Sunday, February 5, 2012

Chuck it


1/17/2012
Mark 8:35

“For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and the gospel will save it.”

Interpretation: Our generation has been taught self-preservation from the very beginning. We plaster pictures of ourselves all over facebook, we read Self Magazine, we can’t turn on the TV without being bombarded with advertisements for new shiny special nothings that we simply must consume. And it’s not our fault, necessarily, that’s the way our generation has been raised; We’ve been brainwashed into thinking we have to have our best friends surrounding us, need to stock up on things to comfort us, and if something bad happens we can always keep our pride and good reputations by finding people to agree with us or hey- going and buying more stuff. Have to HAVE to make you feel okay. But here, Jesus is telling us to LOSE if we want to truly have. What does this mean? So I grew up being Meg, had a decent fake reputation mask I put on every morning that kept me feeling secure in my life. But there was always a driving desire in me to have more. No matter how much I had I still wanted more. Sound like you? If it doesn’t … you’re lying. It’s in our blood man! Sin nature tells us that we want what we want and we’ll sin to get it. Take it back to Genesis when Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She disobeyed God to do her own thing... to “find herself.” So once God made it clear to me that I am a desperate sinner in need of the truth, it was clear that the “Meg mask” needed to be cast into the fire. We need to die so that Christ can live. We need to give so that love can spread. Us trying to save our lives is disobedience. This scripture, this truth, spoken by the one and only true loving God, Jesus Christ, tells us plainly that if we continue to build up our little lives with friends or family or possessions or whatever it is that we thought made us “us,” We are going to lose. But there is hope for the person who understands true love and what Christ did for them personally on a cross, for the person who surrenders all over in faith to this perfect will of our perfect God, the person who sacrifices that man-pleasing mask for the sake of truth and divine love that is Jesus Christ, that person is going to be restored. If we willingly break down this old shack we live in to allow Christ to build his home on a new foundation, there is a promise from God that then we will “find ourselves.” People are always saying that they need to “find themselves,” well that’s never going to work. Lose your SELF, for the sake of God, love, truth, peace, and righteousness.

Application: I will spend time in the word tonight seeking to know my God more. 2 Timothy is on my heart so I’m going to start there.

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