LENT: Two Ways to Deal With Light
The question I asked a couple days ago was, “How can we become broken?” I want to offer another excerpt from The Way of the Cross in response to that questions:
SCRIPTURE READING: 1 Peter 2 (with particular focus on vs. 11-25)
How can we be broken? This is both God’s work and ours. God shows us that we need to be broken, but we must choose. We must be willing for God to show us the truth about ourselves. Unless we do this, we cannot have fellowship with him. We must be ready to listen to what God says to us. If we are ready to do this, he will show us the things which come from our proud, hard self.
When he does this we can do one of two things. We can become proud and refuse to repent, or we can humbly bow our heads and say, ‘Yes, Lord.’ The man who knows, day by day, the meaning of brokenness is the man who humbly agrees to what God shows him about himself.
We must be daily broken before God. This may cost us a great deal. We shall have to give up all our rights. We shall no longer live to please self. Sometimes we may have to give back something we have wrongly taken from others.
There is only one place we can be broken. That place is the cross of the Lord Jesus. He was willing to be broken for us. When we realize this we must be willing to be broken for him.
This is not something which happens only once in our lives. There will be the first time when God shows us these things and we die to self. But from then on we must always be dying to self. Only in this way can the Lord Jesus always be showing his life through us. The choice will be made hundreds of times a day.
SCRIPTURE READING: 1 Peter 2 (with particular focus on vs. 11-25)
posted by Will | 12:22 PM
3 Comments:
"This is not something which happens only once in our lives. There will be the first time when God shows us these things and we die to self. But from then on we must always be dying to self. Only in this way can the Lord Jesus always be showing his life through us. The choice will be made hundreds of times a day."
At first to me this seems quite an intimidating task. To think that we must choose hundreds of times a day to die to self. Wow, it does not seem like I even make a hundred choices in a day. But the more I think about it, heck yeah I do. I make a ton of choices each day. But many of them do not take much thought or cognitive focus.
Now push back on me if I am wrong here. But maybe the mountain of dying to self a hundred or more times per day is not as steep as I make it out to be. It is not an active choice to die to self that I have to make each day. Rather, through spiritual transformation, I naturally begin to think less of myself and more of others around me (included my Lord Jesus). Through the work of Holy Spirit, it becomes natural to die to self and pick up my cross.
Looking back at my life, I am not sure when it was that I stopped caring so much about things of this world. I cannot pinpoint a specific time where in which I made that decision. But I do know now that my cares and concerns are not the same as many of my friends. So to summarize, I am thinking that dying to self is not a work, but rather a natural outward expression of our love for Jesus and his Kingdom. Thanks Lord Jesus for doing the work and thanks Holy Spirit for continuing to open my eyes.
You're not saying this, but my caution against your thought is that we use it to excuse ourselves from the choices we really do need to make everyday, though maybe not hundreds of times a day.
That said, there is something to the idea that we are becoming people, through apprenticeship to Jesus, who choose the way of God without even thinking about it (EX: we give without our left hand knowing what our right hand is doing, Matt 6). This is the inside-out work of the gospel to transform every part of our being.
This is happening in me, in some areas, but I am still a long way off. In fact, the further down the road I get in this kind of maturity, the more able I am to see that still remains ... there are more layers of self than I imagined, and thus more ways that I must choose to die to self than I think.
I guess what I am saying is that I agree and disagree with you. How I disagree is that the "mountain of dying to self" is in fact much steeper than you initially feared, impossible to overcome in fact.
But even with a mustard seed of faith we can move mountains. And "what is impossible for man is possible for God."
Where I agree with you is that Jesus has done the decisive work for us, and Holy Spirit now works in us to bring us to completion. But make no mistake about it, the mountain is enormous and the way over it will require lots of volitional repentance.
Will, thanks for the push back on this topic. I see what you are saying, regarding the intensity of the mountain.
Often times in my life, when I see a challenging task, I try to do it alone. Problem is though, if I stand next to the mountain and attempt to climb it myself, I will fail. Crash and burn. I feel I need all aspects of the Trinity to climb this cliff and only with their help will we succeed.
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