Death brings Life

I did a rare thing this evening. I finished two books: Discovering the Soul of Service and Mere Christianity. I am not going to quote the first one, but I am going to quote the last sentences of the second.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Death brings life. This is the paradoxical life that God calls us to. It is so very hard, but God's grace is stronger.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6).

photo: New Attitude 2008 in Louisville, KY