When I was little- during my Awana days- I was always memorizing verses the fastest and could spit them out like watermelon seeds. I did like memorizing, but I think a big factor was because whoever memorized the most got to throw a pie in the Director's face; which, for me, was my Grandmother's face :) Now I'm a big advocate of memorizing sections, if not chapters and books of the Bible. The context is so important and so key to understanding what the Lord is trying to say! I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.
One of the chapters I've memorized is Philippians 2 and lately I've been dwelling on '[Jesus] did not consider equality with God something to be grasped'. Jesus, Second Member of the Trinity, now with the human aspect, doesn't think about it. What's one of the first things we read in the Bible? The Serpent saying, "You will be like God" (Gen 3:5) and the people of Babel building a Tower to Heaven (Gen 6:3-7). We try and push so hard to be well off, successful, famous, and get the honor when Jesus gave up all that glory up to come down here to serve the people who would crucify Him.
Oswald Chambers touches on this a little in the following devotion. We must not long to become like God- and when I say that I do not mean that it is wrong to long to imitate Him, for we are ordered to do so (Eph 5:1, I Pet 1:16), but wrong to think that we are perfect, omniscient, and eternal. What we must long for is to be like Him in character- and Jesus is the best example for us in that!!!
O. Chamber's words things so much better than I ever could, read what he has to say :)
The rich young ruler had the master passion to be perfect. When he saw Jesus Christ, he wanted to be like Him. Our Lord never puts personal holiness to the fore when He calls a disciple; He puts absolute annihilation of my right to myself and identification with Himself- a relationship with Himself in which there is no other relationship. Luke 14:26 has nothing to do with salvation or sanctification, but with the unconditional identification with Jesus Christ. Very few of us know the absolute "go" of abandonment to Jesus."Then Jesus beholding him loved him." The look of Jesus will mean a heart broken forever from allegiance to any other person or thing. He Jesus ever looked at you? The look of Jesus transforms and transfixes. Where you are 'soft' with God is where the Lord has looked at you. If you are hard and vindictive, insistent on your own way, certain that the other person is more likely to be in the wrong than you are, it is an indication that there are whole tracts of your nature that have never been transformed by His gaze."One thing thou lackest..." The only 'good thing' from Jesus Christ's point of view is union with Himself and nothing in between."Sell whatsoever thou hast..." I must reduce myself until I am a mere conscious man, I must fundamentally renounce possessions of all kinds, not to save my soul (only on thing saves a man- absolute reliance upon Jesus Christ), but in order to follow Jesus. "Come, and follow Me" and the road is the way He went.~Mark 10:21
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