Matthew 10: 39
He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.
I remember once a few years ago when I was in a store and heard a young child ask her mother what this meant. Her mother was at a loss for words.
From MacClaren’s Expositions:
…The true losing of life is the slaying of self, and that has to be done day by day, and not once for all, in some supreme act of surrender at the end, or in some initial act of submission and yielding at the beginning, of the Christian life. We ourselves have to take the knife into our own hands and strike, and that not once, but ever, right on through our whole career. For, by natural disposition, we are all inclined to make our own selves to be our own centres, our own aims, the objects of our trust, our own law; and if we do so, we are dead whilst we live, and the death that brings life is when, day by day, we ‘crucify the old man with his affections and lusts.’…
What is meant? This is meant-the absolute submission of the will to commandments and providences, the making of that obstinate part of our nature meek and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter’s hands… And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense, until we can say-and verify the speech by our actions-’Not my will but Thine be done.’ They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into their hearts, and enthrone upon the sovereign seat in their wills, Christ and His will-these are they who have lost their lives. When we can say, ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,’ then, and only then, have we in the deepest sense of the words ‘lost our lives.’
…The phrase means the suppression, and sometimes the excision, of appetites, passions, desires, inclinations. It means the hallowing of all aims; it means the devotion and the consecration of all activities. …
If you would drive self out of your hearts … let Christ’s love and sacrifice come in. And then, what no brooms and brushes, no spades nor wheelbarrows, will ever do-namely, cleanse out the filth that lodges there-the turning of the river in will do, and float it all away. The one possibility for complete, conclusive deliverance from the dominion and tyranny of Self is to be found in the words ‘For My sake.’
So if you would own yourselves, give yourselves away. And such an one ‘shall find’ his life, here and now, in that all earthly things will be sweeter and better. The altar sanctifies the gift. When some pebble is plunged into a sunlit stream, the water brings out the veined colourings of the stone that looked all dull and dim when it was lying upon the bank. Fling your whole being, your wealth, your activities, and everything, into that stream, and they will flash in splendour else unknown.