“Then
Jesus told his disciples, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me. For
whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my
sake will find it’.”
Matthew 16:24-25 ESV
Just recently we held our first
church-wide fellowship night, and the devotional passage we looked at was from
Matthew 16:24-25, the passage above. We
had some good thoughts related to that passage, what it meant to the disciples
gathered there, and what it means for us today.
There is to be a definite humbling of ourselves, and submitting
ourselves to Christ in order to truly follow Him. My thoughts later that night, and into the
next morning ran into another line of thinking related to the difficulty man
has in submitting himself to anyone else, whether God or man.
Even in theological circles we argue
the validation of our free will against the election or predestination by
God. Some would say that God cannot
override man’s free will. But stop and
think for just a moment about what that would mean if it were true. If God was not sovereign over the will of
man, his own creation, would He then truly be sovereign at all. Could not other aspects of creation overrule
the will of God? Even if one small
aspect of God’s creation could overpower the power and authority of God, it
would make Him not sovereign, or all powerful, and thus susceptible to other
threats on His power. Would He then have
power over the devil who wants to destroy us?
Does He truly have the power to save us?
The answer to this is that while man
has a measure of free will, that free will is completely subject to the power
and authority of God. Think if it this
way. In a family, at least as God has
designed the family to function, there are parents, and then if so blessed,
there are eventually children. As those
children grow, while they are given room to grow, and an increasing ability to
make their own decisions, those children are still subject to the authority of
the parents. We can very easily see the
results of what happens when a child is given autonomy, or complete ability to
make decisions, and even override the authority of the parents. Children grow up to have no respect for
authority whatsoever, because they’ve never been forced to be subject to any
authority. But when a family operates
under the pattern God has established, the children are subject to the parents,
but by the time they are nearly adults, they have learned to make wise decisions,
they have learned what it is to respect those in authority over them, and can
relate in a world where there is always some balance of free-will and
submission to some form of authority.
Autonomy and free-will are not synonymous. R.C. Sproul writes, in Chosen by God, “If God is sovereign, man cannot possibly be
autonomous. If man is autonomous, God
cannot possibly be sovereign. These
would be contradictions… We are free,
but there are limits to our freedom. The
ultimate limit is the sovereignty of God…God is free. I am free, but God is more free than I am.”
This is why Jesus told his
disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his
cross and follow me.” A follower of Christ is someone who has
willingly submitted themselves to a Sovereign God, accepted his way, and has
determined to make pleasing Him the focus of their lives, despite all the
influences and attractions the world throws at us. It is His incredible love for us that
motivated Him to save us and set us free from the weight of our sin. “In love, he predestined us to be adopted as
his sons through Jesus Christ in accordance with his pleasure and will.” Eph. 1:5
By
His Grace Alone,
Pastor
Bruce Jacobsen
