4 Bridges to Nowhere Part 2

[HKHaugan]

Bridge 2

The four bridges are find, save, keep and love. We have crossed the first bridge 'find', the bridge of identity and the desert appeared. Now we come to another bridge called 'save.' Where will it bring us?

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul (Mark 8:35-36)?”

'Save' (Greek-sosei), connoting safe and sound, to secure one's self from physical and emotional threats. If your heart and mind are secure in any moment, you survive. It's developing the ability to protect self in every next encounter with the world. Does me trying to save myself work? Do we have a developed technique that will help us survive the pressure of every next moment?

There is a sense of immediacy in Mark's warning. Personal survival in every next moment, event and situation seems to be what Mark is describing here. It's having those social antennae ready and operative as you go from place to place and person to person. If I can read people in the moment and play to their good side, I can develop a method that will work everywhere I go. Each encounter then is subject to saving myself. The only problem is that this kind of attitude opens the heart to the spirits of fear, deceit, pride and control, the spirits that isolate me and, moment after moment, shrink the image of God in me. My mind gets hard at work constantly rationalizing and justifying how I should speak and act. I may gain access to the whole world but lose who I really am in the process. In actuality I become a slave to the fear of not making it and, without realizing it, alienating me from myself inside and from others outside who only see a manufactured self. All that because I not only have deceived others I have deceived myself.

Trying to save myself is an exhausting process because it is fueled by fear. Fear is tiring. The spirit of fear is always working at agitating the natural and positive fear built into us. Positive fear is respect for laws like stopping for a red light, holding on to bannisters on steep stairways, sticking to proper trails while hiking in the wilderness, using safety belts in cars, driving the speed limit and so on.

Negative fear however, is quite different. It is always whispering in your ear that you've got to be right in whatever you do. It's all about the right clothes, the right car, the right look, the right words and our whole external presentation. It's the unseen impact it has on others. Getting that wrong means rejection, loss of marketability and social isolation. Relational fears are many and they make us vulnerable to the spirit of fear. When we allow Jesus to enter the picture fear takes a back seat because a new truth appears, faith overcomes fear and then love casts it out (1John 4:18). Paul sums it up this way, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children (Rom.8:15-16).”

From one moment to the next the spirit of fear knocks on our door but in those same moments the Lord gives us the choice, Him or fear. With the risen Lord in our heart we learn to handle our fears in a balanced way. It's an ongoing experience of the Lord recovering us from our sinful past into His eternal promise. It's reality in its most exposed form, faith over fear, our witness in a world where the prince of this world hides in the darkness and gloats where his spirit of fear takes its toll. Faith over fear, love over hate, life over death, eternity over the temporary moment, timelessness over time. Faith over fear in every next moment, every next event, in every next choice and every next decision.

This self-manufacturing process is what Jesus is pointing to when He uses the word 'perish' in John 3:16. In the Greek 'perish' is more than just dying outright. It means to erode, fritter away, fall into ruin. Thus eventually, we die alone. When every next moment is lived deceitfully to build our own image instead of the one God has chosen for us that's how we fritter away our lives. The more I choose to follow that path of self-construction (self-salvation) the farther away I move from God who alone can reconstruct what He has intended for me. It's really the path of self-destruction. The instigating influence behind this slow process I take on to become the person I want to be seen as is called sin. And it's the deep inside person, the image of God, now spiritualized in Jesus, that wants to be free from the burdensome struggle that befalls the 'self-made man.'

Here the Parable of the Talents (Matt.25:14) makes sense. Of three men given talents it was the one who hid his in the ground that lost everything. He hid his in the ground because of his attitude based on his own assumption that the man who had given the talents was a hard man, reaping where he didn't sow. The parable told the real story. The man was wicked and lazy. His fear of having to 'face the music' caused him to come up with some self-justifying reason for his lack of trying. He rationalized an excuse that the one who had given the talent was a hard man. In other words blame the giver. Shift the heat from self to someone or something else. But even more important was the very fact that the man who gave the talents trusted the receivers. The one who buried his talent violated that trust.

We have been given our individuality in mind, heart and spirit to look forward and invest it. The Lord in creating us did it in grace, truth and love. He is not vindictive or hard knuckled waiting for us to fail so he can punish us. Neither does He leave us alone to fend for ourselves. He makes Himself available personally in our heart with the Holy Spirit to light the way as we invest our gift of life in being a witness to Him. That is the intention of the Cross and the Resurrection. The Cross frees us from looking back and the Resurrection frees us to look forward. Guilt, remorse, resentment and regret die the moment we receive Jesus as Savior. Now we trust Him as Lord to follow Him in faith regardless of what every next moment brings. We trust to serve Him as His witness wherever we are and with whomever we meet. He saved us for our every next moment, to be with us in our every next confrontation, our every next event, our every next encounter, our every next whatever. In fact every next moment is the moment for which we have been saved to in some way be His witness, to give our testimony and to make ourselves available for His leading. Now we catch what Mark intended, the momentary challenge with a spiritual answer.