Give Everything Over to Death: C.S. Lewis on Romans 12:1

In Mere Christianity Lewis writes:  "Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.  Lose your life and you will save it.  Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.  Keep back nothing.  Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours.  Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the death.  Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay.  But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in."

Comments:  What is all this business we talk about defending our rights and being in charge of our lives?  Are we not trying to lead a double life?  On the one hand we want Jesus; we want to be Christian . . . we want Him to rule us.  And yet, on the other hand we would go to the death to preserve our independence and the rights we have to pursue liberty and happiness.  We strive to fulfill our dreams.  We rule our lives and give lip service to being ruled by Another.  Yet all along the secret to the resurrection of our very lives in the here and now is crucifixion.  Without voluntary death right now none of us shall ever enjoy His resurrection life as it was meant to me--right now.  In the Christian realm death as spoken here always leads to abundant life.  Be warned:  The devil is trying to keep you from it.

Eternal life is about today-- your present existence on September 20, 2011.  It is a quality of life that you will have if you will lay down your life.  My passions, my dreams, my own will and plans must be relinquished to Him.  This is what it means to seek first God's kingdom.  It is to go all in.  It is to adapt the sermon on the mount as a real ethic.  It is to reject every false brand of Christianity which says we can live for Jesus and somehow be in charge of our lives.  You want to see God?  You want to experience His resurrection?  Then you and everything in you must die.  His will, His ways, His power will only come to the front of your life when you voluntary sacrifice all to God--including those things that we have been fooled into thinking we had a right to have.