| “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?” |
| —the words of Jesus found in Luke 9:23-25 |
Perhaps he held a penny tight in his palm, or a piece to a puzzle, or a tiny animal from his barnyard play area. Any adult trying to get the toddler to release the dangerous-when-swallowed item knows the war of wills this entails.
We like to hold on to things, opinions, and plans that we have made, too. Although we don’t shout “MINE!” when confronted with the loss of such items, we feel it deep down. We want our own way. And, we clench our fists all the more when we get challenged to surrender to someone else.
Jesus knew the struggle we have when He asks us to surrender control, and comfort, and those things that we think will make us happy. Yet, He wants us to look beyond what we can see—what we experience in the moment—so that we can get a look at the eternal things He sees for us. God wants to give us so much. He wants to see us present our open hand to Him in order to receive what He wishes to give us. And, He wants us to extend that same open hand to others, so we may give them what we possess.
God knows the dangerous things we shouldn’t have in our possession. He knows that these wrong things will take us down the wrong paths. He know that these wrong things will try to take over the mastery of our time and energies. He sees what would happen if we were to “swallow” such things and own them. He knows they will bring us to our ruin.
During this time of Lent, when others urge us to “give up” something in order to deny ourselves some pleasure, we ought to think, not so much on the things that would fulfill the obligations we feel, but rather on the things God wants to take from us: the sins that so easily beset us, our unsurrendered wills, and the things that crowd Him out of our hearts.
Jim Elliot, the missionary to the Ecuadorian Huaorani people, who suffered martyrdom in 1956, famously said:
He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.
Let us so live that we will not make God pry our fingers from dangerous things. Instead, let’s freely open our hands and allow Him to take from us what He wishes to take, in order to give us all that He chooses to give us. If we do, we will surely find the way to blessing!
