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"In All Circumstances Lose Your Life"In considering the practical hook of Faith I couldn't shake away from Luke 9:24 "Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." Another reading might be, "Whoever trusts in his own decisions will never see the Life I intended, but whoever surrenders his decisions to me will see Life at its greatest." With Jesus' requisite being to "lose our lives", we see the Faith that God requires is trust on the deepest level of human possibility... because what more can be asked of the soul than its will? Seeing Faith as an utter forfeiture of the will to God, consider its implications on Ephesians 6:16 “In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one.” Thoughts and implications welcome! |
My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me. (John 4:34a)
I wrote on this verse in response to Billy's call from Matt 4:4 and I see this scripture's message as relevant to your thought.
For Jesus, His food, His main sustaining power, was to do the will of the Father. Now we have no higher calling than to be like Jesus so for us the sustainance of our life in God is to do the will of God.
For us, this means we have to lay down our life of the self-will and independent decision making and take up the life of hearing God, doing what He says. This is a painful death experience for the flesh, (losing our life as you have said). However, the promise is the life as God intended it.
Taking up the shield of faith we deflect the temptations of the devil. What is the greatest temptation? "...ye shall be as gods knowing good from evil." (Gen 3:5b) This again I believe is when we choose our own will instead of following God and His will. We have to take up the shield believing that, 1) God's will is best for us, 2} God desires to tell us His will (see James 1:5) and 3) we need to decide to do what the Father reveals.
Awesome. That's exactly what
Awesome. That's exactly what struck me about the Ephesians verse; that every spiritual attack is ultimately an appeal to "save" our autonomy from the Father's loving guidance.