Tough Choices // How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Pt 20

A Different Perspective Official Podcast

The choices we make along the way have a lot to do with the sort of life we end up living. Good choices inevitably have good outcomes and bad choices …. Well, you know. But there’s one choice, a certain type of choice, that comes along every now and then that’s really important. It’s going to have a big impact on our lives. And when it does come, we need to know how to handle it.

They say that time flies when you’re having fun. I think that’s true. And here we are on Friday at the end of the fourth week in this series of messages on 'How to Live an Extraordinary Life'. We’ve been trying to figure how to do that by following Jesus around through Matthew’s Gospel account of His life. Just trying to see how Jesus lived His extraordinary life.

And as of yesterday’s program we only managed to get to Matthew Chapter 8 out of 28 chapters and that’s with skipping some things, I mean leaving out some things that we could have talked about in those first 8 chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. So maybe in a few months we might come back and look at some more for there’s a lot more to see about living an extraordinary life by following Jesus around.

But today’s the last day in this series so we’re going cheat somewhat by jumping forward, way forward towards the end of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ life and times to see in part how it ended. Well, not quite the end but an important part close to the end. You see, a lot of what a lot of what our lives end up being worth has to do with the decisions we make.

We all make decisions every day, dozens of decisions day after day. I know my life, sometimes I’ve made really lousy decisions and sometimes I’ve made some really good decisions. Invariably the good decisions bear good fruit and, yes you guessed it, pretty much every bad decision I’ve ever made has sooner or later has sooner or later delivered bad fruit – rotten fruit in fact.

And today I’d like to look at perhaps the single most important decision that’s ever been taken in the history of humanity, the decision that Jesus took alone late at night in a dark and lonely place. The hardest decisions are the dark ones, the lonely ones and this one was one of the hardest decisions that anyone will ever make, and also the most important one. Matthew Chapter 26 beginning at verse 36:

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane and He said to His Disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and began to be grieved and agitated. And He said to them, ‘I’m so deeply grieved even unto death. Stay here, stay awake with Me.’

And going a little further He threw Himself on the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it’s possible let this cup pass from Me, but not what I want but Your will be done’. And He came to the Disciples and He found them sleeping! He said to Peter, ‘So you couldn’t stay awake with Me for an hour. Stay awake, pray that you may not come into a time of trial because the Spirit is willing but the flesh is week.’

Again He went away for the second time, ‘Father if this cannot pass unless I drink it, Your will be done’. Again He came and found them sleeping for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again He went away and prayed for a third time saying the same words. Then He came to the Disciples and said to them, ‘Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Look the hour’s at hand. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up! Let’s get going. Look, My betrayer is at hand’.

Now this of course was the decision of laying His life down for you and me. I could spend some time at this point talking about the theology and the implications and the suffering and all that stuff. And of course there’s a time and a place for all of that, but that’s not what we’re focusing on today. I want to focus just on the decision, just on the process.

Put yourself in Jesus shoes and imagine for a minute being there, deciding whether or not you were going to die for someone else. And not just die but suffer. Not some quick, painless injection, as awful as that would be; not even the electric chair, and certainly there’s some pain there but it’s over quickly, that would be awful too. But Jesus knew He was going to have to suffer for the best part of a day.

Seventeen hours, trial after trial (five in all), beating after beating, thorns driven into His skull, nails driven into His hands and feet, hanging there by those nails in excruciating pain for hours until finally He didn’t have the strength to breath. That’s how you died when you were crucified. You actually lost the strength to breathe hanging there by those nails and so you died of suffocation while all the time those nails tore at your wrist and yours Achilles tendon. Your whole body weighty taken at those four excruciating points.

And so here is Jesus hoping that His friends would support Him but they fall asleep. Can you believe that? They actually fall asleep. He’s sweating blood at His most crucial hour and He prays. He prays, "Dad, (that’s what Jesus called His Father in heave – Abba, Dad) if only you could take this whole thing away from me". I’m sure there were a lot of other things that passed between God the Father and God the Son that dark, lonely, fearful place on that night. He was grieved, deeply grieved, greatly agitated. Why wouldn’t He have been with what lay ahead of Him.

Now elsewhere in John’s Gospel Jesus tells us that He’s not being forced into this but that He has the power to lay down His life and take it up again and if He decided not to go through with it, no force anywhere in the universe could take His life from Him, so this is a freewill offering. He was dying to pay for my sin and dying to pay for your sin so that we could be forgiven. And He threw Himself on the ground and prayed, "Father, if it is possible let this cup pass from Me, yet not what I want but what You want".

And that’s the key to the most important decision in all of History. No, He didn’t want to die, but even in this dark place He said to His Father in heaven, "Yet not what I want but what You want." Right there in that three letter word "yet" is where the ordinary becomes absolutely extraordinary. Jesus made a decision submit His life, literally give His life, to the will of God His Father. And that changed the course of history.

There are going to be times in both our lives, in yours, in mine, when we’re going to have to take one of those Gethsemane decisions and they’re never easy. They’re always huge. I look back to a few in my life and I never, ever want to have to go through them again. But how we decide that point has everything to do with the sort of life we will end up living, if we’re prepared to lose it all for God then that’s extraordinary.

So many people want to hang on to their lives and when we hang on to our lives that makes our lives ordinary. When we’re prepared to lay it all on the line, when we’re prepared to go with the outcome that God has for us even when it deeply grieves and agitates us, that’s where greatness lies.

Most of us will never be called physically to lay down our lives for God, some will but most won’t. And yet Jesus called His followers to take up their cross every day to follow Him because there are much smaller Gethsemane decisions to be made every day in submitting our lives to God so that we might live.

If any man would save his life he’ll lose it, but the one who loses it for my sake will find it.

Weird that last bit, but what He’s saying is that when we try and hang on to everything for ourselves, that’s what makes an ordinary life and eventually an ordinary life comes to an end. But the one who lays their life down for Jesus, the one who goes into their Gethsemane and says, ‘Father, not my will let Your will be done’, that one will live an extraordinary life. And it’s an extraordinary life that goes on for ever and ever.