Out of This World: Loss NOT Gain!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who stood against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.  Bonhoeffer was hung as a martyr for his Christian faith in a Nazi concentration camp at the age of 39 in 1945 for participating in a resistance against Hitler in support of the Jews.  He is most well-known for writing a book called “The Cost of Discipleship” in which he penned the famous statement, “when Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”  This statement summarized Bonhoeffer’s belief that being a follower of Christ is not cheap but costly and allows us to, “live in the world without being of it”, and to be “truly free to live our lives in this world”!

Where did Dietrich Bonhoeffer obtain such a strong belief?  What was the source of his willingness to stand up to Hitler in the face of death?  

READ:  Matthew 16:24-26

Jesus Christ taught what Dietrich Bonhoeffer came to believe and live out, that life is FOUND when we LOSE our lives in this world!  It is a great and beautiful paradox in Christianity that when we lose our lives we truly find it.  Losing our lives has a specific cause, it is for a specific purpose, most significantly losing our lives is for the sake of a specific person . . . Jesus Christ!  How do we lose our lives for the sake of Jesus Christ?

We must FORBID ourselves the LIFE we want (Mt. 16:24) – Forbidding ourselves things we want is hard to do.  Our golden retriever Daisy had zero ability to forbid herself something that she wanted.  She would spend 5 straight days digging a hole underneath a fence just so she could get to a ball.  Are there things in life that we react the same way towards?  We spend our lifetimes pursuing what we want when we should “deny (ourselves)” and live for God.  Our lives are not our own to do with what we want, we are the possession of God and therefore we need to use our lives for His purpose and glory (Rom. 14:7-8; 1 Cor. 6:19b-20a)!

Every day we are to WRITE another page of our OBITUARY (Mt. 16:24) – An autobiography is an account of a person's life written or composed by themselves.  If you were to write and autobiography do you think that you would choose to choose the genre of an obituary?  The apostle Paul wrote his own obituary in Galatians 2:20, “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”  Like Paul, by “taking up (our) cross”, we are to put ourselves to death in order that we may walk a new life in Christ (Rom. 6:3-7, 11)!  Daily we are to die to the desire to write our own story, but instead let God author every chapter of our life.

See ourselves as a FOLLOWER instead of a LEADER (Mt. 16:24) - Do you remember getting to be the line leader in elementary school?  How proud to be the ONE that marched everyone down the hall to recess or to the lunch room.  Is that not the position that we are encouraged to achieve in life?  Jesus does not call us to be at the front of the line, rather to place ourselves last and least among others and take up the humble position of following.  Jesus’ call to be disciple is an invitation to leave the world and follow Him (Mt. 4:18-22)!

CONCLUSION
Another popular Christian martyr was Jim Elliot.  Jim was one of five missionaries killed at the age of 29 in 1956 while participating in Operation Auca, an attempt to share the gospel with the Huaorani people of Ecuador in South America.  Jim’s expressed the heart of loss not gain eleven years before he died when he wrote in a personal journal, “he is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lost”.  Jim understood something that we need to understand as we live in this world.  There is nothing in this world that is worth holding onto compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing and following Jesus Christ!

READ: Philippians 3:7-11