Chapter 5-
Discipleship and the Individual
Luk 14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his
father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and
his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
Bonhoeffer- 'We must
face up to the truth that the call of Christ does set up a barrier between man
and his natural life. But this barrier is no surly contempt for life, no
legalistic piety, it is the life which is life indeed, the gospel, the person
of Jesus Christ. By virtue of his incarnation he has come between man and his
natural life. There can be no turning back, for Christ bars the way. By calling
us he has cut us off from all immediacy with the things of this world. He wants
to be the centre, through him alone all things shall come to pass. He stands
between us and God, and for that very reason he stands between us and all other
men and things. He is the Mediator, not only between God and man, but between
man and man, between man and reality.
Since the whole world was created through him and unto him--
Joh 1:3 All things were made by him; and without him
was not any thing made that was made.
1Co 8:6 But to us there is but one God, the Father,
of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are
all things, and we by him.
Heb 1:2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his
Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds
--he is the sole
Mediator in the world. Since his coming man has no immediate relationship of
his own any more to anything, neither to God nor to the world; Christ wants to
be the Mediator.'
*******
My thoughts - He's
speaking truth.
We don't want to
believe that there is a barrier between us and our natural life. We want to
have our natural life and be Christ's too. How many of us fight to have this?
And what we NEED to realize, what's imperative to realize, is that IF we are
striving for both, we will be lost, we can't have two masters.
A lot of us have
grown up having two parents living with us (though many nowadays don't). We
know that it's easy to pit mom and dad against each other. It's easy for us to
go to one and not the other hoping to get the answer to some question we have,
thinking we know which one is more likely to give us the answer we want. We
also know that sometimes one parent will tell us to do one thing while the
other will tell us to do the opposite and we are torn between the two, which do
we listen to? It's not easy being put in
that position at all. Having two masters. Yet we think we can handle it just
fine. We'll use one master for our selfishness and another for our
selfless-ness. It's IMPOSSIBLE.
Mat_6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he
will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
TRUTH.
But you say you love
them both, and that's a lie. In the end their truly can be only ONE Master to
follow.
One calls us to self
LESS ness.
The other calls us
to selfish ness.
There is a BARRIER
between us and our natural life when we accept Christ as our Savior.
We interrupt our
SELFISHNESS. We put the breaks on our SELFISHNESS. We announce that we comprehend that we cannot save ourselves,
that we cannot give ourselves eternal life. We recognize that we are Creature
beings, created by One who created and wanted to be a HUGE part of our
lives. We weren't abandoned as orphans
and left to fend for ourselves. We were given a SAVIOR. Our Creator wanted to
SAVE US! Our Creator did NOT want to leave us to perish. Our Creator wanted to
offer us HIMSELF, a choice that we make to choose a life WITH HIM, desire to be
His. When we make this choice He then comes between us and the life we would
otherwise have had without Him, a life that ultimately leads to eternal death.
The barrier is put up and it truly is CHRIST Himself who has DIED for us to
keep us from having to succumb to eternal death.
We have CHRIST on
our SIDE.
Does this mean we
won't suffer. As we've already talked
about we will suffer! WE WILL SUFFER!
We have a CROSS to
pick up, and bear.
We are only able to
pick up that cross and bear it because Christ picked His cross up and bore it
for US and it's through HIS power that we survive this life and are kept as HIS
till eternal life is realized for us at His return.
More on all this
tomorrow, by the grace of our LORD and SAVIOR!
In HIS LOVE!
ALWAYS!
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