(This is an open air talk I gave during the Walk of Witness
in St Pauls, Easter 2014.)
Talk
People all over the world long for success. They work for it,
plan for it, scheme for it, but very rarely feel that they have
achieved it.
Less than one week earlier, it looked to the world like Jesus
had made it. He was successful. Massive crowds surrounded Him.
Devoted followers were hanging on His every word. The city of
Jerusalem came out to celebrate His arrival.
And then, on Good Friday, Jesus is hanging dead on a cross.
People rarely feel they have achieved success because there is
a fundamental flaw in the whole success thing. Success, for most
of us, means getting what we want, getting our own way - and the
truth is that our own way stinks. We mess things up. We mess up
the world, we mess up the people around us, we mess up the
carefully planned life we are aiming to enjoy.
Is that what happened to Jesus? He aimed high and, like so
many of us, messed it up?
For once, that is not the story.
From the start, Jesus called His disciples to follow Him. They
had to take up their cross, just as He had to. The cross was not a
mistake: somehow it was a necessary part of the picture, a vital
part of God's plan.
Success, in God's eyes, is living - really living, living His
way. The life that God wants us to live is not the sort of life
that gets old and frail and dies. The life He wants us to enjoy is
resurrection life. And the only way to experience resurrection
life is to die.
Jesus calls us to die so that we may live - that we may live in
Him and live for Him.
We mess things up. We don't know how to make things work. But
if God really is big and loving, He knows how to make the world
work.
He knows how to make our lives work.
Giving up, giving in to Him, and letting our own desires,
schemes and plans die may not be the route to success you will
find in the self help books. But dying gives Him room to live, and
He knows how to live well.
He knows what success really looks like in your life and mine.
And He is big enough and loving enough to achieve it, if we
desire to live His life - if we are prepared to die to our own
plans, live His way, and love people the way Jesus did.
When He gave up His own desires and died on the cross, Jesus
turned what seemed to be the greatest defeat in the world into the
greatest victory, and if we are prepared to follow Him, to live
and to die the same way, God can and will do the same miracle in
your life and in mine.