Giving Way to Life Abundantly
When Jesus died and rose again, the door to life was opened – everything changed after that. No longer do we need to work to access life with God. All we have to do is say: “Jesus, thank You for dying in my place, will You be the Lord of my life?” And the door is wide open to us.
It is an act of surrendering ourselves to Him. No longer can we be the lord of our own lives. We live to give ourselves to Him, in gratefulness of what He has done for us.
In nature, you can see this same thing when you observe a flower. Flowers are often very beautiful, but a flower knows it does not live for its beauty, it does not live for itself. It lives to multiply, it lives to bring life to this world.
A flower gives up its beautiful petals for the seed to grow. And when the seed has fully grown, the flower will give it lovingly up to the wind, the bird, the animal, the human, trusting it will produce life multiplied.
Surrender and trust are the keywords here. For the flower and for us. Look at Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood, praying to God, but ending in surrender and trust. How ugly and sorrowful things looked after that, but three days later the most beautiful thing in the world happened.
What beauty can come out of our own surrender and trust? What if we, like the flower, fully realize the purpose of our life? That our beautiful colours and fragrance are there to praise God, that when our petals turn brown and fall off, we surrender ourselves to God. It may look sad to an outsider, but we know and trust the abundance of beauty that is to come. That in this dying to ourselves we are giving way to life abundantly.
In this surrendering we know that we can fully trust God. He says Himself that the flowers are clothed more beautiful and with more care than any human ever could. Will he not much more care for us? He is to be trusted. He will take better care of us than we ever can ourselves.
(The idea of the comparison with flowers came after I read the book ‘Parables of the Cross’ by Lilias Trotter – You can read/download it for free here)
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