Day 9, Luke 9

Sorry for the silence on this end. As you know it is a busy time of year, and we've had a lot on our plates this past week. Still I think it's best to pick up on the right day and move right along, so here we are at Luke 9.

There is a lot packed into this chapter (as usual!), but I'm going to focus on something that Jesus comes back to twice in the chapter: the selflessness required of his followers (that is to say, Christians). Verses 23-27:
Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God."

This strikes at the very essence of who we are. We are created beings, not some random assortment of proteins and cellular organelles that functions at an amazingly high level. If you ever learn a bit of microbiology, it becomes incredibly apparent that the functions of a "simple" cell could never arise by chance. Yet we live in a world where the common wisdom dictates that we are a law unto ourselves, and we delude ourselves that we control what goes on around us and that we are the ultimate arbiters of good and evil, justice and injustice, etc. Yet I think that there is a core to all of us, a soul, where we know that this is not the case, and in fact we are the created beings, who were created for a purpose. We can't even claim the privilege of knowing that purpose, which for such unceasingly arrogant creatures drives us a bit batty sometimes. And yet here we have Jesus, the Son of God, saying that in order for us to really save ourselves, to really distill out that essence of who were created to be, we must submit ourselves to Him so completely that we essentially give up our lives to Him. This is the core of Christian belief, and one that probably sounds like gobbledy-gook to those who don't know Jesus personally. Yet I challenge you to think of Christians who so selflessly gave of themselves and not see how they were refined with time to become beacons of humanity, of goodness and justice and mercy. Mother Teresa? Billy Graham? Peter Marshall? They were all luminous, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who knew them or knew of them, who would not say there was something amazingly different about them.

I wonder how much of a difference we Christians would really make if we took that command to give up our lives for Christ more seriously. I think we often fall into the trap of the three would-be followers who sought to follow Jesus in the last part of the chapter (v. 57-62). These three men displayed a love of their worldly possessions and status, a desire to put the world's concerns before the Lord's concerns, and a wrong ordering of priorities. Especially in this country, we have been given many good and powerful blessings. But seeking to secure those blessings, or puting them ahead of the God who gave them to us, is sinful and wrong. What number of errors would we avoid, if we (and especially I) put Jesus in his rightful place, first on the list, all of the time instead of occasionally? I think we would be so happy to fully pour ourselves out at his feet, in his service, instead of dripping ourselves out a meager dropperful at a time.