“If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (1 Cor.15:19)People can debate whether or not life after death exists, but you cannot debate whether or not Paul believed it. Everything about the way Paul lived shouted something better was to come. He believed that living for the Kingdom of God was more important than living for the kingdom of man, and that the reward of doing so outweighed any physical consequence on earth. He didn’t waste his life on the pursuit of wealth, power, prestige, influence, possessions, health, or business. There was no way he could say, “Well… true or not at least it was a comfortable life”. He didn’t live for comfort; he lived to see the Gospel proclaimed. He knew if he was wrong, he should be pitied more than any other man. What causes a man to go from a persecutor of the Church to someone who is persecuted for the church? I want the Gospel proclaimed, but confess I want to be comfortable doing it. I talk about loving the unloved and unlovely, but very little do I go out of my way to seek them out. I talk about the importance of serving the poor and the weak, but can’t seem to find myself putting much action to those words. What took place between Jesus and Paul (at the time Saul) that caused him to undergo such a radical change? So much of me wants that, and yet if I am honest, a part of me doesn’t.
5 comments:
No question about what Paul was living for at all!! Agreed, we should all be like this and even more so, like Christ.
very honest words from you hommie!thanks for them! it's a tough thing to admit how we can be wrong, but it seems that's always the first step to make a change...at least it has been for me.
Any man that gets pelted by large rocks and left for dead but gets up and goes back into the city and preaches the word he almost died for is a man living for something better than this life offers. That story of Paul's passion always makes me wish I had his strength.
So I don't know if I am allowed to leave messages, but I am going to anyway because this post resonates with a book by Brennan Manning I am reading, entitled “The Importance of Being Foolish-How to Think like Christ." To poorly paraphrase the chapter, Brennan discusses how the only possible way to move out of our obsessive self-awareness and into the life of Christ is to surrender ourselves and let God be God. This discovery makes security, pleasure, and power look like cheap painted fragments of glass. In losing ourselves we find ourselves, the strange paradox of Christianity. “I consider all things rubbish, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). This loving awareness of being the child of the Father moves us out of a life spent pursuing our base desires and frees us to pursue the kingdom of God. We no longer have to live lives bifurcated by our needs. Everything we have and are forms but one self, one heart beating with the lifeblood of Christ. Without this need for earthly security, for material fulfillment much of our emotional suffering caused by our addictive desires is healed. With acknowledgment of the need for Jesus alone, we can drop all of our manipulative games – the money game, the security game, the male-female game, the power game, the knowledge game, the expert game (my personal downfall) and so on. We can present ourselves simply to others: “here I am. It’s all I’ve got.” In humble self-awareness and sovereign freedom we can truly be for others without fear of rejection or concern for their usefulness to us. I agree with you that Paul is such a role model and amazing example. It is far too often too difficult and inconvenient to put action to words. But I find the times I do give of myself, and deny all personal desires for the sake of others that I am rewarded far beyond measure. Bering selfish is not as fun as giving. So yeah, that is my lengthy 2 cents.
Laura,
...We can present ourselves simply to others: “here I am. It’s all I’ve got.”
Well said.
It's only 8 am and i'm already crying, your thoughts have touched my heart.
Thank you, I'll ponder these thoughts for the rest of the day.
Laura - Thank you for that.
"Without this need for earthly security, for material fulfillment much of our emotional suffering caused by our addictive desires is healed."
This is very true and I think the heart of how Paul lived. After all, how safe is earthly security anyway? Paul realized nothing on this earth, apart from what we do for Christ, would last. We find freedom when we stop playing the "games" and start living for what is real.
Philippians 1:21
"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain."
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