to finish what he has started in your life (1:6). You are not worthless, inadequate, helpless, or hopeless, since Scripture makes it clear that you are God’s temple (I Corinthians 3:16); that you are God’s co-worker in the kingdom (2 Corinthians 5:17-21); and that you may approach God with absolute freedom and confidence (Ephesians 3:12).
All of this has nothing to do with how you feel right now. It has everything to do with what God says about you right now.
Spiritual growth is the process of gradually replacing the broken ideas we’ve always assumed to be true with the Real Story about God, the world, and our own lives.
It doesn’t happen all at once. Sometimes we go two steps forward and three steps back.
But Muhammad Ali was definitely on to something when he said, “I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.” If we take God at his word, we can declare, “I am God’s dearly loved child” – and start livingas if that’s true – even before we “know,” in the depths of our souls, the fullness of what that even means.
The odds are pretty good you’ll never become a world champion at anything, let alone a global icon.
But you can get this one thing right:
You don’t have to waste 30 years of your life believing the same old lies about who you really are.