| Devotional Hours with the Bible |
Chapter 20 |
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What is it to serve Christ? How are we to serve Him? The answer is here. “If any man serve me, let him follow me.” Follow me? What does that mean? It was sometimes literal following with the first disciples. Andrew and Simon and John and James were fishermen. Jesus bade them follow Him, and they left their boats and nets and fishing tackle, gave up their business, and went with Jesus. Matthew was sitting in a little booth, collecting customs from people who went by, and Jesus said, “Follow me.” Matthew left His business and went with the Master. Following Christ may mean the same in our day. If you are in a sinful business and hear the call of Christ, you are to leave the bad business. There are men and women whom Christ wants to follow Him away from home and country, to be missionaries in foreign lands. But the literal following is not always the meaning of the call.
We are to follow Christ in the way of sacrifice. That was the way Jesus lived. He hated His life. This does not mean that He despised life, that He regarded His life as of no account. Sometimes you hear a discouraged man say: “My life is of no value. I cannot be of any use. I can never do anything worthwhile. I may as well die.” Jesus did not mean that we are to hate our life in that way. God never made a life to be useless. Jesus said no one shall accept even the whole world in exchange for His life. Think what Jesus must have thought of the value of human lives when he laid down His own life to redeem men. It is a sin to hate your life, to despise it, to regard it as of no value, to throw it away. Love your life, prize it, for it is worth more than worlds. Keep it, cherish it, and guard it. Never say you are of no account.
What, then, does Jesus mean when He says, “He that loveth His life shall lose it?” He means loving life more than duty, more than obedience. To hate one’s life in this world is to give it up gladly in service of others, to lose it in saving others. Recently an English medical journal reported that Dr. Waddell was attending a poor man’s child with diphtheria, when the operation of tracheotomy became necessary. The instant clearing of the tube became a matter of life and death, and at the risk of his life, the doctor sucked the tube free of the diphtheritic membrane. The child recovered, but the doctor contracted the disease. He hated his life; that is, he thought it not too valuable to sacrifice in the doing of his duty as a physician. The records of every day are full of instances when in hospitals, in private sick rooms, on railway trains, in mines, and in all kinds of service, men and women are illustrating the lesson. The highest example the world ever saw was in Christ’s own case, when He gave His life to save the world.
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