Trying to Keep VS Giving Up

Those who try to keep their lives will lose them.

But those who give up their lives will save them. 

(Luke 17: 33)

            The choice is given to us. Are you trying to keep or ready to give up? Pondering on these mega phrases such as 'keeping your life', 'giving up your life', 'losing' and 'saving', they make you move onto a platform of serious thought. Let's go directly to the questions that spring up in front of us. 

            First. What do we understand by the words "trying to keep their lives"? And why do we lose our lives when we try to keep them? The answer to this thought provoking question stems from our dependency. Are we so dependent on the life we are living? Have our past experiences and achievements in life made us strive for more and also make us wish that this life prolongs forever? Then we need to pause. If your heart, mind and soul is striving for to make this life permanent, then I think your purpose has been hijacked. You are on the wrong route; not on the highway to the eternity that we receive through Jesus Christ. The reason is, you have started depending on this life of temporary satisfaction so much for you have started losing your passion towards reaching that house of eternity God has promised you. 

             Second. What are we supposed to give up? And how does this act of giving up helps us in saving our eternal life? I would like to look back into what Jesus relates when he teaches this great reality in Luke 17: 32 "Remember Lot's Wife". Surely something that extends our understanding. When Lot and his family were asked to leave the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah before they were to be destroyed, they were also asked not to look back when they run away in search of refuge. They were asked to forget their past; their life in these cities, the experiences and the relationships. In other words they were asked to give up their past so that they could save their future. Lot's wife disobeyed and became a pillar of salt. Where did things go wrong?

              Looking at Lot's wife (whom Jesus specifically mentions) we understand that, for her, giving up the life she had lived was not an easier one like Lot or even his two daughters. I've chosen these few lines from Anna Akhmatova's poem "Lot's Wife." There would have been this inner struggle in her heart that would have been saying,

                               “It’s not too late, you can still look back

                                 at the red towers of your native Sodom,

                                 the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,

                                 at the empty windows set in the tall house

                                 where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”

Leaving behind her life was really this hard for Lot's wife and she looked back. We know what was the end result. She became a pillar of salt. She couldn't give up on her past life thus she lost her future's privileges. She couldn't give up on the importance and prominence she had given to her life not knowing that it's not going to save her anyways.

My dear sisters and brothers. Today things may be really hard for you to give up. The vision of eternity may be looking grey for you. The life that you are living here may be more important to you than the life you have seen and heard about eternity. You may not be willing to give up your life. But let me encourage you.

I encourage you to put all your faith on God and depend on Him for your everything. Let not what you have earned in this life or the things that you have achieved in this world be a stumbling block for you to be. You are called to give up your life.

May God bless you.