Do you feel that something is missing in your life? Do you feel that your worldly ambitions and material rewards are not enough? Do you seem to have all that, and still feel empty inside?
Well, you’ve heard this before: “All you have to do is let Jesus into your life! He will give you the spiritual sustenance you are looking for, and when you add that the material things you wanted, and the success you have achieved, you truly will ‘have it all.’”
You hear this from well-known gospel songs, and best-selling books to earnest evangelists on TV: “All you have to do is accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior. All you have to do is ask for what you want in the name of Jesus, and it will be done for you.”
There is some truth in that. In fact, I have said this several times. You need Jesus in your life if you feel empty.
However, Christianity is more than all these. You do not want to be part of a religion where you do not have to do anything. That kind of faith has an immediate appeal, but if you think about it, it lacks the depth to sustain you over the long haul of Christian living.
Years ago, when the Betty Crocker company first began selling their cake mixes, they offered a product that only needed water. All you had to do was add water to the mix that came in the box, and you would get a perfect, delicious cake every time.Well, to their great surprise, no one bought it. The company could not understand why. They commissioned a study that brought back a surprising answer: People were not buying the cake mix because it was “too easy”. They did not want to be excluded from the work of preparing a cake; they wanted to feel that they were contributing something to it. So,Betty Crocker changed the formula, and required the customer to add an egg, in addition to water. Immediately, the new cake mix was a huge success.
Unfortunately, many people make the same mistake when it comes to presenting the Christian religion. They try to make the call of Jesus Christ as easy as possible because if it seems too hard, people will not “buy” it.
Jesus said several things about the blessings of faith, and he talked about asking in order to receive; but Jesus never presented the overall Christian life as being easy.
Jesus talked a lot about what God can do for you, and the benefits that you get by following Jesus. But he talked even more about what you must do to be his followers. And that is the part that is usually overlooked.
Some Greeks who were attending the festival of the Passover approached Philip, a disciple of Jesus. They heard a lot of things about Jesus—how he healed the sick, how he fed the 5,000, how he talked about God’s kingdom. Philip was not sure what to do with their request. Philip consulted with Andrew, the other disciple with a Greek name, and together they went and told Jesus of the Gentiles’ request.
Jesus’ response, on the surface, may appear a bit odd to us: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified … and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself.” (vv. 23-32). Then he described the cost of Christian living, and he was not watering it down to make it seem palatable or “easy”.
This Sunday we celebrate the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, the townspeople came out to cheer for him. They threw palm branches — the symbol of victory — in his path.
The disciples must have thought: “Hey, this is great! People are starting to listen to what Jesus is saying. Their expectations were only heightened when they heard the Master say: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”
But then Jesus said: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” But he does not stop there: “Those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
Suddenly, the disciples get that sinking feeling, perhaps thinking, “This is not what we have in mind. Why does Jesus have to make everything so hard? This is the man who can walk on water and raise the dead! Why does he not just use a little bit of that power for his own ends?”
But before the disciples can distance themselves from Jesus’ words, he confronts them: “Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.”
Now the disciples are starting to sweat. And those of us hearing those words might start wondering. We look at Jesus’ promises of eternal life and unimaginable glory and say, “Sure, Lord, I’ll follow you there.”
But when we face Jesus’ command to serve the poor and needy, to go into all the world to spread his message, to take up our cross and die to our own self, suddenly, we are not so sure whether we can truly follow him.
In one installment of the comic strip Hagar the Horrible,” Hagar confronts his not-so-bright sidekick, Lucky Eddie. “I need a second-in-command,” Hagar bellows. “Can you say yes or no with authority?” Lucky Eddie shouts back, “Yes or No with authority!” And Hagar says to himself, “I think I’m going to be sick!” The best thing we can say about Lucky Eddie is that he is eager to please.
But Jesus requires more from his followers than being eager to please. Jesus needs people who can say “Yes” with authority: Yes, I am willing to put you first in my life. Yes, I am willing to put aside my agenda. Yes, I am willing to follow you, though it will cost me everything.
Jesus describes His fate by saying that the hour has come for Him “to be glorified.” “Glorified,” means “crucified.”
During this Lenten season, we are reminded of Jesus being crucified. He compares himself to a grain of wheat buried in the earth. It cannot yield anything, and remains alone if preserved, safe, and secure.
If He is crucified, dead, and buried, then He can rise to bear much fruit, drawing all people to Himself. The Son of God must die if He is to bring to the world the gift of eternal life.
Today, Jesus is also telling us that we must die to live. If we want to be a follower of Jesus, we have to lose our life! To receive the ultimate joy, we must be willing to pay the ultimate price.
At this point, many of us would say, “It is too expensive. I love my life too much to lose it, and I am not ready to die yet. I think I’ll find something that is a little less demanding.”
Just like a young man who had been suspended from school several times, and told me, “Why do I have to change my life when I like it now?”
A lot of people are looking for the path to faith and spiritual fulfillment, but many of them are not finding it.
Jesus says in our text, “Whoever serves Me must follow Me.”
This is the path we seek, but we lose our way amid the easy answers. Faith is something to be practiced and prepared for eternity. It is not easy. We are to follow him all the way to the cross, where he dies as a grain of wheat to be buried, and bear much fruit. He says that like him, we must lose our life to keep it.
What do we have that we need to lose?
Today that question resonates with meaning because everything that truly matters is at stake. We should die with those parts of our lives which keep us from loving Christ. We should work hard to lose them because the things we give up count as nothing compared to what we gain.
I do not know where you are in your life right now. If you keep on postponing giving yourself to God; if you have some anger with someone; if you have neglected your prayer life because you are busy; if you have neglected your family, concentrating only in making money, you need to die from these things to be able to get a life that is fulfilling. It is not easy, but with God on your side, it can be done.
When we watch the Olympics, what do we see but young athletes who have made enormous sacrifices over the years? They sacrificed a normal childhood for countless hours of hard work and pain and solitary training, and they did it all just for that moment when they would stand on the winner’s platform at the Olympic Games.
As parents, we, too, are asked to sacrifice. We sacrifice all our privacy, and a piece of our sanity. But we do it all for the sake of something that money cannot buy. These are the things we lose to gain something better.
“One of the bitterest moments of my life,” said a missionary, “was when an earnest young Buddhist boy told me, I want to believe in Christ, but I have never seen Him in those who profess Him.”
How can I believe in someone Whom I have not seen? “A Christian,” says Robert E. Gibson, “is the keyhole through which other folks see God.”
Earl Palmer, in a fine little book titled, The Enormous Exception, tells the story of a pre-med student at the University of California-Berkeley who “became a Christian after a long journey through doubts and questions.” When Palmer asked the young man why he had chosen Jesus Christ, he answered that what had “tipped the scales” in his spiritual journey were the actions of a Christian classmate. During the previous term, the pre-med student had been sick with the flu, and as a result, had missed 10 days of school. “Without any fanfare or complaints,” his Christian classmate carefully collected all his class assignments, and took time away from his studies to help him catch up. The pre-med student told Palmer, “You know, this kind of thing just isn’t done. I wanted to know what made this guy act the way he did. I even found myself asking if I could go to church with him.” (Don’t put a period where God put a comma, Nell W. Mohney. Nashville: Dimensions for Living, 1993)
A small act of love, a friend can see Jesus in our lives. And so, you and I are confronted with a question: Can others see Christ in us?
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