Life or Death

“In a world that prizes promoting oneself, they were following a teacher who told them to crucify themselves. And history tells us the result. Almost all of them would lose their lives because they responded to his invitation.”

 - Radical by David Platt

This is an interesting one to me. Ever since high school, I have noticed this odd trend in the church. While the younger generations are running after a post modern, hipster, relational vision of Christ and Christianity, the older generations quote encouragement that sounds something like, “and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony and that they loved not their lives to the death.”

As a seventeen-year-old, standing surrounded by fourteen and fifteen-year-old freshmen, it honestly creeped me out a little.

What kind of grown-up looks at a group of teen and pre-teen aged Americans and thinks, “Death. Martyrdom. Book of Revelation”?

It just seemed a little bit extreme.

And, the fact that they rarely included themselves in the statements only made it all the more disturbing. Where exactly were all of the adults going to be while we were giving up our lives?

I'm well out of high school now (although I still hear similar things said to teenagers on a fairly regular basis), and I think that I am beginning to understand. (I hope that I understand, at least. If I'm wrong, then I maintain the right to be creeped out.)

You see, as a teenager, death seems frighteningly close and real and unnatural. People your own age die in suicides and car accidents and gang shootings. They die when doctors can't find the answers. But, every time, there is a sense that it isn't right. That they were too young to die. That something went wrong.

Grown-ups have a bigger sense of the rhythm of life. People are born. They live. They often give birth to other humans. Then, sooner or later, they die.

Teenagers flee death. Adults assume it.

They thought that they were speaking passion over our lives. We heard them speaking passion over our deaths – which, to a teenager, is not the same thing at all.

In the midst of that, though, I think that we learned something that it is so easy to otherwise forget. We learned that you are not ready to live for something until you are ready to die for it, and that you are not ready to die for something until you are ready to live for it.

We learned, at least a little, how to long for heaven at the same time that we longed for earth.

We started to learn what it meant to live out an invitation to die.

What about you? Are you willing to die? Are you ready to live?