Dying to Live

I have been a Christian for almost 15 years.  It has been an amazing, challenging, mountain high, valley low, roller coaster journey and I would not trade one second.  But this last month, God has been wrecking me and my family.  I mean really.  Destroying us.  And I have never felt so free or full of joy!

Today.  I am determined. . .and delighted. . .to lay down my life, every bit of me - my time, my money, my pride and plans, my religious deeds, my everything - for the sake of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I have spent the last 15 years seeking Him - but I am realizing that I have spent very little time seeking the true, terrifying, impossibly huge, unreachable because of His holiness, demands a blank check of my life, completely other and foreign to me, God as He has revealed Himself in His word.  The God I have been seeking looks a lot more like me:  quick to anger, slow to forgive, annoyed and frustrated, passive.  The one I've been looking for desires my own comfort over His will.

I cling to my own life, my own comfort and will and dreams and desires.  I grasp with all the white knuckled intensity I can muster to remain in control.  I seek to give only as much of myself as is necessary to feel good.  To get my God fix.  To squash down the ever present, nagging feeling that something is not quite right.  Just enough to sand the edges off of the quiet assertion in my heart that I am missing it.  Missing the fullness of joy and life He has promised - the peace that passes all understanding.  It all remains mostly elusive to me.  There are moments.  Moments of joy and perfect peace when I am abandoned to His will in me.  But why do I settle for moments?!

Today, today, I am dying to live!  I want to pour out every bit of me - with reckless abandon - so that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me! I want to stop trying to figure out how much of myself I can keep, how much I can hold onto while still getting a taste of God.  I want to be wrecked for the sake of the Gospel!  No more compromise.  No more justifying.  No more lukewarm, double minded, give and take.  God is not a deal maker.  He doesn't bargain with us for which parts of our life we get to keep and which we will surrender.  He. Demands. Everything.  And I want Him to have it!  All of it.  And I have never been so excited about the journey or so filled with anticipation about what this next day may hold, this next hour, this next minute.  All of me, every bit, for the sake of knowing You!

Philippians 3:8
8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.