You’ve probably heard that before, but we all may look at that statement in a different light.
We know an addict’s biggest battle is his own desire for whatever addicts him. A perfectionist’s biggest battle is her own sense of having to be perfect. A bitter person’s battle is his unforgiving spirit. A workaholic’s biggest battle is her need to prove her worth.
The list goes on and on.
But not one of these is the biggest battle we all face or have faced. That’s because the battle is spiritual, not physical. You can’t see it on a bathroom scale – in that endless fight to lose weight. You can’t see it won in a bigger paycheck or a knock-out figure from all of those workouts.
But you won’t win a spiritual war in the way you might think.
Jesus exemplified this spiritual battle, and He showed us how to win it. He foreshadowed what he later showed us by his life in this statement.
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?” Matthew 16:24-26
According to these words of Jesus, our biggest fight is to give God our wills. Andrew Murray called it Absolute Surrender. And while it sounds like we are giving in and giving up and actually losing ourselves, it is only in this surrender that we win our souls.
Jesus showed this to us in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he faced what is undoubtedly the greatest test/battle/war of all time. He knew what awaited Him in the darkness. He knew the war was not against earthly enemies, even though it was human beings who were the instruments of His coming torture.
No, the real torture began in that Garden. The choice began in that Garden. Like a similar choice started in a different Garden at time’s beginning, Jesus now faced that same battle of wills in His Garden where blood, sweat, and tears, became a real thing in the absolute truest sense.
You see Jesus came to earth to obey His Father’s plan for His life and for the life of the world. But in that Garden, like every human being to ever live, He had a choice. Would He fulfill God’s plan for His life or go His own way?
Can’t you hear the anguish of choice in His tone?
He walked away, about a stone’s throw, and knelt down and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me.”
The biblical writers go right on to the next sentence, but can we pause a moment? If I were writing this scene in a novel, I would want to hear every nuance in every word. Did He plead? Father, if you are willing, please! Did He falter on every word? I say this because the rest of the text tells us that an angel came to strengthen Him and still He prayed more fervently and was in SUCH agony of spirit that His sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.
Do we pray like that? Do we war with our wills, with our wants in such fervent prayer that the very ground beneath us knows we are there weeping?
THIS honesty, this fervency, this agony, this desire for ANYTHING else, was Jesus’ greatest battle. And because it was a battle of His Father’s way or His way, we can look at His example and realize that this is our battle too. Will our lives be lived God’s way or our way?
There is a popular song sung by Frank Sinatra titled “My Way”. “I did it my way.” Don’t you know that is the desire of every person on the planet? We all want life to go our way. Even Jesus faced that desire in His Garden moment.
The desire itself isn’t a sin or Jesus would not have remained the perfect Son of God. It was what He did with that desire that mattered.
This is where Jesus taught us how to win the biggest battle of our lives. The battle for our souls.
Jesus won the battle for the souls of men and women when He uttered those words. He showed us that prayer is bitter honesty coupled with absolute surrender to what God wants, whether we like it or not.
That’s not a popular thought these days. We live in a world that worships autonomy. We want independence and freedom to do whatever we want, and don’t you dare judge me.
I get it. I feel the exact same way. I want to make my own choices. We all do.
Adam and Eve were faced with that same “do what I want” temptation, and we all know how that turned out.
What would have happened if Jesus hadn’t won His temptation to escape the will of God?
There would be no Savior. There would be no battle, because we would all simply live as we pleased and gain the whole world, yet lose our own souls.
We owe a great debt to Jesus for winning the battle that cost Him more than we will ever comprehend. And we win our own battles with our wills by giving them to God. By sacrificing our way to His. By praising Him for what He’s so graciously done for us.
This might not be the subject we want to think about. But it is most definitely the one battle we will all face. And we will all make a choice.
#livegrace #absolutesurrender #thegreatestbattle #gaintheworldorloseyoursoul Personal, Musings, DevotionsAugust 16, 2018
