A Cross Fit Challenge

This year the Lord led me to three words: Listen, learn and lead.  Then He showed me how each word should lead to the gospel.  I am intentionally listening to hear His voice above all others, to learn the deeper meaning of the gospel message and to lead others by sharing what He teaches me.  The Lord called His disciples to listen in the darkness and in the quiet in order to proclaim in the light whatever they had heard whispered in their ear.  (Matthew 10:27)  The result of the disciples listening and learning from Jesus is found in the Bible in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.    

I committed to the Lord to share each week in my Sunday morning Life Bible study, what I was learning about the gospel.  We have been going through the book of Romans, focusing on the gospel of Christ.  I have often heard that out of obedience comes blessing. Over the past 10 weeks of obediently sharing the gospel story in my class I have had the joy of hearing from different women how they have been challenged or encouraged through the Word.  This past Sunday, when class was over, one of the ladies in my class approached me.  I recently had heard her story of how she was pregnant and living in Cambodia in 1975 when the Communists came in and forced all the residents of her town to the countryside to labor camps. She did not know about Jesus at that time, but knew there must be a God.  The Lord rescued her out of Cambodia five years later and was offered passage to the United States.  As we talked in the hallway last week she was full of joy and excitement. Speaking in broken English she kept telling me, “I understand, I understand!”  I am sure I looked puzzled, and then she said, “I knew God and believed Jesus, but I never understood what it all meant until now.  The Word you taught today opened my ears and my eyes and I understand!”  Tears welled up in both of our eyes and we had a little worship service of our own right there in the midst of a busy hallway of a mega church.  She understood for the first time what Jesus had done and that she no longer had fear or anxiety.  She knew that nothing would separate her from God’s love!

Her words have been on my mind this week as I began preparing myself for Easter.  I am reading a book, “Bread and Wine,” which is a collection of readings for Lent and Easter by many different authors. I have lingered long over this one sentence from the introduction of this book, “Lent (literally “springtime”) is a time of preparation, a time to return to the desert where Jesus spent forty trying days readying for his ministry.  He allowed himself to be tested, and if we are serious about following him, we will do the same.”  I desire for my eyes and ears to be open to the deeper things of God just like my sweet Cambodian sister’s eyes were opened this week.  Psalm 51:12 says, “Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.”  My prayer, as I go into this season of Lent, is that God would test me, examine my heart and restore to me a greater joy.   And that through this desert experience He would draw me into a deeper understanding of and connection with Jesus.

The Lord has already been at work refining my mind and heart.  Last night I was writing an email expressing my frustration over someone’s actions and how I had done everything I could to help and was ready to throw in the towel.  I kept rewriting and editing the email and when I was ready to hit the send button something stopped me in my tracks!  It wasn’t a something, it was the Holy Spirit, that still small voice inside me, saying “This isn’t about what you don’t or do deserve, it is about giving up what you think you deserve and instead giving grace, My grace."  

Then words that I had hidden in my heart came flooding into my mind, “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:  Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but make himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”  Jesus was God and was with God from the beginning (John 1:1), but chose to come to earth in the form of a baby inside of a young virgin’s womb in order to fulfill His calling as Savior.  The Bible says He grew in wisdom, in stature and in favor with God and man. (Luke 2:52)  First He had to grow up and then it was time to go out to save a dark and dying world.  But before He could fulfill the call of God He had to go through forty days in a desert with no food, no water, and endure extreme temptation from the Devil himself!  I believe the first thing God is calling me to do in this season of Lent is the same thing He called Jesus to do – to give up living an entitled life and start living an abandoned life. 

Avery and Will

My son and daughter-in-law have become Cross-fit enthusiasts.  They have both disciplined themselves physically by enduring intense workouts that have involved lifting heavy weight, jumping on top of boxes and doing hundreds of chin-ups.  They look phenomenal.  Their bodies have been transformed!  Jesus’ desert experience was the beginning of his cross fit experience.  The Lord was conditioning Him for the path that ultimately would lead Him to the cross.  We have grown up in a world that tells us daily that we have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that as a result we are an entitled people.  Jesus said, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.  For even the Son of man did not come to be served but to serve and give His life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:43-45) My first day of observing lent, He has tested me and I have seen my failure.  I have sought entitlement instead of abandonment.  Will you join me on a cross fit challenge?  The cross fit challenge is this: To set aside being praised, honored or served by others and instead take up Christ’s call to deny yourself, take up your cross daily and follow Him and serve others.  I am looking forward to forty days of transformation. At the end of the forty days the goal is that He will have become greater and we will have become less.  We will be transformed in heart and yes we will look phenomenal, because we will look a little more like Jesus.  I want to say with my sweet Cambodian friend, “My eyes have been opened and I now understand more fully what I already believed!”   

I would love to hear from you and how you are planning to take the cross fit challenge.  I am praying for you as you seek to live an abandoned life and asking that your eyes will be opened to know more fully the gospel story of Jesus.

Looking forward to Easter!

Nancy