No pain no gain!

Matthew 16:24-28

Then Jesus went to work on his disciples. “Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat; I am. Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?

“Don’t be in such a hurry to go into business for yourself. Before you know it the Son of Man will arrive with all the splendor of his Father, accompanied by an army of angels. You’ll get everything you have coming to you, a personal gift. This isn’t pie in the sky by and by. Some of you standing here are going to see it take place, see the Son of Man in kingdom glory.”

Food for thought!

Jesus is straight. Life is not a joke; every kind of life has a price tag; there's no cheap, easy, feel good kind of Christianity, that is being offered to many people in these days. If a person is going to be a follower of Jesus Christ, there is a very high price to pay.

Jesus is honest; very honest. He did not come to rescue us from the way life is; He came to strengthen us to face life the way life is. He did not come to do away with problems and sufferings and pain; he came to lead us thru all of those things. He did not and cannot take away child birth pains for pregnant mothers, or crying for a dead dear one, because that's how life is. He came to invite us face life the way he did.

God gave us life to spend and not to keep. If we live carefully, always thinking first of our own profit, ease, comfort, security, if our sole aim is to make life as long and as trouble-free as possible, if we will make no effort except for ourselves, we are losing life all the time. But if we spend life for others, if we forget health and time and wealth and comfort in our desire to do something for Jesus and for the men for whom Jesus died, we are winning life all the time.

What would have happened to the world if doctors and scientists and inventors had not been prepared to risk experiments often on their own bodies? What would have happened to life if everyone had wished for nothing but to remain comfortably at home, and there had been no such person as an explorer or a pioneer? What would happen if every woman refused to be mother or refused to take the risk of bearing a child?

The very essence of life is in risking life and spending life, not in saving it and hoarding it. True, it is the way of weariness, of exhaustion, of giving to the uttermost; it is better to burn out than to rust out, to risk than hide from risk, to give than to get, for that is the way life is.

"Don’t run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? What could you ever trade your soul for?"