Luke 9:24 says, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it”. This scripture confuse a lot of people as Jesus did not explain what He said. But then Jesus continued on and said what good is it if a man gains the whole world and he, himself is lost or destroyed. Jesus was not only talking about life and death physically but something higher.
The word ‘to save’ and ‘to lose’ describes an act of deliberation; something that we intended to do. In the previous verse, Jesus said that we have to deny ourselves and bear our cross. We have to lose our life, which means to follow Christ, we have to set our mind on something higher than what the world currently present. We have to lose this life which involves anything that set us apart from God.
If we try to save this life we will lose our lives. It means if we focus on prospering this current life we have on this earth, try to be wealthy, focus on our selves, pleasuring ourselves and lose sight of God then yes, we will save the life that we have now but we will lose eternal life. We might become very rich, we have all the fun in the world, we have all the friends that we want to have, we can travel the world and enjoy all the perks and ignore God but then when our time is up, we will lose all that we have gain in the world since we cannot take them with us when we die and we lose eternal life with Jesus and spend eternity in hellish fire. We lost them all.
However if we choose to lose our lives on this earth, that is focusing on gaining eternal life then we will save our lives. People say it is hard to do what God ask us to do while living on this earth. It is hard to try to ignore all the things that the devil and the world throw at our face as we need to live in this earthly life too.
Try to imagine this, if our toe got stepped on really hard or something heavy fall on our head, aren’t we focusing on the pain of our toe and our head? We forget about everything else. We forget about what we were doing and whatever is happening around us but focus on that pain alone. That is the key to lose our lives and to save it. We focus on eternal life, focus on seeking first the kingdom of God and we will be able to think less about everything else.
It doesn’t mean we sell off all of our possession and live as a beggar. But we will not attach ourselves to those material things; that it won’t matter whether we have them or not. That is the kind of action and decision that we need to make in our daily life. All other things won’t seem so matter anymore but what matter is we make a decision to lose our lives now, to lose this worldly desires, to lose our own will, we deliberately choosing to lose it in order to gain eternal life.
Do not save our lives now as we will truly lose them all, but choose to act in losing them so we may gain eternal
life.
Luke 9:24
Daily prayer
Lord Jesus, forgives me if all this time I am trying to pile up treasures, to earn as much as I can, to pleasure myself, to think in a way that it is all about me. Change me so that I make it all about You, I will focus on the things above and not on the things below. I choose to let go all this earthly things and focus to gain eternal life with You. In the Name of Jesus I pray.
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