Lose Your Soul-Life to Find True Life

“Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his soul-life will lose it, and whoever loses his soul-life for My sake will find it’” (Matt. 16:24-25). To lose our soul-life means losing our soul-life as the initiator, decision-maker, and definer of how we feel or what we want! In these verses the Lord is saying, “Lose setting your mind on the things of men. Lose it! Take Me! Lose yourself; do not find yourself. When you lose yourself to find Me, then you will find yourself in a proper way.” For the church to be in the reality of Christ, we need many experiences of starting to do something out of ourselves and then stopping ourselves by calling on the Lord. By this we bring our being back to Christ. We sink back into our mingled spirit. We stop ourselves from initiating, thinking, acting, deliberating, feeling, and reacting, and bring ourselves back to Christ as our Source. At that point, we lose our soul-life. The more we lose our soul-life, the more satan comes out of our system, and the more satan cannot destroy the church through our undealt-with mind and opinion. When Peter took the initiative to rebuke the Lord concerning His going to the cross, the Lord looked at him and said, “Get behind Me, satan!” That means satan was in Peter’s system. He was occupying Peter’s soul. Satan will be ejected out of our system if day by day and hour by hour we do not initiate anything, but lose our soul-life to find it in Christ. When the self initiates things, satan is unrestrained in his attack on the church. We must all learn not to initiate! Do not live! Do not reason with your flesh and opinions and desires! Just say, “Lord, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!” Then, like Peter, we will learn to eject satan out of our system, and our independent, undealt-with self will not be satan’s door into your personal life and the church.
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To lose myself completely...this is so challenging to me.

rdg

I like this article, but I hope it is not trying to do away with the literal translation that implies the willingness to literally lose our physical lives (die) for Jesus sake.

The word for "life" PSUCHE means "breath", also occured in Matthew 20:28 and means "to die", not to merely give His soul life.

Even as the Son of man came not to be served , but to serve, and to give his life "PSUCHE" a ransom for many.

I like this article, but I hope it is not trying to do away with the literal translation that implies the willingness to literally lose our physical lives (die) for Jesus sake.

I did not get that at all from what I read in this article.
rdg

Edit: thought some more on this and what I come
away with from this article is the need for us
to be willing to die to self in everything! Jesus
Is now Lord of my life, I must be willing, submissive
and obedient to Him in every tiny part of my life.
This means that I don't get up and start the day
as if it were my own, it means I seek HIM first! It
means as believers we don't run ahead thinking
we know the plan, we come before HIM and wait
to be given our orders!! HIS will, HIS life being
poured out daily through us.