Dying to Live
Matthew 10:37-42
37 Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
40 He who receives you receives me, and he who receives me receives the one who sent me. 41 Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet's reward, and anyone who receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man will receive a righteous man's reward. 42 And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.
I remember watching the western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which two outlaws find themselves being chased by an angry posse. It was a fun movie, there was silliness, gunfights, a little romance and of course, for women, it starred Robert Redford and Paul Newman, in their prime.
Do you remember the scene in which their luck seems to have run out. They escaped to a high cliff that overlooked a raging river. Butch suggested they jump into the river, but Sundance refused. Finally as the posse closes in for the kill, Butch asks Sundance why doesn’t he want to jump. Sundance admits he can’t swim. Butch laughed and said, “it doesn’t matter, the fall will probably kill you anyway!”
Like Butch and Sundance, we face two options, we can also jump off the cliff or we can surrender. And both lead to death while we’re still alive. Yet, they are very different. Jumping means we reject Christ and allow our soul to die, which means we live a life without the power and strength, the hope and grace, the love and future Christ offers us. The other option is to follow or surrender to Christ, which calls for us to die to ourselves. It’s through this strange paradox of dying to ourself that Jesus says we truly find life, the greatest life possible.
The first step in dying in order to live is to maximize Christ in your life. If you have a computer, you’re probably familiar with the features of maximizing or minimizing the screen. When you maximize a window on your computer screen, that image fills the screen, while the other open windows or images are hidden.
When we maximize something, we make it bigger. In our world today, one of the big attractions at fast food restaurants is to super-size of maximize our meal. You see, you order a hamburger, especially off the dollar menu and what you get is nothing more than a simple hamburger at the normal size.
But we live in a world in which bigger is believed to be better, so we can super-size it and WALA . . . . we end up with a hamburger!
In today’s passage, Jesus makes it perfectly clear that we are to follow Him and be willing to change our lives for His sake. Christ becomes the focus and purpose of our lives and as the writer of Hebrews tells us we must fix our eyes upon Jesus (Heb. 12:2) and set our hearts and minds on Jesus (Col. 3:1-2). Jesus is our great and glorious Savior who is worthy of worship and worthy of our best attention and affection. We must maximize Him, not anything else. In today’s scripture, Jesus said,
Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me; and anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me . . . is not worthy of me. . .
Jesus is telling us He must be first in our lives. We must love Him more than anyone or anything in life. But we find that’s not so easy to do. We get pulled in so many different directions. We want to love our families, but Jesus says love me more. We want to love our parents, but we must love Him more. We want to have some fun in this life, but pick up our cross? That’s no fun.
But . . . we want what we want and we don’t want anyone to get in our way. Life becomes focused on us, we lose perspective, because life is about our pleasure and gain. We’ve even learned how to spiritualize our self-centeredness. We can be phenomenally petty about whatever doesn’t suit us, so when Jesus tells us whoever does not take up their cross and follow Him . . . is not worthy of Him . . . it really makes us cringe. We may ask, “You mean, I really have to pick up my cross and follow Him? Is He really serious?” Because that means I may not get to enjoy all of the pleasures and receive the immediate and self-gratification I long for.
This is all part of what Jesus is saying in this passage. He must come first, no exceptions. And the amazing thing is Jesus understands our dilemma. This is why He said, 39Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
You see, according to the Greek, the person who finds their life, is the person who is preserving or safeguarding their life. It means you won’t take the risk of following Christ and becoming the person He calls you to be. This means you die while you’re living, because the Spirit of God is not at work within you. This means you have no spiritual resources to call on in good or not so good times.
When you refuse to lose your life for Christ, your chances of becoming the person Christ calls you to be, to be the person who experiences the power of His grace, the blessings of His presence, the joy of His touch, are not possible. Not to mention the hope of everlasting life with Him upon our death.
Oftentimes we super-size ourselves by making ourselves look better than we really are, because our super-sizing comes when we reject God, because in rejecting God, we’re telling Him we know the plan, and our plan is better than His plan. As a result, we become a god. We think we have the power to do whatever we want or need, but that’s not the case, and in fact we may succeed for awhile, but the emptiness will come and one of the worst feelings a person can have is the feeling of being empty.
You see, we were all created to live in community, to live in relationship with others. I’m not talking about marriage. It means we’re supposed to relate to other people, and when we aren’t, we find ourselves alone and longing for relationship. And the one relationship we long for more than any other is one with God. Yet, so many most of the time we don’t even realize it. So, we act upon our impulses to fill us with things that end up leading us even further away from God. We try to please ourselves with whatever it is we are convinced will make us happy.
Since we think we’re god, then we don’t have need for God. And if you’re a god then having a relationship with God is not what you want, because when you’re relating with God, He will be telling you to do what He wants you to do, which in many situations will not be what you want to do.
As opposed to that, Christ calls us to lose our lives for His sake, and when we do that, paradoxically, we will find our lives. How do we find our lives? Because we put our hands in the hands of the One who has the master plan. Let me put it to you this way, if I were to write a book about how to perform gall bladder surgery, or how to overhaul the transmission of your car, you would not buy the book, unless you wanted to read a comedy. But if I wrote a book about spiritual disciplines, you may be more apt to purchase that book or use it as a resource, because you trust there is a certain level of knowledge and expertise.
On the same token, Christ knows the plan for our lives. In fact, He not only knows that plan, but He wrote the book about our plan and purpose in life. So, who are you going to trust to learn about and follow your plan and purpose in life? You or Christ?
It would only make sense you would follow Christ to learn and understand the plan. Not only would you do this, you would make sure to seek Him out when part of the plan doesn’t make sense to you.
So, when we lose our lives for His sake, we find our purpose for this life. But dying to our basic nature isn’t easy. And this means we must change to become more and more of who and what Christ calls us to be. And as we all know change isn’t always easy. We don’t always want to change.
It’s tough stuff. When we change we must let go of some of the things of the past, maybe they’re things we’ve really enjoyed and celebrated . . . . or maybe they’re some of the bad things which have happened to us that we need to let go of. Because once we let go of them, the blessings are ready to roll in, but we’ve blocked the blessings since we can’t let go of our baggage or wounds we carry around with us.
In order to accomplish this, we must recognize the greatness of Christ. He is the life-giving Savior; and this is the first step in the journey into Christ-honoring discipleship. We maximize or super-size Christ.
And the second step is to minimize ourselves as we seek to follow Christ. When we discover our purpose, or genuine life, we also come to understand life is not about us and the world does not revolve around us.
Christ calls us to deny our self and pick up our cross. But it’s difficult because we can’t always see what Jesus wants to give us, because so often the blessings aren’t material, they’re spiritual. The Christmas season is a great example of this, as we are already being bombarded by sales and Black Friday ads . . . wondering how can we super-size my gifts this year. Yet, it’s not about accumulating stuff, as it is our inability to see the spiritual things. The apostle Paul wrote about “fixing his eyes on what was unseen” (1 Cor. 4:18).
So, we struggle with this concept of dying to self because we’re selfish! We fight against the lordship of Christ. As I already mentioned, we falsely believe we could do a better job with our life than trusting His plan. Jesus has what we desperately desire, but we keep seeking to satisfy our selfish desires instead of humbly submitting to Christ.
So, what do we do?
We must submit ourselves to Christ. We surrender ourselves. We give God all of our life . . . our heart, soul, mind and body. There’s nothing we keep for our own. It all becomes God’s property and possession. We are His, and because we are His, He is ours.
This may sound like we just have to deny ourselves all of the pleasures of the world. But following Christ is not a passive lifestyle, nor is it just a sanctified resignation. We are not just eliminating desires; you see, when we follow Christ we should be igniting spiritual devotion. Spiritual surrender is not resignation. Christ-like surrender shouldn’t be confused with just quitting bad stuff, instead it’s allowing God to transform your life, to change your life so that you have new desires, new mercy, new life, new hope, new strength and power, and a new heart and soul.
When you surrender yourself to Christ, you find yourself looking at the world differently. You don’t have to ask what would Jesus do, you simply know what you are supposed to do . . . and that happens because of your connection to Christ. And the key is for you to be connected to Christ, because without that connection, you’re lost.
As a result, when we see a ministry need, we jump in and help, it’s called serving. And when we start serving, whether in the church or community, we see that it makes a difference in the lives of others and in our life as well. We may not always get the praise we want and desire, but that is okay, because we have super-sized Christ, and because we super-size Him, we have a super-sized faith . . . and after all, since we are dying to live, why does a dead person need recognition?
