Daily Lesson for February 2, 2017

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Mark chapter 8 verses 34 through37:

34 And calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. 35 For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel's will save it. 36 For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? 37 For what can a man give in return for his soul?"

There is hymn called "The Summons" by John Bell, great Scottish musicologist and serious connoisseur of fine single malt Scotch (message me to find out how I know this -- I am Baptist so can't say in public). "The Summons" is about Christ's call on our lives and one of the stanza's includes these words:

"Will you leave yourself behind
if I but call your name?
Will you care for cruel and kind
and never be the same?"

The summons of Christ beckons us to leave an old self behind, come and follow, and never be the same person with the same values again.  What is left behind is our whole notion of what we thought our lives might be like before Christ's call. What is left behind is all pretense towards greatness, all assurance of security, all guarantee of control. The old has passed and the new has come and the new does not carry with it all the same values and presumptions of the old.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, "When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." But the dying is hard. The "old man" still wants to live. He still wants control. He still wants his say. He wants to love God and mammon, salvation and security.  The old man will not go gently into that good night.  The dying is a daily process.

We cannot be a part of Christ's "new creation" and still also be the same as we were. There is a dying, a letting go, a saying goodbye.  There is grief here -- real, substantial grief. For what we are to be demands a goodbye to what we once were. The reaching out to take hold of the soul necessitates a letting go of the world. And a coming and following His way insists upon a denial of our own.

Here is the hard road of what Bonhoeffer called "The Cost of Discipleship".  He who would find his life must lose it; she who would gain salvation must be willing to let go of everything else. This is the way of faithful following. And it is the reason why Jesus said the road is narrow and difficult to find.