Mark 8:35 “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
More than a millennium ago, the Celtic saint Columbanus pointed out that: “It is the end of the road that travelers look for and desire, and because we are travelers and pilgrims through this world, it is the road’s end that we should always be thinking about.” He concluded with an exhortation: “Don’t let us love the road rather than the land to which it leads, lest we lose our homeland altogether.”
How are we going to live? There are two approaches to life: playing to win and playing not to lose. It sounds contradictory to what our verse is saying (which sounds contradictory itself!), but Jesus is saying that you play to win by losing yourself for him. If you play not to lose, you’re trying to save yourself but are doomed in that pursuit.
Diettrich Bonhoeffer left the safety of exile in America to return to his native Germany and try to overthrow Hitler. He was eventually caught and executed. Shortly before his execution, whilst languishing in prison, he wrote the following in ‘The Cost of Discipleship’:
“Suffering is the badge of true discipleship. The disciple is not above his master… That is why Luther reckoned suffering among the marks of the true church… if we refuse to take up our cross and submit to suffering and rejection at the hands of men, we forfeit our fellowship with Christ and have ceased to follow him. But if we lose our lives in his service and carry our cross, we shall find our lives again in the fellowship of the cross with Christ.”
Are you playing to win, or playing not to lose? What does that mean in light of Jesus’s words in Mark 8:35, and the words of Columbanus and Bonhoeffer?
Lord, I choose to lose my life for you today. Amen!
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