Life Givers

If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it.

Mark 8:35

When we read these words of Jesus, it seems he is talking about a kind of laying down our lives that refers to more than just our physical lives. Jesus expounded on his command to love as he loved by describing the highest expression of love: to lay down our lives for our friends. There are many in our world who live ready to lay down their physical lives for the sake of others: those in the armed forces, law-enforcement officers, and others whose jobs bring them into physical danger. But for most of us, physically laying down our lives for others is a remote possibility. Yet this command is to all of us.

Years ago the Lord began to teach me how this worked in my own life: time and time again he calls me to lay down my life. Not my physical life but my own self-interests, my own schedule, my own comfort.

The love to which God calls us is specific and active. It nearly always means setting aside our own interests, even if only momentarily. Rarely is it convenient. It will almost never fit into our schedules where we have a break. It will mean lots of rearranging. Daily there will be calls to love those around us the way Christ loves us. Calls to lay down our lives with our self-focused vision and actively love those around us, even when it is inconvenient.

The promise Jesus makes is that when we learn to give up our lives for his sake, we will have saved our own lives. We will have found the real meaning of life. Life lived with ourselves at the center is a continual drain. It wears us out and leaves us empty.

If your life is filled with hurt feelings, resentment, discouragement, and anger, start responding to the opportunities God presents to give up your life. When you give up your life for his sake, you are giving over your own life to his care. That is where you will find everything you are searching for.

Here is my life, Lord. It is yours alone.

In the total expanse of human life there is not a single square inch of which the Christ, who alone is sovereign, does not declare, “That is mine!”

Abraham Kuyper(1837–1920), Dutch statesman and theologian