Romans 14:8 “If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we died to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”
If we, and all we have, belong to God, then actually we own nothing and owe everything.
Medical missionary Alexander Clarke was hunting in the Congo when he heard fearful shrieks. He ran through the bush to find a lion mauling an unfortunate man. He shot the lion, rescued the man, patched him up and took him to the nearest hospital. Months later, as he sat on his veranda one Sunday afternoon, he heard lots of noise outside his compound. He opened the gate to find a line of animals – chicken, goats, sheep and cows – followed by children and lastly the man he had rescued and his wife. The man came forward, knelt before the doctor, and said: “Sir, according to the law of our tribe, a man rescued from the jaws of a wild animal no longer belongs to himself but to his rescuer.”
As our verse above states, we belong to the Lord. And it’s not a lion’s jaws we’ve been rescued from; rather we’ve been rescued from the jaws of hell and bondage to Satan. The man Clarke rescued understood the enormity of what had happened to him. May we likewise recognize that “whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.”
As Erwin McManus writes: “To belong to God is to belong to his heart. If we respond to the call of Jesus to leave everything and follow him, then there is a voice within us crying out. ‘Fight for the heart of your King!’ Yet Christianity over the past two thousand years has moved from a tribe of renegades to a religion of conformists. Those who choose to follow Jesus become participants in an insurrection. To claim we believe is simply not enough. The call of Jesus is one that demands action.”
Lord, I choose willingly to be fully yours today. Amen!
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