“There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13 NLT)
For whom are you laying down your life? What does that even mean? The words in the verse above are the words of Jesus hours before He would be nailed to a cross. He was literally at the end of His life, laying down His literal life for His literal friends – YOU and me! Sacrifice doesn’t get any clearer than that. A person’s life’s mission and goal aren’t fulfilled in a clearer fashion than Jesus’.
We can say we’re “laying down our life” for our wife when we take out the trash or wash a few dishes, or we can “lay down our life” by going out of our way to pick someone up for church, but those things are laughable and, while good, aren’t fulfilling God’s will for our life.
We can’t lay our life down for anyone unless and until we first lay it at the feet of Jesus. Yes, of course, we can lay down our literal life for someone, and that’s admirable, but it doesn’t illustrate the kind of sacrifice Jesus made until He gets all the glory, honor, and praise. As long as there’s a twinge of desire for us to get glory from it, it robs the Lord of the glory due His Name.
B.J. Thompson wrote: “It’s not until you come to the end of yourself that you’ll discover the ugliness of your brokenness and the beauty of God’s grace.” Jesus didn’t come to the end of Himself on the Cross, but in the crib. He was born with a singular focus – to lay down His life for His friends, and that process began the moment He was born.
For us that process begins the moment we’re born again! We come to the end of ourselves when we die to ourselves, as illustrated in our water baptism. And we rise to new life in Him, offering ourselves on the altar of His will to be used in any manner He determines. To believe we can yield our life and allegiance to Jesus and continue to live anyway we choose is to misunderstand the meaning of being a Jesus follower.
Laying down our life for Jesus doesn’t signal the end of our physical life, it signals the beginning. We don’t come to the end of ourselves when we die physically, but when we’re born again of the Spirit of God. We die, not when we stop breathing, but when the Spirit of God floods our beings with Himself. G. K. Chesterton wrote: “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
The trouble with “living sacrifices” such as ourselves, unlike Jesus, we want to wiggle off the altar and escape to settle for far less than the call of Jesus demands. We want to look and be respectable, so we won’t bring disgrace or shame to the beautiful name of our Savior, but the problem with that is, it’s not what He saved us to become.
Dr. David Jeremiah wrote: “Rare are the occasions when one person is called upon to die that another might live. Yet we can demonstrate the ‘greatest love’ in countless other ways when we die to our own desires and choose the good of another over ourselves.” Dying to self means dying to self-reliance and self-sufficiency, but it also must supersede our love of self.
We come to the end of ourselves when the desires of another become greater than our own desire. We don’t begrudgingly concede, but joyfully initiate the privilege of doing what will please another in favor of that which would most please us. The joy and satisfaction of seeing another’s pleasure fulfilled doesn’t become greater than our own, it becomes our own.
Food for thought.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 