Don’t get mad at me, I am not the one who said it, He is! Jesus said in Matthew 10:39, “Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Oh, how I long to “live” and in doing so miss life altogether at times, at least the life Jesus intended for me! What a ride I have been on struggling to make this life work. I find myself wondering…What more can I do, what else can I try, where else can I turn, what else will make this emptiness go away? I wonder how much time and energy I have spent “finding life?” Sad to say, no doubt many more hours and much more energy than I even care to know. I have spent years and years looking for “life.” A life of contentedness, joy, fulfillment, purpose, meaning, etc.. It is not the gain of life that offers me such things, it is the loss of life for the sake of Christ.
Oh come on…there must be more to this life aside from Christ. How long will it take for this wandering heart to be convinced? I must resolve this matter, less I miss the “life” altogether. No longer do I desire for my joy and happiness to be contingent upon things looked forward to. May my joy come from deliberately losing this life only to find a more abundant life in Christ as I strive to follow Him more and more with each passing day.
So, let me get this right… are you telling me that dying to self is what gives life? When I become nothing, I gain everything? Such questions have me almost spinning in circles, wondering what have I done? How much time have I wasted? After all, there is nothing I hold onto more than this life. How ironic is it that it is the very thing that needs to die. Why do I insist on resuscitating it? Why do I insist on laying my life down on the altar for God and then keep crawling off? Maybe out of will or determination to make it work?
Am I living to die or dying to live?
Pastor Andy Veith
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