Something to spend...
Terry Dashner (
www.ffcba.com)
As a young boy growing up in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma I looked
forward every year with great anticipation, I might add, to the
annual Rooster Day event. Rooster Day was a weekend event in May
that provided a carnival and parade with wafting aromas of
greasy burgers frying at every other food booth on main street.
Rooster Day still takes place here in May of every year. And
although the carnival and parade is much larger than what I
experienced as a boy, every child's desire to attend it is still
the same. But for most, like me, in order to spend the day
having fun, one must bring some money to spend. (I mowed a lot
of lawns for $2.00 a yard to get enough money to spend at
Rooster Day.)
In order to have fun at Rooster Day, one must have something to
spend. Do you realize that God wants us to enjoy life through
spending it? That's right. God gave us life to spend and not to
keep. Listen again to this verse. Mark 8:36 reads, "Whoever
seeks to save his life shall lose it; and whoever loses his life
for my sake and for the sake of the gospel shall save it"
(William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible Series Revised Edition
The Gospel of Mark, Westminster Press, 1975, p. 203).
History is full of examples of men, who by throwing away their
lives, gained life eternal. Late in the fourth century, there
was in the East a monk called Telemachus. He had determined to
leave the world and to live all alone in prayer and meditation
and fasting, and so to save his soul. In his lonely life he
sought nothing but contact with God. But somehow he felt there
was something wrong. One day as he rose from his knees, it
suddenly dawned upon him that his life was based, not on a
self-less, but on a selfish love of God. It came to him that if
he was to serve God he must serve men, that the desert was no
place for a Christian to live, that the cities were full of sin
and therefore full of need.
Telemachus found his way to the [Roman] arena. There were
eighty-thousand people there. The chariot races were ending; and
there was a tenseness in the crowd as the gladiators prepared to
fight. Into the arena they came with their greeting. 'Hail,
Caesar! We who are about to die salute you!' The fight was on
and Telemachus was appalled. Men for whom Christ had died were
killing each other to amuse an allegedly Christian populace. He
leapt the barrier. He was in between the gladiators, and for a
moment they stopped. 'Let the games go on,' roared the crowd.
They pushed the old man aside; he was still in his hermit's
robes. Again he came between them. The crowd began to hurl
stones at him; they urged the gladiators to kill him and get him
out of the way. The commander of the games gave an order; a
gladiator's sword rose and flashed; and Telemachus lay dead.
Suddenly the crowd were silent. They were suddenly shocked that
a holy man should have been killed in such a way. Suddenly there
was a mass realization of what this killing really was. The
games ended abruptly that day--and they never began again.
Telemachus, by dying, had ended them. As Gibbon said of him,
'His death was more useful to mankind than his life.' By losing
his life he had done more than ever he could have done by
husbanding it out in lonely devotion in the desert (Ibid., pp.
204-205).
Keep the faith. Stay the course. Jesus gave us His life so that
we might have life to give away.
Pastor T
About the author:
www.ffcba.com
