Mar 3, 2022
Do we really believe Jesus when He says that we must give up our life? Let's talk about that today.
Hey, I'm Mike Henry Sr. and yesterday we talked about Mark 8:34 and the setting of this passage. But let's continue today with Mark 8:34-37.
And calling the crowd to him, with his disciples, He said to them, "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me." For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? For what can a man give in return for his soul. That's Mark 8:34-37.
I think our civilized world lets things like this go in one ear and out the other. We all die. We know it's coming, but we ignore it. We put it out of our minds. Jesus is telling us something bold here. And often we simply snore right through it.
He told us yesterday that we must follow Him. That's contrary to the whole idea that we want to be leaders. And today He tells us that we can't hang on to our life. He describes following Him as marching down death row, taking up our cross.
Self-preservation is a given. We all try to compromise between what we have to do and what we want to do. It seems most of us question more and more of what we have to do with each year, or with each generation. Everyone's looking for a loophole. Jesus says, if we try to save our life we will lose it. But if we lose our life for his sake, we will save it. What does it mean to lose our life for Jesus's sake, and for the gospel's sake? A friend told me recently that David Platt said, "We don't make Jesus Lord of our life. He is Lord." Jesus. Isn't giving us a grandfatherly platitude here. He's telling us what's going to happen. He's telling us how reality works. We have a choice. We can give Jesus our life now, which means taking up our cross and following Him daily.
It means doing things we don't really want to do, but we do them because we want to follow Jesus. Or we can give Jesus our life when we die. He's going to claim it. And because I follow Jesus, I live two lives. I live the one that I will one day lose. And I live the one that he gave me when I trusted him.
You see, I believe I live my eternal life now. I can't lose that second life. But the first one will be over pretty soon. They're not many years left. If you don't lay down your first physical life, you can't have the eternal one. We will all see Him as Lord one day. It says in Philippians, "Every knee will bow. If we gain this whole world", but we don't have that second life we're done.
We're toast. It's not going to be a very good day for us when we die and meet Jesus involuntarily.
As contemporary Jesus followers. Let's remember that we live that second life. We can share it with others. We can even practice living this life, as someone who knows these things, by taking part in the Marketplace Mission Trip to find out more, join our Online Community. This is a community of believers who are trying to live our faith on a regular basis. It's not as weird as you think. We can make ways to allow our faith to be integrated into our actions every day.
Check it out at https://community.followerofone.org. Create a profile for yourself there and join our online community. And you'll get invited to go on the next marketplace mission trip, which is a two-week exercise where we practice this very idea of integrating our faith into our work daily. Most people think they don't have time, but you'll be surprised.
It takes about five minutes a day. Try it out at https://community.Followerofone.org. You might help someone save their life forever. Our actions matter. Thank you for being a marketplace minister.