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Whether you have or have not watched The Lion King, you probably have heard the phrase hakuna matata, which means “no worries”.

The movie begins with Simba being presented to the animal kingdom as the future king. For the first half hour or so, Simba is growing up while Scar, the king’s brother, schemes to rip it away from both his brother Mufasa and his nephew.

Scar is successful in his schemes and takes control of the Pride Lands by murdering his brother along with attempting to do the same to Simba.

Simba finds paradise away from all of his problems and his past along with learning how to eat bugs while he grows into a young lion. For the rest of his youth, he lives by the phrase hakuna matata to keep his haunted memories at bay.

Life is easy until his childhood friend, Nala, shows up and tells him he must return and accept his responsibility as rightful king.

Simba isn’t immediately convinced. He would rather keep living his life, worry free, and leaving his past in the past.

Do you ever feel like Simba?

Do you try to push everything away – your fears, your insecurities, the skeletons in your closet –  in order to live a “worry-free” life?

That would be nice . . .  in the short run.

But at the end of the day, Simba would not be satisfied until he has accomplished what he was born to do and who he was born to become – king.

We were all born to become someone – a child of the true King of Kings.

The Apostle Paul writes this to the church of Ephesus, a church that faced persecution:

“Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son.” (Ephesians 1:4-6)

We have a destiny and a purpose, like the sun rises and sets each morning, to be holy and to be adopted into God’s family.

With this great purpose, we cannot simply hakuna matata through life.

We must face the facts, like Simba did through the help of his friend Rafiki, that God not only lives within us through the indwelling of his Holy Spirit, but he also has a great purpose for us.

What does the application of that look like?

It is to bring light into the world through love and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

John writes, “God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us.” (1 John 4:9-12)

The salvation God freely gives is an assurance of his love for us, AND it causes us to love fully and completely. We can be free from sin’s bondage.

Because of that amazing promise, we can face our fears or whatever we have hiding in our closets that we are ashamed of, like Simba was ashamed of and felt responsible for the death of his father.

Because only then can we move forward from our fears, our shame, our past and embrace the purpose God has for us.

In love and truth,
Melody

Copyright © 2020 Melody Turner @ https://mxtv.org/hakuna-matata-lie/. Used with permission. No part of this article may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from Lifeword.org