Right-Size Your Life to God’s Logic
Dying To Live
“ Jesus said, “Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”
— JOHN 12:24-25
Getting Closer to Jesus: Thanks to Adam and Eve’s original sin, the unlimited promises of God, as well as the unrestricted potential of mankind, were forever changed—and not to the good. What God had in mind for human beings on Planet Earth was irreparably damaged, if not forever forfeited, as the corruption of sin took root and infected the DNA of all humanity. Sin knocked us off course on the journey of unending favor with no hope of a course correction.
Until Jesus came! Jesus came to get us back on track: to set us right with God and reestablish within us and among us the Kingdom life—that which was intended to be ours before the fall of man. But this gracious offer of a course correction would have to be done his way, not ours.
Easier said than done! Sin had thoroughly altered our relationship with God—no longer did we intrinsically trust him, immediately obey his commands, and innately step out to do things his way. No longer would we naturally, courageously, and joyfully follow the Shepherd’s voice. You see, our sinful flesh had entered the picture and stood as a constant heckler to the voice of God, even as Jesus called us back to the path of Divine favor and unleashed potential.
And the persistent stubbornness of our sin nature, aided by the unholy trinity—the world, the flesh, and the devil—caused us to balk at the gracious invitation to be set right with God. Instead of naturally seeing Christ’s call for what it was—an unmerited opportunity for never-ending, ever-increasing restoration—we now saw as an illogical and dangerous blind leap into the abyss. Such was the blindness caused by that unholy trinity. The logic of God we now consider upside down.
Yet the fact remains, what Jesus said and what he called to do is really a rightsizing of the logic of God, now corrupted in our minds by sin. In God’s universe, to recapture the promises and potential of his original intent, we must die to the old to experience rebirth into the restored. If we hold on to the corrupted life, we now know in the flawed system in which we live, we will kill any chance of that divine life being infused with untainted, indestructible Kingdom life. The old way—the sin-tainted flesh—must die, and get put into the ground, to spring forth as the reborn sprig of Kingdom life. The old selfish nature must be transformed, so that it gives to that which God desires to give. It must serve to surge into Kingdom greatness. It must learn to step into the thin air of risky faith for the bridge of blessing to be built under it. It must lose, as the flesh defines winning and losing to win, as God defines winning and losing.
It doesn’t make sense when we look at it through the shortsightedness of our sinful humanity. But when our focus is corrected through the vision of unquestioning trust and complete confidence in Jesus, the path to the Kingdom life once again become clear and straight—and what appears illogical to the fallen world now only seems logical. We can see clearly now, and suddenly the fog of sin opens the pathway to the indescribable beauty of life restored in Christ.
And we wonder, what took us so long to trust the only One who truly knows the way.
“ God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light
— ABRAHAM HESCHEL
Take the Next Step : Here is a prayer to counteract the human logic that keeps us from experiencing the Kingdom life Jesus wants to restore to us: Lord, you were the servant of all. You came not to be served, but to serve and to give your life away to ransom mankind. You died so that I could live. Help me to take on that selfless, Kingdom-focused mindset. May I be so deeply and profoundly touched by you that, like you, this becomes the essence of my fundamental being.