Tuesday, September 19, 2017

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. 

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