Whose kingdom are you living in? Yours or Christ's?
What do you treasure the most? The things of this earth or the things of Christ's Kingdom?
Who is your greatest love? The people in your life or the Person who is Life?
You can find your life, and one day when the refining fire of judgment burns everything up realize just how temporal your kingdom was/is--you "will lose it." Or, you can exchange your kingdom for Christ's Kingdom, losing your life for Him and in so doing find the real, abundant, eternal, Kingdom life. Real pleasure and satisfaction is only found when we place everything on the altar and surrender to the cross of Christ.
I'm reminded of my favorite Bible verse, which we meditated on during our Scripture and Prayer time yesterday at worship--
You make know to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Psalm 16:11
I want to ask you to pray for a man named Cerno. I met him in January on our trip to Guinea, West Africa. The missionaries tag the people they serve with nicknames to help us in the states in praying more specifically because many of the folks there have the same root name. This man's nickname was "Demon Cerno." For years he had been tormented by evil and darkness, as are many in that part of the world. Satan has a hold there, namely by way of his greatest tool--Islam.
We visited with him and told him that this was Satan at work and that only Jesus could deal with Satan--we weren't worried about that torment because we had Jesus. We commanded the evil away in Jesus' name. Though he was peaceful at that moment, I told him I could not promise that as soon as we left the demon wouldn't return because he didn't have Jesus.
As we shared with him about having Jesus for himself, not as a safeguard against demons but as Lord and Savior, his concerns came up: I'll lose my job. My family will turn me away. My friends will cut me off. I'll lose my life.
I had my Bible handy (because the demon thing sort of freaked me out) and opened it to this passage, Matthew 10:34-39. The offer that was before Cerno was for real life. All these other things were going to pass away, but the Kingdom of God was available--only through Jesus. What he was challenged to give up were but rags in comparison to the real, abundant, Kingdom life of Jesus. Real pleasure. Real satisfaction.
We may not have such clear cut sacrifices to make, but we must make the exchange just the same. The things we must give up are perhaps a bit more disguised. Satan makes us think they're not that big of a deal. But without the exchange, there is no Kingdom life. We must lose our lives for Christ's sake to truly find it.
