Todays Reading!! Something I Needed to Hear from my Savior

Sacrifice, My Status Symbol

"For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospels will save it." Mark 8:35

O wicked and perverse generation, have I been so long in your midst and yet you have perceived me not?  Have I not ministered unto you in myriad ways, and you have been blind? Yes, and when I speak to you, you do not hear.  O My children, you go your way as though you belong to another; yes, you behave not as sons and daughters but as strangers.  You hold meetings in My name, and give honor to men, but not to Me.  You boast that you serve me, but in truth you serve your own ego; for that which you do is calculated to enhance your own position and advance you own prestige, and you give it all a sanctimonious cloak.

"See," you say, "we shall pray," while prayer is farthest from your heart.  And who shall hear you?  Only your own ears.  Prayer is for those whose hearts cry to me in sincerity.  Prayer is for those who earnestly seek me; not for those with only pretend piety, who, with selfish and unworthy motives and hearts make fat with self-adulation, are only playing with Me as a child would manipulate a puppet on a string!

Get to the prayer closet! This is the reason I have taught you to pray in secret; because there you are beset by fewer false motives and less temptation.  He who does not habitually commune with me alone is almost sure to find true prayer impossible in public.

You would make Christianity pleasant and acceptable.  Your Savior did not find it so.  You would make it comfortable and accommodating to your own schedule.  He knew nothing of such a false religion.

Lonely nights, he wrestled in prayer, nor spared Himself physical discomfort.  Yes, and the more you pamper the flesh as to bodily comfort, the more it will demand of you, until you become its servant, an your physical needs shall be a tyrant unto you in your house.

Do not be deceived.  I gave you no such amendment.  Hear Me as I repeat to you what I gave to your fathers; "Deny yourself and take up your cross and follow Me." Yes, follow me not some worldly form of a backslidden church.

Do not think that it becomes blessed because it bears the name "church." My Church is a living body, not a dead form.  My people may be recognized by their humility and suffering, not by social acceptability and self-advertised success; not by extravagant physical appointments of their structures, but by the grace of God at work in their hearts.  Sacrifice is My status symbol, and humility has not been eager to recognize the type of spiritual leadership I had in servants like the prophet Jeremiah and the apostle Paul.  Do you desire to truly follow Me? Look for the bloodstained prints of My feet.  Go, as it were, to the cold, unyielding rock in the garden of Gethsemane, where self is put aside, and the cup of the suffering is accepted.  Die to your own treacherous and deceitful heart.  Rise with determination to go on unflinchingly, not hoping to spare yourself.  Save your life and you will surely love it.  Offer it up to me, this day, in renewed consecration to sacrificial living, and I will accept you and you shall know joy as a new wine.