Denying Self

And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.

                                                                                                               - Mark 8:34

Just before going to bed this scripture popped into my head. I was writing in my journal and it seriously just stuck. It's also been something that God has been continually putting into my time with Him. Constantly He's been trying to get this idea across: Are you doing everything for me or are you partially for me and yourself?

In the Greek, the word "ἀπαρνησάσθω” or “he must deny,” can literally mean “he must renounce claim to.” I think this translation is absolutely essential to what a disciple must do. I believe it is at the point when we as Christians start living for ourselves that we find serious problems. According to what Jesus said, we have to follow Christ and give God the calls to every area of our lives, not just some of them. As the text writes, we “must renounce claim to” ourselves.

If a disciple does not give up his life for Christ, is he really following after him and giving him complete control? Or is he just partially walking the Christian life like the Church at Laodicea was doing? Just a thing to think about.

Faith and Doubt

     The other day I read some of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis for a class assignment. For that particular assignment I had to read C. S. Lewis' take on faith. When I read the section, I found it to be very insightful and really helped me to get through an important issue that I believe each of us will inevitably go through at one point or another, "unreasonable doubt."

     C. S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, book 3 says this about faith:

"In the first sense it means simply Belief- accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people- at least it used to puzzle me- is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue- what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously I used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid."

     Later on in the chapter he goes on to bring up an important point, that often our emotions and imaginations make us not want to believe, even if our reason would say that everything we believe to be true, correct. I would classify this as doubt. Many times life comes our way and inevitably everything explodes, makes a huge mess, and leaves us sitting in the trash heap of life's lows. After sitting in the rubble for a while, our heart and emotion wants to tell us that our logic sucked and thus begins the battle between "faith and reason" and "emotion and imagination." On one end you think about your faith and your reason and it makes perfect sense and find no flaws in the arguments, your even able to defend against good objections, and then on the other end your heart wants to retreat and give up, thus what I call "unreasonable doubt." The only way out of our "unreasonable doubt" is to continual remind yourself of what your logic and reason first told you to be true before you got into the temporary mess of life's explosion. We all inevitably go through trials that WILL test our faith, but in the end will allow us to come bigger and stronger in the end. Sure, results aren't always immediate like we would like them to be, but if we keep pushing and continually pray for God's help, God will answer and will get you through, you just got to trust him.

Life Worth Emulating

     Tonight for some reason, I cannot go to sleep. I’ve been thinking and thinking and so I opened up my bible and read part of Mark 9. One thing that stood out to me was verse 42.

Here is the verse:

“And whoever causes one of these little ones who believe to stumble, it would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea.”

     This particular verse deals a lot with leading other people and guiding them in their walk. It deals even more specifically, with our own personal walk. There is one quote I’ve seen on every leadership test that I’ve taken at Liberty and it goes kinda like, “to disciple someone you must have a life worth emulating.” Leadership in it’s very beginning phases is a lot like, “you see, I do,” and eventually goes on to the disciple doing, and the leader seeing, but for the disciple to get to eventually do the work, the leader has to lead by example. As Leaders, We MUST live by example because what leaders do, the disciple will eventually do and apply to his/her life. We also MUST make sure our actions are pure and free of sin and that involves seeking God’s face and asking him to be brutally honest with us so we can work with him to be more Christ-like because, as it says in the verse, “it would be better for him if, with a heavy millstone hung around his neck, he had been cast into the sea.”