Risk
The Word of God is so amazing and I cannot imagine being without it. It provides guidance for me as I seek to follow Christ. Because it is God’s Word and it is so powerful we sometimes take for granted that God used men to record it. Through their life experiences God carved out His truth and preserved it for you and me to fully develop in Christ. In Acts 15:26-27 Luke shares an extraordinary trait about these early followers of Christ. 25So we all agreed to choose some men and send them to you with our dear friends Barnabas and Paul— 26men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul and Barnabas put their necks on the line for the name of Jesus Christ. This challenges me to look for ways to take greater risks for Christ. Are you risking anything for Christ?
Christianity is all about risk. Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it (Mark 8:34-35).” Elsewhere Jesus tells us that taking up our cross is a daily thing. In Roman times, to see a person carrying a cross was to see a dead man walking. Viewed from eternity taking up our cross, losing our life, is no risk with respect to the reward that follows. Viewed from our side of eternity, there is much risk – humiliation, suffering, death. Does Jesus really expect that of me? He expects no less of me than he expected of himself. He became as I am so that I would become as he is, cross included. Christ expects me to pick up my cross and take with me wherever I go, whatever I do. He expects me once, twice, perhaps many times a day, to plant that cross in the ground, climb upon it and die to self, be a servant/slave, to others. Perhaps, he will call me to suffer and die. Is it too little to ask? I keep my cross in a back closet of my life. It is dusty, little used. My shoulders are not bruised or abraided from carrying it. It makes a nice accessory to worship but I am loathe to pick it up and carry it into my world, my life. I am not a dead man walking. I am a live man with a limping, sick spirituality. Until I am ready to risk all and die, I am not fit to live.
I too have been guilty of this. I do know that there are areas of my life I have died to myself for Christ. I know that while I am here in this sinful world I will never be perfect. Jesus knows my heart and loves me no matter what. That and eternal life is enough to keep me wanting to please Him.
The greatest risk we run as Christians is not physical hardship, emotional turmoil or even the threat of death. The greatest rist, I believe, comes from turning your whole life, body and soul, over to God for him to create out of you what he will. The Bible is repleat with the illustration of the potter and the clay (Isaiah 29, 45, 64; Jeremiah 18; Romans 9). God takes us, when we surrender to him and breaks us, molds us and makes us as he will. In the process, comes pinching, nudging, forming, extruding all these things on the potter’s wheel of our life. If we fail to yield, he breaks us and starts over. Then, there is always the fire, the kiln, that hardens our form into a useful vessel under his direction. Further firings, add glaze and increase our beauty. The risk to us, the clay, is the loss of all we knew and were in our former (dead) life and what awaits us as a new creation in Christ. Most of us are spiritual zombies, dead as before but with a bit of life. What would happen if we truly surrendered all and yielded to the potter as simply a lump of clay? It is beyond our imagination.