WEEK SIX INTRODUCTION
EXPRESSING OUR FULL HUMANITY
AS FOLLOWERS OF CHRIST                                                                 
April 7 - April 13
We enter into Christ, embracing his death by being buried with him in baptism, learning to die to self, and by taking up our cross and following him. We do this every time we no longer live for ourselves but for Christ and for others. This is one of the ways God’s great love is made manifest to the world. The Apostle Paul states, “Dying we live.” Our true humanity is expressed by practicing this new mode of life that cannot be touched by death, because it has been entered into through death. So while fully invested in this earthly life, we begin to embrace our humanness by learning to live beyond the boundaries of the grave, laying aside the temporal things of this life to focus on the things of the spirit. Dr. John Behr says that when we follow Christ by daily taking up the cross, God “refashions us as living human beings, human beings living in this world as God’s paradise at the center of which stands the cross, the tree of life.”

Sunday, April 7
Losing Our Lives
Scripture: Luke 9:23-26
And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

Poetry:
We Pass and They Pass and Slow the World Abides
by Kevin Goodan

In harvest I was lost.
Listened for threshers,
Combines veering,
Hoping to grow near them,
Or the blade that keels loam
For winter. I stood still long enough
To see history and each bird,
The ones that appear
Tattered from some journey
That is their final going,
Those that will reach
The end. Of what is given,
A restless shifting through the day.
Who you are I know not
But who are you to doubt
That what is true is temporary,
An audible click in the brain,
Or a stress of air through the throat
No easy inheritance.
Do you want to outride
The riders of your life?
I was lost and it had rained,
Harvest mashed adn moldered,
And it was going to rain
In the midst of acts of salvage
As the lush earth we knew once
And journeyed through
Settles back into clay.

 

LOSING MY LIFE AND ITS ‘RELIGION’

Who will preserve my life? Who will protect it? Those existential questions are full of needs and wants in search of a satisfier. They carry immense social and political ramifications. Who is both abundantly sufficient and good to lead and guide my life?

The human tendency is toward self-preservation, self-protection, and self-fulfillment. That is the natural posture of how human life is lived, whether in an individual sense or in a group and even tribal sense.

It’s possible to ‘integrate’ God with a life lived out of self – preservation, protection, and fulfillment. It’s often tried by any form of ‘cultural Christianity.’ For example, I may believe God is good and even find Him to be significantly ‘useful' for my life (e.g., helps my marriage/family, finances, relationships, business, politics). But it does not follow that on that basis I am less self-preserving or less self-protective regarding my life and how it is to be formed, developed, and led . . . even by God Himself!

Followership, in contrast, is a distinct posture and intentional arrangement of human life. It assumes a releasing trust, a losing of ‘my way’ as the only way, a costliness for the sake of pursuing something better than what I alone possess. Followership is more like an apprenticeship, a teacher-learner relationship that journeys in life and into fullness of life’s endeavoring.

Jesus’ words come crashing into our world, disrupting and disordering all manner of status quo about how the world is supposed to work. “If anyone wants to come after me . . .” That conditional statement sings with invitation to encounter the Living One: If you want what He wants, run hard after Him. It entails a kind of love and discipline to pursue Him, not merely the things that I want from Him.

Jesus, the Wise One, offers stark and contrasting ways of life:

1.     Deny yourself and follow Him [the former frees us to pursue True Life]
OR
2.     Deny Jesus and follow yourself [the former enables the latter]

Notice: Jesus leaves us with this implicit question: What do you really want for your life? What is the animating vision that motivates your way of life? What are you ultimately after and how much are you willing to gain or lose in order to get it?

Jesus’ claims foster even more vivid questions: Are you after the project of saving your life? Are you focused on becoming a master of your own justification? What will you do when that project actually results in losing your life even as you try to save it?

Jesus – and later the New Testament writers – are strategically trying to help us doubt “confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3). For it maintains its own religion and identity-shaping rituals.

To hammer that point home the means for achieving 1) is by cross and crucifixion. By experiencing death, we enter into life as it is truly meant to be. The experience of crucifixion – “taking up your cross” - is the loudest confirmation for the certain limits of desire and its posture of self-fulfillment, self-protection, and self-preservation.

Because of Jesus’ own crucifixion and resurrection, followers of Jesus learn a new way to be human, passing from an ‘old life’ inaugurated ‘in Adam’ to a ‘new life’ inaugurated ‘in Jesus’ (Romans 5; Colossians 3). In other words, by whose authority will you learn to live?

With Baptism, Jesus followers begin to rehearse a new story of identifying themselves in Jesus’ death and resurrection (Romans 6), being ‘born from above’ (John 3), and exercising the authority of His Name by putting to death the desires of the flesh (Galatians 5).

Jesus’ wise, perceptive teaching cuts right to the core of the problem of desire in human life and its endeavoring. Desire or wants are not evil per se. But human life was never destined to live off of desire-fulfillment. If it were, getting as much desire-fulfillment, protection and preservation would be Goal #1 in human life. But such ‘saving’ leads to utter loss and decay. Yet, how easily we confuse getting what we want with our own self-worth.

With the help of the Good Shepherd, by His Spirit, we can learn to train and discipline our desires and place them in their proper relationship to the abundant Good Shepherd, who leads us into a “life without lack,” a Psalm 23 way of life (Dallas Willard).

Jesus does not force his will upon people; he is not another religious, information-pusher or another philosophy peddler. He is not satisfied with simply “read my book” or “come hear me speak.” His call is costly. It is whole-life-encountering. It is for body, as much as it is for mind. It goes right to the will: “If you come after me . . .you will learn how to die."

But it is tempting to reduce Jesus’ teaching about “dying to self” to a rite of passage for being part of his inner group. If you behave a certain way, then you are ‘in’. But Jesus’ top priority in life is not group maintenance. He’s not some cosmic bouncer to His Father’s clubhouse.

It is also tempting to reduce Jesus’ teaching to a call for behavioral modification, some religious additive to help your spiritual health, to grin-and-bear-it, like nasty tasting cough syrup. “I’ll take it, if I have to,” one might say. Thank God that Jesus has zero interest in relating to us on those terms and cares far more about the well-being of His followers than they even care about themselves. That’s part of the paradox and irony of Jesus’ teaching on self-denial.

Both ‘temptations’ suffer from an utter failure of imagination; a failure to see Jesus as both the vision and means for having a life that is truly worth living. When you experience “dying to self” from the sunrise of Psalm 23 and the sunset of the “Lord’s Prayer,” you begin to realize that this sense of ‘dying’ is all about learning to truly live now, fully into His Kingdom come.

Indeed, with Revelation 22, our dying to self is pathway for learning how to ‘reign’ with the authority of Jesus, to exercise His power for good. To learn how to reign with Jesus – including His delegated power and authority – is to enroll in a ‘school’ of humility, faith, agape love, and dying to self.

So, to come after the True Life – a life that is truly worth living – we must learn to attend to the posture of our life, the way it is going now, the destiny that is to be had in Jesus, our True Life. One must “deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow.” For Jesus, the God-Man, offers His way as the way to truly be human.

Prayer of Surrender:
Jesus, because I am crucified with you, today I abandon the project of living for my desires, reputation, recognition, and glory. In the authority of your name, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I put to death wanting my way to be done with you and other people. Come, Holy Spirit! Rise-up within me. Break the power of self-preserving and self-protective thoughts and desires. Free me this day from believing that getting what I want equals my self-worth being fulfilled. Free me in order that I may freely love others. Father, I freely abandon myself into your hands. Your love holds me in all my fragility. Whatever you want to do with me this day, I surrender my agenda without reservation and with boundless confidence in your goodness.
Amen

[inspired by Charles De Foucault, Dallas Willard, John Wimber]

Joseph E. Gorra
Writer and Educator
Founder/Director of Veritas Life Center

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.