New Life
Continued Mysteries in Jesus’ Teaching
To take up our cross and follow Christ sounds horrific, until we discover that following Jesus takes us not only to crucifixion but to resurrection; not only to the death of self but to a gloriously new and superior life.
It is only the spiritually corrupt part of us that we are asked to let die. Once that goes we find ourselves tingling with life like never before. It’s the death of the grub so that butterfly wings might be stretched and soar heavenwards. It’s the death of the sin-addict, the grovelling sin-slave, the despicable weakling, and the rising of the glorious conqueror. It’s the death of pollution and the emergence of purity; the death of lonesome self-infatuation and the release of true love.
‘Self’ refers to everything within us that is weak and ignorant and ugly. It is all that would ultimately darken us with shame and misery – the foolish choices that seemed a smart move at the time; the sweet things that turn sour. This, and only this, is what your loving Lord wants to die, so that a new you can burst onto the scene. Like (and through) Jesus risen from the dead, the new you will be a person brimming with life; glowing with purity, honour and a thrilling future.
I have sometimes so much craved sin that I actually felt that without it life was hardly worth living. That is utterly ridiculous and yet temptation is all about the enemy of our souls creating a dangerously false but highly convincing illusion. The critical issue, however, is that even if sin really were the only thing that made life seem worth living, I should lay down my life for the sake of the One who laid down his life for me. Christ paid the ultimate price for me, even though I deserve nothing. This leaves me utterly without excuse for not laying down my life for the exalted Lord who deserves everything.
As Christ resurrected to a new and glorious life, so will I, as I cling by faith to my Saviour. Through the One who died a slow, agonizing death for me, I will gain a sparkling new life, far superior to the old, sin-stained one. This new life will be fully manifest only after I physically die. Nevertheless, as I “die daily” – daily sacrificing a life of self-centeredness for the sake of my Lord – I will receive greater and greater foretastes of this new and excitingly superior life. Since they are only foretastes I will still have times when life feels awful, but in faith I plow through those times, refusing to surrender eternal reality for temporary illusion.
Making Room for God
Alex, a friend of yours, inherits a massive fortune in diamonds. He knows you have a small safe for personal valuables. “I have many diamonds with me,” he says, “I’d hate for them to be stolen. Could you put them in your safe?”
“Okay,” you say, none too pleased. You open the safe. It’s crammed with stuffed toys and fake jewellery. “You’ll have to remove your things to make room for the diamonds,” Alex observes.
“What?” you exclaim, “and risk having my valuables stolen? Not on your life!” You angrily show Alex the door. You later meet a friend and tell him about it.
“Alex kindly approached me, too,” your friend replies with a big grin, “I gladly threw out my valuables for his diamonds!”
“You did?” you reply, taken aback. “You took your valuables out of your safe, when he has enough wealth to buy a million safes of his own?”
“Alex didn’t want to use our safes!” laughs your friend, “He wanted to share his new-found wealth with us. All he wanted was to ensure you had a secure place to store your diamonds until you made up your mind what to do with them.” “You mean all those diamonds would have been mine to keep?” Your ‘valuables’ suddenly seem worthless. “If only I’d understood, I’d have immediately emptied that trash out of my safe!”
Most of us make that same tragic mistake when God makes his offer. Like no one else, God is a giver, yet we mistake him for a taker. We each have, as it were, a treasure chest within us. We usually cram it full with such trinkets as self-righteousness, self-pity, self-promotion and bloated self-esteem. Pathetically, we horde these fake commodities, foolishly thinking them valuable. We realize they are inadequate, but they are all we have and we don’t think God would give us genuine valuables. We think the Lord asks for sacrifices, when all he wants is for us to clean out lesser things to make room for priceless treasures. Most of us fail to realize that by making room for God, we are making room for a vast treasury of divine riches that will be ours to keep.
If God filled that treasure chest within you, it would make you of infinite worth. While that chest is filled with yourself, however, there is no room for God. The more you make yourself small, the more of God there can be in that chest. The thought of making ourselves small terrifies us until we discover that it is simply making room for real riches that will be ours forever. Anyone opening up to God and pricking the balloon of his/her own importance, fills with divine importance. The new you fills with divine glory and supernatural power and majesty and joy and goodness and love and wisdom.
By emptying ourselves, we free up space for God to cram honour, beauty and eternal riches into our lives. When we shrink our estimation of our unaided ability, we make way for more of the ability of Almighty God to come flooding in.
Dying to self means coming to life like never before. It is trading trinkets for treasures; taking desires that end in despair and exchanging them for superior passions that produce life and fulfilment. And yet, when we have only known the inferior, it is so hard to even imagine the superior that it seems an enormous sacrifice to swap our darling trinkets for things of eternal value.
You might have heard it said, “God does not make junk.” The implication is that because we are God’s creation, we are of great worth, irrespective of whether we are filled with self or filled with Jesus. There’s a flaw in that logic. A brilliant artist will only make masterpieces, but any fool can vandalize a work of art until it is worthless. Our value lies only in our potential to be restored to the condition the Master originally intended. This restoration cannot happen if we keep Christ at arm’s length. We were divinely crafted to be filled with Jesus. As a human body without life is nothing but a putrid, decaying shell, so is a human spirit without Jesus.
Ironies
So upon opening yourself up to God, the more you shrink in your own estimation, the more you grow in worth, honour and usefulness. Here’s an example that may startle you: the more morally superior to a rapist Jane thinks herself, the more of Jane there is in that chest and the less there can be of God. On the other hand, the more Jane regards herself as morally corrupt and worthy of the same eternal fate as a rapist, the more she makes room for the Holy Lord and so the more she grows in purity and eternal honour.
Consider Jesus’ parable of the tax collector and Pharisee praying in the temple. The one overwhelmed with a sense of moral depravity went home pure in God’s eyes. The good-living man, however, left morally corrupt in God’s eyes because he considered himself better than notorious sinners (Luke 18:9-14).
Likewise, we see in the life of the apostle Paul, the more he grew in spiritual stature, the lower his opinion of himself. That’s the only way anyone can grow spiritually. Paul went from thinking himself the equal of any apostle, to regarding himself as the least of Christians, to concluding he was the worst of sinners (Galatians 2:6-14; Ephesians 3:8; 1 Timothy 1:15). The more we lower ourselves, the taller we stand. Life is filled with such ironies and spiritual life is crammed with them. Consider these ironies:
Jesus, without equal in wisdom and spiritual power, regarded himself as useless without God. “By myself I can do nothing,” he said (John 5:30).
“The meek . . . will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).
“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 18:14).
“So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants . . .’” (Luke 17:10)
“Honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself,” said Jesus, quoting the Old Testament (Matthew 19:19). And yet another time he said: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2:20).
“I die daily,” wrote Paul, (1 Corinthians 15:31) who had discovered how to really live.
In a nutshell:
The world says love yourself, Jesus says deny yourself.
How can this be the gateway to fulfilment and supernatural joy?
Continued Mysteries in Jesus’ Teaching
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