Luke 9:23-24 (NIV) 23Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.
Philippians 3:8-9,13-14 (NASB) 8More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, 9and may be found in Him, 13Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.
Have you seen a life that you judged as excellent and which influenced and shaped your own? Excellence inspires conformity to what is seen and experienced. Then we discover that excellence has a price tag, and the cost is the possible loss of everything we thought we had to have to be happy. The word Paul uses for loss was often used to describe the throwing of valuable cargo off a ship to save the lives of the people on board. What is it we need to throw overboard? What are we holding on to, thinking we must it have to be happy, when in fact it is sinking our life?
For some of us that something may be money, a symbol of security. Or, it may be that we need to let go of that underlying spirit that drives us to add more and more responsibilities and activities to our life. For others, the cost may be letting go of a broken or lost relationship, or it may simply be letting go of the importance we place on this relationship. People are important to us, but sometimes we make our relationship to them so important that they take the place of God. We must let go.
Certainly, there are many other things we must let go of – regrets, guilt, grudges, fears, expectations. But perhaps the most basic is dogged determination. We need to let go of the dogged determination that sets our sights so totally on our will and our desires that we are blind to God’s will and God’s desire for us.
The cost of excellence is the loss of everything that stands in the way of the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ. Faced with the need to let go, usually all we can see and feel is deprivation, impoverishment, and misery. But awaiting us is the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ. “Knowing Christ” is a summary phrase for all that we receive when we establish a relationship to Jesus Christ. When we become friends, or when we get married, the relationship itself is a gift of surpassing value. But the relationship brings with it other gifts, as well. Vitality and pleasure come into our life. With Christ, we also receive the gift of “the upward call of God...” This call is not an added duty to our life. It is the one demand that determines the way we fulfill all our other responsibilities to others, and even to ourselves. The cost of excellence is letting go.
From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope, 1989
© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell Broyles
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