‘let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it’ Matthew 16:24-25
Writing is the place where I work things through in my mind where I grapple with life, attempt to understand the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ and try and understand this corrupt heart of mine.
It’s approaching a year since I last wrote anything for this blog for a variety of reasons; over commitments in other areas and for the last 7 months recovering from some weird moments of clumsiness.
These moments of clumsiness resulted in much physical pain and heart pain of trying to understand who I am in light of where I lay. It’s not until these moments of brokenness break into our everyday that we realise how much we’ve actually been living in light of our own achievements or pursuits rather than living in light of Jesus’ purposes.
We can be fooled into thinking that our life in the here and now is all about making everything around us comfortable. To earn enough money to live well, to live in a home that functions well, to have children who behave well, to have a body that works well; we feel like our world is falling apart when we can’t achieve these expectations, worse still we (I include myself here) judge others badly when their lives reflect the brokenness of the world we live in.
Our hearts desire the life of completeness however according to Jesus the reality we live in is the brokenness of sin. Jesus tells his disciples that the cost of following Him is to take up their cross. In our everyday moments this might mean wearing a cross at work as a means to witness to others or being bold enough to talk to our work mates or family members about the Lord Jesus dying on the cross for them.
However, as we continue to read Jesus is talking about being willing to lose our life. For us in the comfort of the Western World this seems really harsh, our hearts that hunger for comfort is shocked by the reality of Jesus’ words.
Jesus is talking about the battle for our eternal lives, the willingness to follow Jesus as he leads us to the promised land, the completeness we are really craving for.
You see if we are following Jesus we are actually on the road in the wilderness, the place of heat, of thirst, of dust, of danger, of obstacles, of stumbles and falls. Not very attractive but it certainly explains the difficulties of the life we often face. The yellow brick road of the world might look bright a breezy and exciting to accumulate all things wonderful however it leads into an eternal pit of darkness. Whereas the walk in the wilderness that Jesus is taking us through leads to the promised land filled with milk and honey (not literally but the glorious riches of God’s glory and righteousness).
These two roads face in opposite directions with opposing results. We see this theme of choice throughout the bible either to follow Christ or to serve self. That’s why Jesus says we have to take up our cross to deny what comes naturally; selfishness, accumulation, abuse of power, judgementalism, materialism, self-righteousness. Read Galatians 5 for a more sobering list.
As we recognise our need of Christ as we realise the journey of sin leads only to death and destruction, we turn around to trust Jesus, this is the moment of repentance as we pick up our cross and agree with Jesus that we are willing to do what it takes to die to self (in bible speak this is called sanctification and we will think this through in another blog). The miracle of what happens in this moment is Jesus places the gift of the Holy Spirit within us.
We may be on the dusty road of the wilderness, but we are not alone, we have the Spirit of God exposing the sin within to the light of Christ so that we know which areas of our heart need transforming from darkness into light.
The call of the wilderness will be hard, it will be the difficult road to choose but the miracle of Jesus’ grace towards us is that he will personally pick us up when we fall, he will bring people along the way to teach us His truths, he will give us water to drink, he will give us our daily bread, he will help us with the heat of the sin of others, he will equip us to fight the daily battle for our hearts to die to self, he will remind us of the wonders that are to come as well as the wonders of having our hearts transformed from selfishness into His righteousness and so much more than I can mention here.
The amazing thing is deep down Dorothy knew all along that the yellow brick road never led home.
Living His Word 