Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Life Upside Down

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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