To seek death

When we seek to live in a way that pleases God, when we strive to be like Jesus in our thoughts and actions, when we desire to know Christ and have Him be the center of our lives - what does that entail? More than I know and can write about, certainly, but one thing it means is that we seek death.

Before you lessen the impact of that statement with all the rationalization of what exactly "death" means when, say, the Apostle Paul says in Philippians that "to die is gain" or that he longs to be "conformed to His death," take the time to think about it honestly. What does it mean to die? It is to be cut off, alone, from everyone else, as a single individual - to see your dreams for your life fading from your grasp, to know that you will have no future in which to do the things you've always wanted - to suddenly wonder what substance or worth any part of your life has had, and if anything you did ever truly mattered - to abandon all material things without a hidden reserve, to lose all earthly treasures without a safety net or back-up plan, to be separated irrevocably from the physical, visible world around you. How could this be the thing that we seek, when we serve a God of life, a God who delights in pouring out blessings upon His people, a God of joy and harmony and love? Is it strictly a physical death that we seek? Clearly not, since those who followed Christ, though they died for Him, did not seek that death as a suicide seeks death. They were seeking something else, and had already attained death before they reached that earthly death.

So what is this death that we seek? We seek to die to this world, even as we still live and remain in it. And how does that work? It means that the things that matter in this world - respect, approval, fame, material security, wealth, physical health, pleasure, comfort, convenience, and so on through the list of all that we pursue and idolize - these things must not matter to us any longer. Whether we are rich or poor, wealth or poverty must not be the thing that matters or the thing we seek; whether we are sick or well, health or sickness must not be the thing that matters or the thing we seek; whether we are well-loved or despised, the opinion of others (negative or positive) must not be the thing that matters or the thing we seek. It should be as though we have been cut off from those things, alone as a single individual on the other side of the great divide, seeing our dreams for this world fading away, knowing that our future does not lie with them, dispensing of every last hidden reserve and secret treasure that would bind us to this world.

Death hurts, dearly beloved.

It hurts like hell to be torn from the things and the people we love, that matter to us, upon which we have built the whole of our precariously balanced lives. And ultimately, death is hell, because it tears apart relationships and we were not made to be alone. But we seek death because we know that in Christ this death is not the ending. If we have attained this death - the death to this world, even as we physically live on in this world - then when physical death does come for us as it comes for all, we will find ourselves in the fullness and completion of life: not physical life, but that greater heavenly life which we begin to taste and see even now as we learn to die to things of earth. If we give up all this world first, simply because we seek to know and be with Christ and not for any other future pleasure we may hope for or any present accolades or admiration, we will find a more wonderful and beautiful life in Him. We seek death so that we might know what is the power of His resurrection; we desire to be conformed to His death so that we may attain to the resurrection from the dead.