Your 100 Day Prayer: Day 23 – How to Save a Life

“Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘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 lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.'”
-Mark 8:34-35

“Here’s one of life’s best-kept secrets: If we try to fulfill ourselves by ourselves, or to realize our dreams on our own steam and our own personal plan (‘save’ our lives), we’ll fail in the attempt. But if we give up our lives and hand them over to our Creator asking him to have his perfect will even over our own (‘lose’ our lives), we’ll find to our surprise that we’re fulfilled by it.

This is the basic ‘wiring’ of creation. It’s built into everything around us, even if we can’t immediately see it. Unfortunately, it’s something that usually dawns on us only after we’ve tried everything else under the sun.”

TODAY’S PRAYER: Do you feel that in your life you’ve lost more than you’ve gained? Ask God for the assurance that in the life of faith nothing is ever really unrecoverable or in vain. He deliberately builds everything into his eternal purpose that far exceeds any of our hopes or expectations.

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Photo by cimddwc via Flickr