( Written November, 2015)
When I was a college student and was part of a student Christian
movement, it was impressed upon my young heart that “. . . unless a grain of
wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears
much fruit.” (John12:24 NASB) I was often reminded of how Christians were to
die to self to allow the Holy Spirit to grow in them a more Christlike character.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer must have been schooled in the same teaching. In his book,
The Cost of Discipleship, he writes “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come
and die.” When my husband and I went to a foreign mission field many years ago,
we realized that the call to die could possibly take on a literal meaning for
us. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it did on April 9, 1945.
The world teaches self-assertion, standing up for oneself, and
looking out for no. 1. Self-centeredness and self-absorption seem to be the
current preoccupation of our culture; narcissism runs rampant. One only has to look at Facebook posts to see this. The admonition
of John 12:24 stands diametrically opposed to what our culture tells us. For
those who have experienced God’s grace through Christ’s death on the cross,
losing oneself in Christ becomes the only way to a meaningful and productive
life. John 3:30 says “He must increase and I must decrease.” The more
intimately we know the Saviour, the less we think of self. As the old
illustration pictures, there is a dethronement of self and an enthronement of
Christ. Tim Keller in his book King’s Cross writes:
But Genesis chapter 3 tells the next part of our story: that we have each chosen to be our own king. We have gone the way of self-centeredness. And self-centeredness destroys relationships. There’s nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption. How am I feeling, how am I doing, how are people treating me, am I proving myself, am I succeeding, am I failing, am I being treated justly? Self-absorption leaves us static; there’s nothing more disintegrating. . . . When we decide to be our own center, our own king, everything falls apart: physically, socially, spiritually, and psychologically.
The world we live in wants to completely negate the truth of the
Scriptures. It wants to tell us that the scriptural worldview is no longer
valid, but Christians know better, and once in a great while we come across someone like
Peggy Noonan, who though writing from a secular perspective, gives an acute and
extremely honest assessment of the world’s values. In The Time of our Lives,
she says:
In a way, the world is a great liar. It shows you it worships and admires money, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t, not really. It says it adores fame and celebrity, but it doesn’t. The world admires and wants to hold on to, and not lose, goodness. It admires virtue. At the end it gives its greatest tributes to generosity, honesty, courage, mercy, talents well used, talents that, brought into the world make it better. That’s what it really admires.
During these days when we
hear of believers losing their lives for their faith, I often wonder how I
would measure up at the point of a knife or a gun. Am I dying to self now, or allowing God to break me, so
that if ever challenged to give up my body for Christ, I would be found
faithful?
