Why Not Give Your Life Away

I’ve been thinking lately that we really do cling to our lives selfishly. We want to live for ourselves, to reach our own goals, to live out our own wills, to obtain our own dreams. I wonder what it would be like if we can only realize how foolish we are to do that? Yes, we do have our own passions and we want to see them become a reality, so we put our energy into trying to realize them. We tell ourselves, “If I obtain my goals, I’ll be happy. I’ll feel fulfilled. I’ll be ‘whole’.” But is that really true?

You see, Jesus told his disciples that to cling to your own life would make you miss out on it:

“Those who try to gain their own life will lose it; but those who lose their life for my sake will gain it.”

Matthew 10:39

If you live your life only to fulfil your own goals, clinging to it selfishly, you will “lose” your live. But if you give your life to God, and allow Him to do through you what He wants, then you will “gain” your life. You see, God made you with a certain purpose in mind. He knows you inside out, what makes you happy, what makes you miserable, what will make you grow and what will corrupt you. HE KNOWS YOU BETTER THAN YOU COULD EVER KNOW YOURSELF. In other words, He knows what will ultimately make you truly happy inside, He knows what will give you fulfilment, contentment, peace and a truly purposeful life. In John 10:10 Jesus says that, “I have come so that they may have life, and may have it abundantly”, and that is what He wants for you. He wants you to gain life, and have it in abundance!

So, again I ask, if living our lives for God – no actually, “losing” our lives for God, will give us the life He intended for us (which is abundant, by the way), then why do we cling to our lives so selfishly, working towards what we want, instead of what God wants us to work towards? Seems rather foolish when we realize that He knows what will make us happy and fulfilled more than we can ever possibly know.

In Jeremiah 29:11 God promises that He has plans for us. Pursue God and find out what He wants you to do. You have nothing to lose but “life” to gain from doing so.

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.”

Jeremiah 29:11