“He who seeks his life will lose it; and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Matthew 10:39

If I try to keep my life to myself, I will lose it… but if I give it away to God, I will find it…

When we come to God for a new life, we give ourselves away to Him, and our life becomes a sacrifice of praise to the Lord. He will take us and take away our sin and give us new desires after Himself. We will want to the things that He wants and want to please Him by keeping our lives free from the guilt of sin. Sin only spoils us and the sins that infest our hearts will only ruin our lives. It will also drag us down to an eternity without the Lord and we will find ourselves in a place where our souls are lost to God and all goodness and love forever. The stakes here, are high, they couldn’t be higher.

If we refuse God and try to hold onto our lives, we will eventually lose our lives and find ourselves just living for this life. We will lose heaven and the blessed life there, with God in peace and joy. We will gain only the punishment for our own sin and an eternity away from all goodness, joy, peace and love. We will find ourselves in darkness and destitution forever.

Not only will we lose heaven, but there will be no real spiritual life in our earthly life at all, and we will not have the presence and help of God in our daily life. We may find ourselves in the situation of having a false confession in the first place, and perhaps we did not really repent at all. There will be those who think they belong to God but do not, they are just keeping rules to make themselves feel better. Their lives are still their own, and they are living them in their own way.

To lose our life to God, means that we find it. We find out the person we could be and find ourselves desiring holiness and goodness and to wanting to obey and please the Lord. This person pleases the Lord and knows His closeness and blessing in all things. This person is never alone, though all others forsake them and leave them, God never will. Their life is a sacrifice and they give up the right to the easy life, following the crowd in sinful pursuits. They deliberately turn from the ways of self and selfishness and turn to the ways of the Lord.

It is a big challenge, as we find that everything must go, and all secret and favourite sins must be relinquished. If we do not, we cannot enter in and will not be walking with God. Only the person who is living in the power of the Holy Spirit can do this, or even have the desire to do this. This lifestyle is unattractive to the unforgiven person, since they have no gratefulness to the Lord for what He has done for them. They will have no appreciation of the spiritual and will only be concerned about the fleshly desires of their human heart. There is no sacrifice of praise and no peace offerings made in gratefulness to the Lord.

We follow the pathways of soul and not the ways of the flesh. The soul must first be alive to God, have the sin dealt with in the heart, and have a complete change of mind and will towards God. The pathway of the Christian can only be walked in the power of the Spirit, because we can only overcome our sin, our sinful desires, the temptations of the evil one and the lure of this world, in God’s power. This is how we save our lives. We give our lives away to God, and He gives us the ability to have the spiritual victory and practical victory too, over our sin, temptation and weaknesses.

There is a war in our hearts against the Lord, and to get the victory over ourselves, we must surrender to the Lord. We can never win this war and it is foolish to try. Only as we give ourselves away to Him, do we find that we actually have the victory over our sinful self, in His strength. The defeat of self, is the whole point. We ask God to make us the people we should be, not what our faulty judgment wants for ourselves.! God remakes us and conquers the deadening effects on sin in our hearts, minds and souls, when we come to Him. He gives the victory and we find ourselves doing and saying things that please Him and give us joy. There is no other way, for we are dead in sin without the forgiveness and power of God in our lives.

If I lose my life by giving it to God as a sweet sacrifice, I will find will my life in all its fullness. It will be different from what I would choose, but it will be perfect for me. God will work our His purposes in my life and I will experience joy and peace in trusting in Him and not in myself.

“Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.”

Romans 12:1