The person who loses his life for my sake will find it.

 

Saturday, October 7, 2023


Psalm 90

1 Kings 19:9-21

Matthew 10:28-42


The person who loses his life for my sake will find it.


True fulfilment – the aspiration of human happiness and worth – is found in service. To do something for another lies deep in the soul of every human being. Even the local community radio station asks for donations with the promise of “that warm fuzzy feeling” in return. Serving someone else at our own expense isn’t an interruption on our happy and comfortable lives; those happy and comfortable lives are a rubbish tip blocking our way, stopping us from being truly human by giving up our lives in service.


Consider what it must have been like for Adam and Eve during that unknowable amount of time of innocence in the Garden before they listened to the liar. Every second of their life spent in pure contentment and fulfilment – every second of their life spent in obedient service to God. This is what we were made for, to serve God, and to think nothing of ourselves. The liar told them that they could be happy thinking of themselves, and become “like God”; but no-one is like God. God is not only the giver of good things, but the source of goodness itself.


When Christ came as a human being, His mission was to be completed in the ultimate display of obedient service to God. “Not my will, but yours” He prayed, as He sweated blood on the night of His betrayal. To be obedient in service to God to death – even death on a cross – is the purest, clearest display of how we should expect our own service to God to be like. Because not even death can hold down they who would die in the service of God.


To look for our life under our own terms is to lose it – we have no power over life or death, let alone something as simple as how best to spend an afternoon off work. But God has the power, the wisdom, the knowledge and the love to bestow upon us, should we do what He asks. Not only that, it is the reason we exist in the first place: to find our lives by giving ourselves to God.

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