Brenda and I are heading down to New Orleans tonight. We will be there for 6 days spending time with CRM:Communitas. We are prayerfully considering our calling to take up our cross and follow Jesus. We will sub-merge ourselves into the Communitas and ministry of the CRM team that is there.
I was reading todays entry about Abandonment in Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest. His thoughts were from Mark 10:28 and I felt that they were appropriate as we prepare to take this trip.
Then Peter began to say to him, "See, we have left everything and followed you."
Here is what Oswald Chambers wrote (emphasis mine on what struck me):
Our Lord replies in effect, that abandonment is for Himself, and not for what the disciples themselves will get from it. Beware of an abandonment which has the commercial spirit in it - "I am going to give myself to God because I want to be delivered from sin, because I want to be made holy." All that is the result of being right with God, but that spirit is not of the essential nature of Christianity. Abandonment is not for anything at all. We have got so commercialized that we only go to God for something from Him, and not for Himself. It is like saying, "No, Lord, I don't want Thee, I want myself; but I want myself clean and filled with the Holy Ghost; I want to be put in Thy show room and be able to say - 'This is what God has done for me.'" If we only give up something to God because we want more back, there is nothing of the Holy Spirit in our abandonment; it is miserable commercial self-interest. That we gain heaven, that we are delivered from sin, that we are made useful to God - these things never enter as considerations into real abandonment, which is a personal sovereign preference for Jesus Christ Himself.
When we come up against the barriers of natural relationship, where is Jesus Christ? Most of us desert Him - "Yes, Lord, I did hear Thy call; but my mother is in the road, my wife, my self-interest, and I can go no further." "Then," Jesus says, "you cannot be My disciple."
The test of abandonment is always over the neck of natural devotion. Go over it, and God's own abandonment will embrace all those you had to hurt in abandoning. Beware of stopping short of abandonment to God. Most of us know abandonment in vision only.
So my prayer through this journey is that I learn to give up my miserable commercial self-interest. That I am willing to seek God for God's sake and not for my own interest in return. Regardless of where, when, how and what God calls me into next in my journey that I would never elevate "that" above the desire to gain heaven, to be delivered from sin and to be transformed by the renewing of my mind to be used by God.
