Sermons by Dr. W. Marshall Davis
Pastor of the First Baptist Church, Rochester, PA

 

Saving Your Life

Matthew 16:24-26; Colossians 3:1-11

 

July 12, 2009

 

 

There is a new book by Neil Strauss just published this spring. The cover looks like a bright red fire alarm switch that you see on the wall in public buildings. In bold letters is the title: “Emergency” with the subtitle underneath: “This Book Will Save Your Life.” The first sentence of the book is: “I've started to look at the world through apocalypse eyes.” He says he used to look at the world as seeming “so solid, so permanent, so unmovable, so absolutely necessary. But all it would take is one war, one riot, one dirty bomb, one natural disaster, one economic catastrophe, one vial containing one virus to bring it all smashing down.” The book preys upon Americans’ apocalyptic fear of some unknown looming catastrophe and tries to teach readers how to survive in extreme circumstances, looking out for number 1. It teaches urban survival skills and wilderness survival training.

 

The Bible is another book about how to save your life. The Bible could just as easily have the same subtitle: “This Book Will Save Your Life.” But it goes in a very different direction than Strauss’ book.  The hero of the Bible is not a survivalist who builds an armed camp in the wilderness, but a man named Jesus who willingly laid down his life. Jesus stated a very important principle about how to save your life. He repeated it many times during his teaching ministry with slightly different wording. It is this: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” (Luke 17:33)   The simplest form of it is in Matthew 16:25 “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” This is one of the most basic and important principles of the spiritual life.  It is not for some hypothetical apocalyptic future of global or national crisis. It is for right now and right here. You save your life by losing it. What does this enigmatic statement mean? That is what we are exploring this morning.

 

          I. First it means that you recognize that your life is not yours. Our first reaction to Jesus’ statement is that it is too extreme. “I don’t want to give up my life! I don’t want to lose my life! Thanks but no thanks, Jesus. I will find some other way.” That may be our initial reaction until we think about it deeply enough to realize that our life really is not ours anyway. We are not asked to give up anything that we really own. We are really just being asked to acknowledge that in an ultimate sense our life is not ours. A lot of people hesitate to give their lives fully to Jesus Christ because they think that will mean giving up too much. The truth is that we have nothing to give up. We have nothing. We do not even have our life.

 

          1. Your life never was yours. Your life is a gift. Christians often say that eternal life is a gift from God “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom. 6:23) But so is physical earthly life. Genesis 1 and 2 pictures God the Creator as the great life-giver. The apostle Paul while speaking to Greek philosophers in Athens says to them, “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things.” (Acts 17:24-25) God has given all living things, including human beings, the gift of life. The moment you were born you were given something that was not yours to keep. The gift of life is temporary. It is a gift in the sense that you can use it for as long as you live but it is not yours to keep. When the President of the United States goes on trips to visit other countries or when the heads of state come to see him in the White House, diplomatic gifts are exchanged. Often they are extremely valuable gifts. On Obama’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia, King Adullah presented the president with a huge ornate gold necklace. It looked like it weighed a ton and was probably worth millions of dollars. The president graciously receives such gifts and thanks the giver. But they are not his to keep, unless they are worth less than $335. U.S. law forbids him to keep any gifts over that amount beyond the term of his presidency. He can enjoy the gifts for four or eight years, but he cannot take them with him when he leaves office. They are the property of the US government and go into the National Archives. Our lives are like this. They aren’t really ours; they are a temporary gift for a few years. They never were really ours.

 

          2. Second, your life is not yours now. Paul says that as Christians even our bodies are not ours. “For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (I Corinthians 6:20) This is the truth. Imagine if we lived our lives based on this truth. But instead we live a lie, believing something the world tells us or the government tells us or some human philosophy tells us or our heart tells us rather than what God tells us. Our life and soul are not ours now.

 

          3. They will not be ours in the future. You and I are going to die. Unless Christ returns first we will all die. Our life will be taken from us. Our spirits will leave our bodies. Our souls will depart. Our bodies will return to the earth. Jesus told the story of a man who was all ready to retire rich but the night before his retirement party, God said to him “Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have provided?” (Luke 20:12) His soul wasn’t his any more than his riches were his. Ecclesiastes 12:7 says that at death, “Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, And the spirit will return to God who gave it.” Our souls are not ours. Our spirits are not ours. Our bodies are not ours. That will be abundantly clear at the time of our death so we better practice it now, and live our lives accordingly. You save your life by recognizing that your life is not yours.

 

          II. Second, you save your life by giving up your life. There are three ways that Jesus worded this.

 

          1. First he says we save our lives by not trying to save our lives. “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it.” “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” This seems counterintuitive and contradictory, but it is an important spiritual truth. In my youth I spent a lot of time at summer camp, first as a camper and then as a counselor.  One of the skills I learned was life-saving. I was trained as a lifeguard and served at the camp in that capacity, although it was not my favorite assignment. I much preferred leading hikes through the mountains or canoeing trips on the lake and rivers instead of sitting watching a bunch of kids horse around in the water. One of the lessons I was taught about lifesaving is that you can’t save a person from drowning if they are still trying to save themselves. When you are swimming toward a person who is in trouble, they will try to grab hold of you to save themselves. If you let them, then both you and they are in trouble. If they try to grab you, then you immediately break their grasp with any means necessary. We were taught all kinds of techniques to break someone’s hold. If they grabbed you, then you went underwater quick and deep so they couldn’t get air. You even punched them if necessary in some sensitive places to break their hold. That was old school - how it was taught 45 years ago; I don’t know what they teach now. Probably something much kinder and gentler and politically correct … and more dangerous. The point was that only when a person stops trying to save himself, can he be saved. The same is true spiritually. The only way to save your life is to stop trying to save your life. Then God can save us.

 

          2. Second Jesus says that we save our life, by not finding our life in this world. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.” If you find yourself at home in the world, you will never find your spiritual life. Hebrews 11 talks about people of faith in all ages, “13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14 For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. 15 And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 But now they desire a better, that is, a heavenly country. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.” (Hebrews 11:13-16) Christians by our nature are strangers and sojourners on the earth. It is natural to feel out-of-sorts in this world. Jesus says we are in the world but not of the world. There will always be a sense that things are not quite right. That is the way it ought to be, because Christ’s kingdom is not of the world and we are not of this world. If we find our life here, we will have lost our life.

 

          3. Third Jesus says we save our life by not loving it. This is the way this principle is stated in John’s gospel: “He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” John later says in his first letter: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” In Matthew 10 Jesus makes it clear: “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.” One of the major problems of American Christianity is that we love the world and the things in the world. Paul says in our passage in Colossians 1 “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.” It is not that we don’t love Jesus. It is just that we love other things much more. We love our own lives more than we love Jesus. Therefore we miss the joy and power and fullness of the spiritual life. The only way to save your life is to give up your life.

 

          III. Third, you save you life by choosing Jesus as your life. Jesus outlines his three-fold path to being his disciple. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” These three points would make a whole sermon in themselves but I will just sketch them here.

 

          1. Deny yourself. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself.” It is the same word used by Jesus when He told Peter he would deny Him three times. What did Peter do when he denied Jesus? He put distance between Jesus life and his own. He put his life above Jesus’ life. He acted like he did not know Jesus. This is how Jesus tells us to deny ourselves. You can go home today and meditate on this verse for an hour and only scratch the surface of what it means.  I think it means to put some distance between you and your self, you and your wants, your desires and aspirations. We are in a society that promotes self-esteem; Jesus promotes self-denial. We pamper ourselves and protect ourselves and defend ourselves. Jesus tells us to deny ourselves in order to save ourselves.

 

          2. Take up your cross. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross…” You can’t sugar coat this one. The cross means death; there is no way around it. Our self has to die if we are to live. Again our passage in Colossians says, “Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” To follow Jesus means to follow him not just along the beautiful shore of the Sea of Galilee but to follow him up Calvary. It means the death of our self. I want to share with you a personal experience I had which I do not talk about much. I had it twice in my life. Once shortly after my conversion, but most powerfully 17 years ago. I was at a prayer retreat in Washington lasting several days. One day while in prayer I felt like I was dying. It was not a heart attack or an anxiety attack; it was not physical or emotional. It was a powerful spiritual experience. It felt like a spiritual “near death experience.” It was only much later that I realized that what I experienced was loss of self, dying to self. When you come into the presence of the holy God your sense of self fades. You cease to be and God is; it feels like the self dying. I am still trying to unpack and live that reality that I touched that day.

 

To follow Jesus you give up your life and your soul (They are the same word in Greek.)  You sell your soul to Jesus because he bought it on the cross. Christ purchased our pardon. On the cross Jesus paid the price for us. Therefore Paul can say, “you are not your own. For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” You have been bought and paid for. Your life is not yours. Your soul is not yours. Christ is asking us to give up what he has already paid for. We might think that the price is too high to follow Jesus, but the reality is that your life is not yours anyway. It really is quite a deal. Why not give your soul to Jesus?  Jim Elliot, a missionary who died as a martyr in Ecuador as a young man, said it best, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” 

 

          3. Follow Him. “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” To follow Jesus is not just a one time decision; it is an every day decision, as is the decision to take up our cross. Jesus says in one place, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” To follow Christ is a daily choice. Dying to self daily, denying oneself daily, taking up the cross daily, recognizing that your life is not yours daily, meditating upon this truth daily in prayer so that it is not just a doctrine that is believed but an experience that is lived daily.

 

Follow Jesus. He didn’t say, “Follow these rules.” He didn’t say, “Follow this church or this denomination.” He didn’t say even say, “follow these principles”. He said “Follow Me.” It is a personal relationship. The Christian life is a living spiritual practice of following a Person – the Person who is both God and Man, the Person who died on the cross and rose from the grave. Will you deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Him?