He Who Loses His Life for My Sake Shall Find It

“He Who Loses His Life for My Sake Shall Find It.”

Now no human biography can give us any light concerning the rewards of that age of glory. But the recompense of the just in this world, the “hundredfold now in this time, with persecutions,” is wonderfully illustrated in the history of Christ’s faithful servants. And to enforce this promise we shall turn to the story of saintly lives and let them tell us how much of blessed requital. Even now, the Lord bestows upon those who choose to suffer with Him. It has often seemed as though God takes care to reward His faithful servants most richly at the very points where they have suffered and sacrificed most for Him. As the clay is fashioned to the mould, so His bounty is shaped to our privations, His fullness to our self-emptying, His gift of Himself to our surrender of self for His sake. Indeed, is not this the substance of what He promises in that saying of His, “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it?” He shall find the very things, in other words, which he has foregone, only in Christ and not in himself; divine joy for the loss of human happiness, spiritual riches for the loss of Mammon, favour with the Lord’s people for the enmity and rejection of the world. Surely, we may comfort ourselves unspeakably in this fact, in the face of any trial or hardship which we may be moved to undergo for the Master’s sake. He never leaves Himself without this witness to His tender love and gracious care of His own. And if we can say truly, “See, we have left all and followed You,” we shall certainly have the promise fulfilled to us, “All things are yours. And you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” As much of self-sacrifice, so much of the divine indwelling is the law of the Spirit of life, even as every indentation of the coast means a corresponding fulness of the incoming tide. Therefore, we need not think it strange that the same apostle who had “suffered the loss of all things” for Christ could yet speak of himself as “possessing all things.” This is “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:2)

This is the lesson most deeply impressed upon us from the life of that rare Christian of the last century, Gerhard Tersteegen of Mülheim in Germany. Born in 1697, begotten again at sixteen years of age, soon after so wrought upon by the Spirit that he often spent whole nights in prayer and supplication. Then his renunciation of wealth and comfort, that with all his substance he might minister to the poor; then his noble dedication of himself to God in written covenant; and then the years of obloquy and desertion by formal Christians.

This, in brief, is the story of his life. But in the midst of it all what immeasurable compensation!

No thought of making himself attractive or widely influential seems to have entered his mind. But just when he was most shunned and deserted by the worldly, then the sin-burdened and sorrowing began to crowd upon him from every direction, to crave his spiritual ministrations. But like his Master, for whom he lived supremely, “He could not be hidden.” The people thronged upon him. He tried to withdraw from them, but so much the more they pressed about him. Before he had risen in the morning, fifty or sixty would gather at his lodgings to hear the word of life from his lips. While state-church clergymen were jealous of his irregular spiritual ministry and complained of him to the magistrates, he yielded to the importunity of hungry souls and consented to preach; and such crowds gathered that they not only filled every part of the house, but climbed on ladders about the windows in their eagerness to catch his words. One totally unknown to him came two hundred miles on foot and in bad weather that he might hear the words of this blessed man. But Tersteegen was strangely amazed at it all, since his discourse was so plain and so direct. “I cannot think what the people seek from such a poor creature,” he exclaimed.

Yet the secret is clear to those of us who read about his life today. Give yourself wholly to Christ, and Christ will give Himself wholly to you; all the infinite wealth of His temporal and spiritual favour freely bestowed. “Jesus alone is sufficient,” he wrote; “yet insufficient when He is not wholly and solely embraced.” True without question is the saying, and equally true that those who wholly embrace Him shall have “all sufficiency in all things and abound to every good work.” 2 Cor. 9:8.

Think of this good man, once shunned and derided as a fanatic, now pressed upon by such eager crowds of anxious souls that he could hardly find time to eat or sleep; once lying alone in an attic, burning up with fever, and so poor and neglected that from morning till night no one brought him even a cup of water; now made the recipient of such sumptuous legacies, from friends whom he had never seen, and from spiritual kinsmen in foreign lands, that he felt obliged to decline them.

How was he enriched in everything for all liberality, temporal and spiritual, even as he heartily and without reserve embraced what he called “the mystery of the inward and the outward cross”? Can we wonder if he should have given this as his estimate of life?

The following testimony from his own lips is highly characteristic of his life:

Methinks it would be an inexpressible consolation to me, if in my dying hour and when I shall have to appear in the presence of God, I could proclaim to all the world that God alone is the fountain of life, and that there is no other way to find and enjoy Him than the narrow way of inward prayer, self-denial, and a life hidden with Christ in God, opened to us and consecrated through the death of Christ.

And unconscious, far-reaching spiritual attractiveness was the special reward of self-denial which he reaped.

No one has ever lost, nor will ever lose, by giving himself wholly to Jesus Christ. Many have lost much for Him, but none have lost by Him. Take this as a settled truth: whatever earthly happiness we surrender, and whatever earthly advantage we forsake in order to glorify Him in our life and service, we shall receive an hundredfold already in this life—and eternal reward in the life to come.