A girl who lived in a town north of here was murdered a few weeks ago. Her family lost their daughter. Last weekend, several traffic accidents took the lives of several people; more families are grieving over loss of loved ones.
Every day we are hearing of people who have suffered great losses in the stock market, sometimes millions of dollars. My own RRSPs are not looking good either. While I’m glad that God’s care is my security, financial loss is huge for thousands of people.
This morning’s newspaper tells of the failure of a new study that hoped make improvements for Alzheimer patients. My mother, when diagnosed with this dementia, was at first angry. After a few hours, she calmed down and said, “I’ve lived a good life. There are lots worse things that could happen to me than losing my memory.” Daily, people like her suffer that same loss.
I’ve lost everything from clothes pins to car keys, but found them again. Some losses are not permanent, but many are. Some losses are even a choice. My devotional verses today are about making that choice.
The Apostle Paul was once a zealous Pharisee, a legalistic fundamentalist of the Jewish faith. He belonged to one of the elite and loyal tribes of Israel and was zealous about the righteousness. However, God saw in him something else. He was a proud man who did not understand true righteousness. When confronted on his way to kill Christians, Paul’s heart was laid bare and he realized that he was lost and needed salvation found only through faith in Jesus Christ.
In Philippians 3, Paul writes of those things that he once thought were valuable to him and his reputation as a worshiper of the true God. He said that they were “gain” to him, but now he considered them “loss for Christ.” He used accounting terminology to describe the spiritual transaction that had taken place. He had taken his Jewish religious credentials from the profit column of his life and moved them to the debit side. Verses 8-10 say:
Yet indeed I also count all things loss for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith; that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death . . . .When I read this, I think of all the things in my life that tend to make me proud, or that I tend to rely on. I know that God is asking me to move them to the other side of the ledger, to suffer the loss, just as Paul did. At first I am reluctant, but am more willing as I realize the loss is for my good and His glory. In these verses, I also see that the loss of my “credentials” (religious or otherwise) makes way for a gain.
The gain is knowing Christ. Hanging on to prideful things, like my own abilities or skills, stand in the way from relying on the gifts and strengths that He supplies. Hanging on to what I think keeps me from knowing His mind on things. I don’t need to be a rocket scientist or a topnotch theologian to see the value of moving my stuff to the other side of the ledger.
This also has another side to it that I never thought about until this morning. The saying, “Use it or lose it” is true, but in the case of doing my own thing, the opposite is also true. If I don’t deny myself and consider my way inferior compared to the ways of the Lord, then I will rely on my own way. Instead of using the excellence that Christ supplies, I will be using the rubbish that comes out of my own pride.
This seems a no-brainer, but the matter is not decided by my understanding or perception. It isn’t even settled by an emotional act of my will. It is by grace that Jesus saves me, and keeping the columns of my ledger in the correct order certainly must also be by grace.
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