Iwas doing something last week I didn't really want to be doing. I was not feeling sorry for myself, in fact just the opposite. My mind was drifting towards the Apostle Paul who spent a good deal of time in prison because he loved Jesus and where I was and what I was doing was anything but prison time.
While I’m not a big fan of the holidays, Christmas has captured my attention. I’ve been focused on Luke 2:10 and how the angel told the shepherds that Jesus being born was “good news of great joy.” This joy should be the catalyst for a life filled with what the Apostle Peter called “unspeakable joy.” In other words you can’t really share with others how you feel, there are not enough adjectives to describe what Jesus has done for you and what He means to you.
My two favorite parables are in Matthew 13:4446 and they deal with the topic of finding something of great value and selling everything you’ve got in order to obtain this thing and of course that thing is Jesus.
If Christmas should do anything in our lives it should be to remind us that Jesus is worth our everything. Jesus is to be your life. The trouble with that truth is we don’t know what that looks like in the context of our ordinary lives. I mean, are we really supposed to sell every thing we own in order to be a Christian? Doesn’t that go against what we have learned all of our lives that “salvation was a free gift?”
The answer to that is yes and no. The old hymn we grew up singing is right, “Jesus paid it all” but do you remember the next part, “All to Him I owe.” Doesn’t Christmas (His advent) remind us all that we more or less have a debt to Christ because He came and He died in our place? This gift creates an abundant life that includes great joy now and then one day we will spend eternity in Heaven in the presence of the glory of the Father?
I read the other day that, “Salvation is free, but discipleship will cost you everything.” That might sum it up. To follow Jesus, it will require two of the worst words in the dictionary. Those words are “self denial.”
We don’t have a context for that either in 2023, do we? Deny myself what? The things I want and work hard for? That’s my money, that’s my Jeep, that’s my surf board, I have plans, blah, blah, blah. Jesus told a guy with plans in Matthew 8:22, “Follow Me, and leave the dead to bury the dead.”
Sure you’ve got plans but so does Jesus. He has plans for your life. You have to choose which plan you want the most. The Amplified Version of Matthew 8:22 shares it like this, “Follow Me, and leave the dead in sin (non-Christians) to bury their own dead.”
Better yet might be Eugene Peterson’s The Message paraphrase, “First things first. Your business is life, not death. Follow Me. Pursue life.” That makes you think, doesn't it? Do I spend (waste) my days pursuing things that have no life in them. Am I more about the culture than I am the kingdom? Where does the church fit in my life? Why does the culture seem to come first? And listen, can we talk? It’s not that the church comes first, it’s follow Jesus first (Matthew 6:33) and then everything, priorities, people, places and things will all fall into place.
He told me to tell you that. He also says, “Merry Christmas.”
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