Everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. Philippians 3:8-9
When Jesus calls a person to follow Him, He puts it like this: “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).
Jesus’ words wouldn’t exactly make a popular pitch for an ad campaign. He offers us satisfaction in His love, profound purpose and unexplainable peace, but the path to receiving it is called a narrow and difficult path of sacrifice. (Matthew 7:12-14).
One person who went before us on this path was Elizabeth Elliot. God called her and her husband, Jim, to share the message of His love with one of the most remote tribal peoples on the planet. [1] In the process, Jim was brutally murdered. But Elizabeth went right back to tell the very people who killed her husband about God, eventually seeing his killers come to know Jesus’s love and forgiveness.
Elizabeth wrote, “If we hold tightly to anything given to us, unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used, we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily “ours” but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of…Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.”[2]
We can make much of Elizabeth’s sacrifice, but she emphasized the greater truth that Jesus is worthy of it all. Another person who answered Jesus’s call wrote, “Everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him” (Philippians 3:8-9).
[1] Elliot, Elisabeth. “God Granted and God Denied.” Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control, Revell, 2013, Page 163.
[2] Ibid.
