Jesus and the Happily Ever Sacrifice

Greetings Warriors and Scholars!

Found on IMDB.

I watched a bit of an episode of "The Librarians" from TNT the other day. Season 2, Episode 9: "And the Happily Ever Afters." The team was under a spell in a small town on an island all experiencing their idealized dream of a life. Flynn Carsen (played by Noah Wyle) had been off finding more artifacts and came home unaffected by the spell to find them all gone and the clippings book going crazy with a situation on the island.

He found them quickly but they were all held in this. He also found a fairy (played by Hayley McLaughlin) who helped him trap them and talk to them. What they found was that they needed to choose to give up the idealized life in order to be free of the spell and claim their true life back.

Do you have your idealized life? Do you have your happily ever after? Sometimes what we think is our best life is just a ruse. It might be really good things, but it is not what God dreams for us. Jesus himself said that we need to lay down our lives to find it.

"Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it." Matthew 10:39

There are the dreams we dream for ourselves, and there is God's dreams for us. His vision for who we can be and the adventures we can experience. Sometimes he gives us something else we had not thought of and sometimes He gives a thing we give up back to us, perhaps transformed in a way we had never thought of.

In the show they had to place talismans down to symbolically give up the fake lives, but Paul tells us that presenting ourselves to God "as a living sacrifice" is our "spiritual act of worship" and is pleasing to God (Romans 12:1).

We live in a world that says we should live according to our desires. That we must be subject to our nature, but Jesus tells us to give that to Him and to control our natures. One day we will even give the crowns we have earned by serving God back to Him, as a way of recognizing that it was all about Him anyway. 

Be a Hero or Take it Easy

Greetings Warriors and Scholars!

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/teri-hatcher-and-kevin-sorbo-lend-90s-flair-superg-252427

Today my Mom and I caught up a little bit on Supergirl by watching last weeks episode (along with the musical crossover on Flash after that). Spoilers ahead!

In last week's episode, "Star Crossed" (yes we get the hint CW), Supergirl found out Mon-El was not just a resident or citezen of Daxam, but a prince of the planet. He had lied to her. In their discussion about this, she tells him:

"You just want things to be easy, Mon-El, but being a hero and falling in love, those are not easy things. They're hard, and they're messy, and they hurt sometimes."

She is so right. Jesus Himself warned people who wanted to follow Him that it was not easy. In Luke 9 a man comes and asks to follow Jesus, but Jesus has a warning: Foxes have dens, birds have nests, but the Son of Man (Jesus) has no place to lay his head. Jesus did not have a home. He never owned a house and He was often surrounded by crowds for a variety of reasons, which included such desires as being healed by Him and desires to trick or even kill Him.

Another time Jesus tells us that if we want to follow Him we must take up our crosses and follow Him. Now, a cross is not a fun device. It is a torturous device of death. He was telling us we would have to die to our own desires. This was repeated by Paul in Romans 12 when he tells us that we should be "living sacrifices" to God.

Later on that episode, Mon-El chose not to go with his parents. He told them to leave without him because Supergirl had changed him. He didn't like who he was before he had met her and he didn't want to take the easy way out. I had mixed feelings about this. I think it showed some growth on his part and maybe he still needs help growing, but I kind of wanted to see him go back to Daxam and change the culture there.

So the question for each of us is this...what do we need to give up for God? Is it a selfish desire? Is it a sin? Sometimes God even asks us to give up good things for Him. Not because they are bad but so that our priorities are focused on Him alone. He might give that back at a later point and He might not. As Job says, "He gives and takes away"(Job 1:21).

Following Jesus is not an easy task, but it is good. It is messy and sometimes it hurts, but it is good.

Hey, please go to this link here and donate to my campaign for going to the Christian Game Developers Conference. I'll be doing prayer appointments and using my teaching gift through the weekend.