What COVID-19 Reveals About Us
Photo by Clay Banks
Written by Asaya Azah, a member of the Becoming the One leadership team
COVID-19, also known as the Wuhan coronavirus, has taken center stage in our once seemingly normal lives.
Schools have shut down. Businesses have closed. Air travel has ceased. We’re stocking up our refrigerators, buying everything in sight. Mass hysteria has clouded our judgment to where we find ourselves fighting over an item like toilet tissue—of all things.
Being someone who likes to observe human behavior, I can only ask: What exactly are we afraid of? Is it really about contracting this virus or is it something much deeper?
As I’ve explored these questions, there’s only one conclusion I’ve determined.
COVID-19 makes us face the very thing we fear the most—our mortality.
But why? From a scientific and experiential standpoint, we understand that death is a part of life.
Yet there’s still this part of us that believes we can somehow escape it and live here on earth forever. However, this just isn’t reality. This life we’re currently experiencing was meant to be only for a moment in time. While some of us may be here longer than others, in the end, we’ll all come to our natural conclusion. It’s just life.
I’m not trying to make you feel depressed about this reality, but rather I want you to understand that even though COVID-19 is real and active in our world, that doesn’t mean we have to live in fear, especially of dying.
Contrary to what some may believe, there’s an answer to this fear and His name is Jesus.
When we can get to the place where we understand that knowing Jesus as Lord brings us to the end of ourselves—we no longer fear our mortality.
When we exchange our selfish nature, our personal pursuits, and relying on our own human intellect as to how to do life and adopt His nature, His pursuits, and His intellect, suddenly we become like the prophet John who once said, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30 NKJV). This was a type of death, a dying to self, that John experienced and it serves as a model for us today.
The apostle Paul further clarified this point while speaking to the church in Galatia:
I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
Paul’s words remind us that when we make the decision to follow Jesus, we’re choosing to conduct ourselves according to His standard of living and not our own.
Just as Jesus sacrificed His very own life for us, so we, too, must sacrifice our nature to share in intimacy with Him.
I love what John Bevere said on this subject in his book Good or God?:
No longer are we independent, feeding from the tree of our evaluation of what is good and evil. No, we now live in Him, our very life drawn from Him. We depend on the provision of the cross: freedom from slavery so we can now live an obedient life empowered by God.
In the absence of faith, fear exists.
And if we truly believe we’re the sons and daughters of the living God, then fear has no place in our lives because His perfect love for us casts out all fear.
So live a beautiful and courageous life, my friend. One that glorifies the God who’s in you, so that others may see that when you live for Jesus, there’s nothing to fear, even death.
As we continue to deal with the challenges presented by COVID-19, may we find comfort in the words of our heavenly Father:
Do not fear what they fear (Isa. 8:12).
The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction, but we who are being saved know it is the very power of God (1 Cor. 1:18).
God has not given us a spirit of fear—but of power, love, and a sound mind (2 Tim. 1:7).
Be strong and courageous! Don’t be afraid or discouraged, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go (Josh. 1:9).
Asaya Azah is a member of the Becoming the One leadership team and the author of Unscripted: The Journey to Self-Discovery.
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