Living for God After 20 Years

I watched about fifteen minutes of Oprah's 20th anniversary show yesterday. That's about all I could stand. An entire hour of television devoted to praising the accomplishments of one person seemed rather mind-numbingly dull for some reason. Of the fifteen minutes that I did see however, there was a short segment where Oprah read an entry from her journal 20 years ago on the eve before her first show. It was rather shocking. The entry spoke of how she could sense a big shift in her life and of something big about to happen. She didn't know the details, but felt like something great was about to occur. Certainly anyone who knows anything about our culture, knows that she certainly was correct in that assupmtion. Something big was about to happen in her life. I couldn't help but notice though, as she spoke praises to her own accomplishment, that producers edited out part of the segment. They removed her verbally reciting the phrases in her journal that alluded to living her life fully for God and doing all through the power of Christ. (You could read these parts of the entry that she wasn't reading aloud on the screen). The shocking part of this segment is not that Oprah knew in advance that she might see success in her endeavors, but more that somewhere along the way, she has lost focus on the One who truly instigates those paths in our lives. I knew she believed in a god....but THE GOD? Her show often refers to god in some sort of a third person sense. Someone who is nice to reference once in a while because it can be a quick answer to hard questions, but never someone who is deeply personal, loving, and fully entitled to all of the glory in any one person's accomplishments.

I think my question is, at what point did Oprah remove the true God from the context of her life and success? The easy answer would be when she started to make money. While partially true and fully biblical for that matter, I think there must be something else attributing to her own self-righteousness. There must be some place even outside of financial reward in the journey to worldly success that causes many a believer to compromise their complete reliance on the One who created them. I think that there is something internal that would serve as the better answer. Something about man's fallen nature and inherited ability to always elevate his own ego when things are good and blame others when they are not. To say the "good" that we do in life is because of God and for Christ alone, takes away that sense of self-elevating joy in accomplishment and breeds true humility which is probably why so many like Oprah fall victim. The world lifts up those who can "pull themselves up by the bootstraps" and succeed, not the truly humble at spirit.