Have you ever felt like an innocent soul? You have prayed, sought God early, heard His voice in your heart, glorified Him in your thoughts and words, and then interceded for others. You enter the day like you always do, you desire to be pleasing to God, but you understand you are in control of nothing, and you feel fine because you are one in your relationship with God.
As your day progresses, it's normal until you are gripped with excessive concerns for another person. The pressure is on, and you need to step up your game, but it's not a game. You try to help as you can, and in the process, you give a piece of your heart away with concerns for the other's welfare. Then you are told that you made an error, which cost the other person nothing but you a great deal.
Then your calling from Jesus Christ comes into focus. "Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me." Matthew 16:24 This statement can be completely meaningless apart from a real-life cost. Nonetheless, as it stands, Jesus asks for everything.
From our intent, desire, will, and resolve, they are not without a tremendous cost. In the denying of self, we must be unwilling to associate with ourselves, the selfish, self-centered, and self-protecting part of us that will grip onto anything to keep what God does not want us to have. But Christ's statement is clear that we let ourselves die by taking up our cross or the means of our end.
The man who lives in a mission field where his life is always at risk because the people he wants to reach are naturally inclined to kill him; does so with authentic resolve. This man has died to himself. As the statement goes, When you can receive correction and reproof from one of less stature than your self, and humbly submit inwardly as well as outwardly, finding no rebellion or resentment rising in your heart that is dying to self.
In his book Letters to the Chruch, Frances Chan asserts, and Martin Lloyd Jones does the same in his address to the attendees at the London Theological Seminary inauguration, that church structure in the west turns its members into consumers instead of those who give themselves away.
Jesus was recorded in Luke 14:33 as saying, "So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his possessions." By possessions, Jesus means every conceivable thing, even the good things in and of themselves, because in Matthew 16:26, He said, "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" The Christian is called to hold onto nothing of this life to gain Jesus' words, "Well done!"
So often, the church becomes more about money than people; when that's the case, I doubt there will be "Well done!" Jesus said, "Behold, I send you out as sheep among wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. "But beware of men, for they will hand you over to the courts and scourge you in their synagogues, and you will even be brought before governors and kings for My sake, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles." Matthew 10:16-18
To hear more on this subject, click the button below
Comentarios