Saving lives, one step at a time

 This week's verses are Mark 8:34-37:

 Then Jesus called the crowd, along with his disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wants to become my follower, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me and because of the gospel will save it. For what benefit is it for a person to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his life? What can a person give in exchange for his life?

These are classic verses that every Christian has probably heard at least once. We like the sound of them, but there's no common experience to connect us to them. Most of us don't know anyone who has died for their faith. Even if we go back generations, we can't really think of any cases where someone was put to death for their Christianity.

And we don't really know what it is to be a follower in any deep sense. We follow people on social media. We follow TV series and authors. But we don't really follow people in sense of being devoted to learning from them. Except maybe people who quit their job to go join the circus.

We also don't really know how to deny ourselves. We live in a culture that encourages us to follow our dreams, and take the easy path, and indulge and reward ourselves. Nobody's choosing between eating and feeding the poor. We don't even skip dessert most of the time.

And we don't really know what it's like to take up our cross either. How many death-row criminals have you seen on their way to execution? In Jesus' time, when the Romans were constantly trying to put down insurrections, this would have been a very familiar experience for people. You'd be in town for something and you'd see police and yet another badly beaten guy dragging some heavy lumber to the edge of town, and you knew what happened next. You didn't ask questions.

We don't know any of these experiences. Not following someone as their disciple. Not saying no to ourselves. Not the humiliation of the perp walk and being brutally beaten with nobody to stand up for you. And definitely not being killed for doing what's right. So we hear these verses, and we run our fingers over the surface of them, and admire them, but we don't really know what to do with them.

But if those verses are hard for us to take to heart, what Jesus says next is even worse. He says that we have to give ourselves up and die in order to be saved and have eternal life. It sounds like Yoda talking. Even if you diagram it out, it doesn't make sense. But if you tell someone who is in a bad skid that they need to turn the wheel to go straight, they're not going to believe you either.

He says if we try to hold onto what we have, we will lose it all. But if we hold onto him to the abandonment of all else, we will live forever as who we were meant to be. If we lose our soul to gain our stuff, our stuff won't be enough in the end to buy back our soul.

Your soul is priceless. Only God can afford to ransom it back.

It's so much to take in, we almost need to read them backwards to make sense of them.

 

What is it that we are willing to give God up for so that we can get it? Think of the church service you planned to attend, the prayer and contemplation time you planned to have, or whatever it was that you didn't get to, or didn't even consider in the first place. What did you choose instead?

 

When you became aware that someone in your life was not a Christian, and you found reasons not to share your faith with them, what were they? What were you afraid of losing? What was the life or the privilege you were trying to hold onto instead?

 

And when you have a chance to help someone, and are asked to give more than the time or cost you would have budgeted, what is your strategy? Where is the breaking point of your goodness and compassion? Where is the point in the road where Jesus continues on ahead and you turn and find somewhere more comfortable to be?

 

What selfish priorities and wicked things do you hold in reserve and wall off from others? What are the habits you won't change, the things you won't give up, and so on. The non-negotiables that never get put before God.

If we want to follow Jesus, he needs to be front and center. We need to position our lives to pursue God on the path he has for us even to the point of death, if that is required to stay on the path. Because if we find ourselves condemned, and it is the end of our days, what are we going to offer to pay our way out? 

 

Take inventory and ask yourself, of all of the things you have managed to acquire and produce, of all of the things at your disposal after a lifetime of "doing you," what you could possibly offer to God to save your life in those circumstances? There's nothing.

These verses are worth meditating on regularly. We need to spend some time in them if we are going to really understand our place in eternity. Take some time this week and read through them, with all the hard questions, and ask God's help to keep moving forward without turning to run for your life.