by Keith Needham

Created on: August 15, 2011   Last Updated: August 16, 2011

When one enters the Old Testament world, one is confronted with rules and regulations, law codes and moral prescriptions, archaic ceremonies complete with an obsession with body cleanliness.  The way of life is confusing: there is so much shedding of blood, prerequisites about what should be eaten, the perpetual distinction between the clean and the unclean.  How it makes me thankful that I do not have to live this way anymore, that these things are history, that grace has come, and with it my ability to live pretty much as I please.

The other day, however, I was reading; and it slapped me upside the head that the sacrificial system has not been done away with at all.  It hit me that there is a sacrifice that I still must offer.  And that sacrifice is simply killing a lamb, presenting it on the altar, and allowing it to pay the price for my sin.  For the sacrifice that I am now to offer is me; and I am the lamb, and I am the one who is die up there on that altar.  In that moment, it came back to me what I have already known, that Christianity is equally about dying as it is living.  According to Jesus, if I want to live in the Biblical sense, the first thing I have to do is die.

Evangelicals are not all that good about dying.  We want to live, to experience life, to live it to the full - this is why Jesus came, not to talk to me about dying.  Oh, I know that I cannot demand my way, and I need to be nice to people, and I have to do more than look out for myself; but other than this, how do I die?  We do not hear much in our day about denial; and when is the last time you heard a sermon about self-mortification?

A reading of the heroes of the church reveals a pattern of lifestyle that most of us know nothing about.  Hours of prayer and fasting, not once in a lifetime, but daily - Martin Luther they say prayed five hours a day!  Many went days without food, striving the restrain their desire, and conquer the monster within.  Most advocated periods of solitude, not just to meditate, but to train the mind to keep from saying the very first thing that popped into one's head.  For these, holiness was the goal, a goal to be diligently pursued: life was not left to the emotions, but there was a passionate desire to only be led by the Spirit.

Some of these heroes took things a little too far.  We do not take them far enough.  We want the easy life, the natural life, the life that flows naturally, not the life that we have to manufacture by listening to Scripture and cultivating a life full of discipline.  I have found discipline to be no simplistic task; it takes effort, it takes fasting and prayer, it takes solitude and meditation, humbling and self-abdication.

I need more diligence controlling the interior life.  Anger is a monster, and strife the weapon of a tongue that is out of control.  I need more self-restraint, to learn to curb human pride, and turn my heart to humility.  Prayer and fasting may be one place that I should start to renew my quest for maturity.  After all, I am to die, not simply crawl off of the altar.

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