Seems simple enough, right? Try to hang on to everything earthly and lose what really matters, but hang on to everything heavenly and gain what truly matters.

Okay. Done for the day.

Coff….

I think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. Let’s look.

Reading the Amplified Version:
“For whoever wants to save his higher, spiritual, eternal life, will lose it [the lower, natural, temporal life which is lived only on earth]; and whoever gives up his life which is lived only on earth for My sake and the Gospel’s will save it—his higher, spiritual life in the eternal kingdom of God.”

So, we’re talking about two lives here: The higher, spiritual, eternal life and the lower, natural, temporal life lived only on earth.

We have to choose which one we’re going to focus on, which one we’re going to go all-in for, and which one we’re willing to lay down.

Mind you, the truths in these verses have preached to me before I have written them for you. That’s how this works. God grabs me through His word and shakes me and my thinking up, then provides the words to share with those who will read them.

We who are believers sort of, kind of, possibly understand this concept, the laying down of life, but in reality we don’t.

We find it so easy to say we will lay down our lives for the sake of the Gospel, but when the doing time comes, we are all about me, my, mine.

Remember when Jesus talked about the two sons who answered differently when told to do something? One said yes, then didn’t do it, the other said no, then went on and completed the job? Jesus said the one who obeyed was the one who answered no. That saying yes, then not doing is disobedience. OUCH! (That’s in Matthew 21:28-31.)

That must mean that the doing of laying our lives down is to happen pretty much constantly, or we’d be in a world of hurt, just gliding through life without a care until BAM! we have to put up or shut up.

Now, wait just a minute! God intends for me to have a good life! He wants me to have some comforts!

Does He? Did Jesus? He said He didn’t even have a place to lay His head. People treated Him as an outcast and someone to be hunted and killed. That’s not comfortable. Yet He spent every day going and doing for others. He wasn’t afraid to lay down His today life for His future life.

We need to get there. We need to become so enamored of the life to come that giving our time and resources, stepping out of the comfortable and into the uncomfortable, giving up our will for His becomes our heart’s deepest desire.

Losing our life here for Life there.

Time to stop saying and start doing.

Coffee, Bible, Journal.

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Faye Bryant is an author, coach, and speaker who helps individuals escape the lies of the enemy, live into God’s truth, and build a better life by first feeling, dealing, and healing their way through a stuck future or an abused past, toward a deeper path of purpose, and into the unhackable life of their chosen legacy.  Hers is a story of resurrection: from death to life!