Losing is saving
Luke 8:40 – Chapter 9 Read it here
“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”
If yesterday’s reading emphasized what we are expected to DO as Jesus’s disciples, today’s emphasizes what we are expected to sacrifice. Nothing about following Jesus is a halfway effort. Discipleship can’t be done part-time.
This is a teaching that is logically follows from much of what we have read in the Old Testament.
Think back to the sacrificial laws. In most cases the sacrifice demanded by God was the first or the best…exactly the kind of things we could most count on to give us the resources necessary to protect and sustain life. Yet the sacrificial law demanded we give up what could save us.
This takes the same principle further, not only giving up what sustains life, but giving up life itself.
Rarely does that come to a literal sacrifice of life (though it has for many believers throughout the ages), but it always means giving up a lot of our choices, desires and our own will.
Jesus returns to the same theme when he speaks of the necessity of not holding back, as in the case of the man who wanted to wait to bury his father or the one who wanted to go back and say goodbye to his family.
“No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”