Losing Your Life in Christ…

Grace be yours & peace from God our Father & the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Text: Matthew 10:34-42
34 “Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
Losing Your Life in Christ…
Do you ever lose things because you forget where you put them? Pastor says he often loses his glasses. He takes them off whenever he has to do some close-up work because he can see better close-up without them. When he’s done he walks away without thinking about his glasses. Sometime later he will realize his glasses are gone, but he won’t have any idea where he had them last. He thinks that he would learn his lesson and not lose them, but he says that sometime this coming week, he’ll put them down somewhere, forget where he put them, and will be searching for the lost glasses again.
Do you have any tendency like that? If you are like pastor and have that tendency to lose your glasses, nothing really bad may come out of it. The worst thing that could happen if you lost them altogether would be that you would have to buy a new pair of glasses. It would cost you something, but you could always get another pair of glasses without too much difficulty. And so it goes with the everyday things of life. For the most part you could usually replace what is lost.
But that is not true with things that are eternal, like your soul. If through inattention or doubt or rejection of God’s Word you lose your soul, it’s gone eternally and you will suffer forever in hell. A soul cannot be replaced if it is lost. And that is no laughing matter.
Jesus warns us of this in our text. At the same time, He encourages us to find our soul daily in Him through faith. But to find your soul in Him, you have to lose something else. You have to let go of the attractions and distractions of this life that can pull you away from Christ. Usually losing something is bad, but not here, for when you lose your life in Christ, you actually gain so much more.
I. Jesus begins by saying, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
A sword is an instrument of war. It is a weapon that brings death. How is it that Jesus brought a sword and violence with Him when He came to earth, because on the night of His birth in Bethlehem, the angels sang, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom God’s favor rests.”
As the Prince of Peace, Jesus had come to establish peace between God and sinful men. He would do that by offering Himself as the perfect sacrifice to atone for our sins. Yet, the vast majority of this world’s people prefer to think that they can and will do what is necessary to establish their own peace with God. They also resent it when anyone tells them something differently. So, if you tell them that only Jesus can give us peace with God, only Jesus can take away our sins, and that only by faith in Jesus will we find the way to heaven, they won’t like it. You will find a division coming in-between the two of you. And that’s what a sword does. It cuts, it divides, it separates, and it does so in a painful way. That is a consequence of Jesus’ coming.
You see, dear friends, many are opposed to this aspect of Christianity. Sometimes that hostility has led to bloodshed. The early Christians were thrown to the lions for their faith in Christ. How peaceful could that have been for them?
Sadly, Jesus wants us to realize that such treatment can even come from the members of our own families. He said, “I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law – a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
What a sad and horrible thing it is when a believer finds himself at odds with those in this world who are supposed to be closest to him. And the cause? – his faith in Christ. That’s a bad and a sad situation. So what is the believer to do?
The temptation is to avoid the bad blood within the family. But to do that, you will have to put out your Christian light that is to shine in this world. Christians will be tempted to hide their faith, or, as Peter found in the courtyard of the High Priest when Jesus was on trial, Christians will be tempted to deny their Lord. Why do such temptations come? Because a person is more concerned about his or her relationship with the relatives than about his or her relationship with the Savior. Anyone who is more concerned for such relationships on earth is making a disastrous choice.
You see, Losing Your Life for Christ, choosing Christ above all other individuals and above all other things, won’t get you worldly peace. Sooner or later it will get you pain, division, or, what Jesus calls, the “sword.” The price of discipleship is a costly one.

II. But, losing Your Life in Christ gets you the rewards of grace.
Jesus promised, “Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it….he will certainly not lose his reward.” Christ Himself promises to recognize with a reward the life that was lost in Him.
Normally a reward is something given in return to you for something you have done. If you capture a dangerous criminal, a reward for his capture may be given to you. If a child picks up his clothes from the floor and helps his mother with the cleaning of the house, he may receive something in return for what he has done. That’s what we think of when we think of rewards – something given to us in return for something we have done.
Does God give us such rewards? Yes, but His basis for the reward is completely different from the normal way that we view rewards. He does not reward us according to what we have done on our own. Thank goodness He doesn’t, for what we have done is sin. Even the most righteous things that we have done are nothing but dirty looking rags to Him. And the Bible adds, “The wages of sin is death.” That’s how God would have to reward us if rewards were given on the basis of what we had done on our own.
But God’s rewards are not based on what we have done as much as they are based on what the Savior has done for us by taking away our sin and on our believing in Him. They are known as rewards of grace, not merit, and they flow to those who by faith have lost their Lives in Christ. Jesus said it this way in our text: “Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward. And if anyone gives a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.”
A prophet’s reward or a righteous man’s reward is not heaven; it’s not eternal salvation. No one, not even a prophet nor an apostle, earned heaven by anything he did. Rather, we know from the Bible that anyone receives eternal salvation only through faith in Christ crucified. When we believe that, when we receive a prophet, a preacher’s word on that and believe it, God graciously rewards our faith with the same blessings the prophet receives: peace with God through Christ, patience in time of tribulation, confidence to pray, and the like. And, like a prophet, we will live for Christ in all things that we do. Even such a simple act like giving a cup of cold water to a thirsty child pleases God, when that is done as an expression of the faith that Loses Its Life in Christ. He will find a way to reward us with His grace. We may forget about what we have done, but He won’t.
Perhaps some who are among us today could tell of blessings from their own experience which followed as a result of some act carried out in faith in Christ. Perhaps the blessing was even entirely out of proportion to the effort spent. Losing Your Life in Christ will get you the rewards of grace. You may see them in time.
But most especially, you will enjoy them in heaven. John writes in Revelation (14:13), “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from henceforth. Yes, says the Spirit, they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”
Our good works do not open the door to the Father’s House for us, nor do they have the power to get us into heaven. Christ crucified and faith in Him does. And once the believer is there, all of those good works and deeds of faith, even the giving of a cup of cold water, are remembered and honored. Why? Not so much because you did them, but because they showed that you had lost your life in the Savior. That is something God never forgets.
Losing Your Life in Christ won’t get you worldly peace, but it will get you the rewards of grace. God grant it in our lives of faith, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
May the peace of God that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus. Amen.