Spiritual Suicide

What have you been living for lately?  If you are living for anything less than your Savior you are committing what I call “spiritual suicide”.  When you live for self, choosing to do what you want to do rather than what God wants you to do, you are actually dying a slow death.  When you hold tightly to the advancement of your agenda, your cause, your story, instead of His agenda, His cause, and His story, you are slowly shrinking the size of your soul.  The promise of having it all when you are living for yourself is actually a promise of ultimate death.  To be sure, achievement and acceptance may give you what seems like “life” for a while, but in the end you will be engulfed, enslaved, and ultimately extinguished by them.

“For whoever would save his life will lose it,” writes Mark, “but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).  Here we are confronted with the truth of the Gospel that says the only way we can be assured of life is to die.  We must die to our preferences.  We must die to our priorities.  We must die to our privileges.  We must die to our possessions.  We must die to our purposes.  To live for these things is to live for something smaller than Christ.  It is seeking living water from dry wells. 

The Gospel calls us to be willing participants in the death of the personal claims we have to our lives.  So powerful is the pull of desire in the direction of living for the self, death is the only way to life.  Christ calls us to die that we might live because there is no life outside of Christ.  Seeking life outside of Christ is simply shrinking life slowly into a downward spiral of ultimate spiritual suicide.  Die to self…live for Christ.  This is the Gospel that gives you all the grace you need to run the race set before you.  NEVER FORGET THAT…AMEN!