Dying To Live

In all honesty I sometimes have a hard time understanding why anyone would ever reject Christianity as the means of salvation. Not only is heaven offered as a free gift to those who don’t deserve it but when you investigate the religions of the world Christianity is the only faith where God doesn’t seek to destroy His enemies but instead He does the unthinkable when He dies for them so they can be redeemed. It was Jesus who said, “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends” (John 15:13) which the Bible says is exactly why Jesus Christ came to earth in the first place. John 3:16 is probably the most well known verse in all the Bible shared around the world, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” God is not our enemy, we were His and still He came to save us.  

Biblical Christianity is radical in that God loves the unloveable and blesses the ungrateful all the while showing kindness to sinners with the hope of leading us to repentance. It’s been well said the greatest force in the world is love and its no wonder then why God would call us to love Him with all of our heart, mind, soul and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We don’t have to physically die to show others love today but lets be honest, death has a way of getting people’s attention like nothing else can. Maybe the best way we can show the world God’s love today is by dying to ourselves and our own desires.

Every time we die to ourselves by preferring others, by serving them and sacrificing for them we reveal God’s kind of love. Sacrificial death for the benefit of others is the best reflection of the heart of God and maybe just maybe the ultimate way any of us can help the world to understand the God of the Bible is when we forgive. When we choose to die to our own feelings and we forgive those who have wronged us we make God known in ways like nothing else can. Like the song sings, “Living, He loved me, Dying, He saved me, Buried, He carried my sins far away, Rising, He justified freely forever, One day He's coming, Oh glorious day, oh glorious day!

“The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly”

John 10:10

I LOVE YOU!

Michael Osthimer

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