If there is one
thing we are never quite ready to do, it is laying down our lives for anyone we haven't got the utmost respect
and affection. Give that person a nasty
side, a ridiculous bit of arrogance, a slanderous disdain for anyone or
anything we like and all bets are off.
The deal is done and whatever Christ may have to say about the romance
of love, we see right through it. We are
better than that. We have the
sophistication of our pride to barricade us from laying down our lives for such
frivolous purposes. Jesus told us to lay
down our lives for our friends in the same way He did and that is where this
spins on the dime. He put His life on
the ground of the cross for the snarling world that despised Him and that is
the very point at which His children do so also. We have mistaken nearly altogether what it
means to lay down the life. It is not
dying for some cause ; it is letting ourselves go that the Holy Spirit might
work Himself through us. It is a
surrender at the moment of discernment that God wants to do something through
me just now: help a rude customer, defend a selfish co-worker, encourage a lazy
friend, pick up an insolent child, give way to a pretentious prig. We have no way of knowing what God is going
to do with us as we lay down our lives but we can be certain of this. He must do something He insists matters and
do it right then. An eternal array of
circumstances and shifts are about to begin as we lay down our lives and to
stop them all because we insist on our right to do as we wish is profound
arrogance. A serial killer can give up
his life for a philandering prostitute; only one with the Spirit of God working
through him or her will lay down life at
the moment of the Holy prompt, an unwelcome prompt perhaps but a certain
prompt. The opportunity to be the
pipeline through which God's work in humanity flows is most astounding if you
think about it. You, dirty and
contentious as you are with God are His chosen beloved partner in the transformation of a world all about you.
Greater love
has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my
friends if you do what I command.
John 15:13-14 NIV
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