Storybook lessons

As a former English teacher, it should come as no surprise that I love to read. I love everything about books, the way they feel in my hands, the smell of the pages, the limitless possibilities for the imagination contained between the two covers. Lately my favorite books to read are actually books that I bought to read to my children as our family 'read alouds'. They are simple books- books that probably both of my children could read on their own, and yet they have impacted me much more than I ever anticipated. I bought these books with the idea that they would serve as a great resource for some family togetherness while at the same time teaching my kids about real men and women of faith. Little did I know that perhaps God had a different purpose in mind and that I was in fact the one who would learn a valuable lesson from these books. They are the Christian Heroes: Then and Now series.

If you aren't familiar with these books, they are a series of books written about some of the greatest men and women of the Christian faith, heroes as the title suggest, who boldly and obediently served Jesus. Men and women like Amy Carmichael, Jim Elliot, Corrie Ten Boom, Nate Saint, Gladys Alward, Hudson Taylor and George Muller are just a few of the stories told. Recently I just finished reading the biography of Nate Saint. He was the pilot who bravely went into the Ecuadorian jungle with the more famous Jim Elliot to take the gospel to the unreached tribe of the "Auca" Indians. Most people probably know that it was there that these 2 men and 3 others lost their lives, speared by the hands of the people they were so desperate to save.

Like most believers, I was familiar with this story before I read it. I had read other accounts by Elisabeth Elliot (Jim's wife) and various other authors and had always been profoundly impacted by this tale of heroism for the sake of the gospel. But as I finished reading the book, I felt a quiet unrest deep within my spirit. You see, Nate Saint had a wife and 3 small children. I couldn't help but put myself in the shoes of Marj Saint or Elisabeth Elliot...kissing my husband good-bye, knowing full well the risk that he was taking, that I may never again see his face on this side of eternity, that my children might have to grow up without their father. Or what about Hudson Taylor, the missionary committed to taking the gospel to the foreign territory of inland China. There he buried several of his children and his wife, lost to tropical diseases that they otherwise wouldn't have suffered if they had stayed in America.

As I thought about these things, the now famous quote of Jim Elliot kept going through my mind , "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose". This quote hung on my classroom wall for two years, and now for the first time, I felt the heavy weight of it. And I thought to myself, what am I "giving" for the sake of the gospel? If I am completely honest, I am not sure that I would willingly give the life of my husband or children. In fact, I spend a lot of time in prayer asking God for exactly the opposite. "Please keep them safe, please protect them, please watch over them" are things that I petition the Lord for on a regular basis. How does one get to the point of being willing to place all things, even the things and people most dear to us, on the altar before the Lord in total and complete surrender. "Not my will, but yours be done"....whatever that looks like, whatever that means, whatever it costs.

We reason with ourselves that God doesn't ask that much of us all. He only wants some people to go into the mission field, or sell all their possessions. No, He doesn't ask that of us all...only special people, called for a specific purpose. I mean, He couldn't possibly want me to endure hardship or to suffer. But isn't this in fact the very thing Jesus demands of all His followers in Mark 9 where he says," If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lost it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it"? Take up your cross, lose your life. He doesn't say you may have to in order to follow Him, he says you MUST. He doesn't say to be my disciple you should say a prayer, walk an aisle and then sit in comfort and complacency. He says in essence, you must die. Just like He demanded of Nate Saint and Jim Elliott, just like He demanded of Hudson Taylor, he demands the very same thing of all who come after Him. You must give me everything.

So how does one get to that place? That place of total surrender..."Here, Lord, it's all Yours. You can have it all...whatever You ask, I will give up for the sake of the gospel." I so want to be in that place. I so want to be able to see things from a heavenly perspective. Knowing that there is nothing in this world, and I mean nothing, more valuable than knowing Christ and living boldly and radically for Him. I think (and this is just my best guess at this point) that perhaps it starts with a daily obedience to this call placed on us a believers. Today I will choose to die to myself. Today I will choose to give up things of the world in exchange for things with real value...whatever that looks like for each individual believer. Daily obedience to the commands of God, committed to knowing Him more deeply through the study of His word and prayer, and through that He begins to change us. He begins to loosen our firm grip on the worldly things that we hold so dear and then "the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of His glory and grace."

Oh, how I long to "count all things loss" in comparison to knowing Christ as Paul exclaimed in Philippians. And so I take heart that Paul too saw himself as not yet having fully attained it. So, as I seek to give Christ my all and yet feel so far away from being able to proclaim honestly "to live is Christ, to die is gain!", I will espouse the words of Paul found in Philippians 3:12-13 "Not that I have already obtained this or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose."