I’m a future-oriented person.
“What’s next?” is the question I’m constantly asking. I set goals and timelines for my life like it’s a part-time job. I’m rarely satisfied with where I am and always chasing the elusive sense that I’ve made it—I’ve arrived.
Personally, this creates frustration.
Spiritually it creates an impossibility.
The truth of arrival
Here’s the truth.
“Arrival” in the life of discipleship is less about arriving at a destination and more about embracing a new reality.
It looks less like gaining and more like losing—or dying.
To make it to the top, you’ve got to join Jesus at the bottom.
The life of faith is a slow death to sin and self. It’s an ongoing emptying of our hopes, dreams, preferences, and desires so that we can join in our savior “who came not to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:25).
It’s believing Jesus when he said, “whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
The paradox of loss
And in a beautiful paradox, the more we lose the more we gain.
By dying to ourselves and serving others, we become full of the life Jesus promised. Our needs and expectations become less about us. They’re full of God’s desires and the needs of our neighbors.
We see the Holy Spirit at work around us.
We live lighter, freer, and more holy.
We become more like Jesus.
When we arrive
Don’t strive to “make it.”
Strive to empty yourself of whatever is keeping you from communion with God and your neighbor.
Prayerfully seek to live out Paul’s admonition to the Philippians.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And… humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).
As long as we’re on this side of heaven arrival looks less like gaining and more like emptying.
It looks more like Jesus.
One more thing
This video is a glimpse of the coming kingdom and I can’t stop watching.