Deny Yourself

By Colleen Podmore

Just recently I have become aware of the fact that I am getting older. Not only putting on extra storage capacity around the middle but also not able to do what I used to do because of a loss of physical strength. Activities are dropping of my agenda!

What should I do? Just accept it as a fact of life? Death after all is inevitable.
No, I decided I needed to strengthen what remained, to exercise what was becoming weak. So I joined a gym. This makes perfect sense to me. If you want to exercise, you go where people are who are like-minded, you go where you can get good advice, support, you can benefit from the wisdom of others and to be encouraged.

A few weeks ago, I selected a gym to attend, one that I thought would meet my needs, one where I thought I would be comfortable – I already have some experience of gyms so I knew what to look for, what would be helpful to me and the goals I wanted to achieve. What would not be helpful and to be avoided at all costs. Has everyone here been to a gym?

For example, some gyms are big and impersonal and you have to be really self-motivated to keep going. Unless you have some experience and your own programme, it’s hard to keep going, you quickly become discouraged and give up. People who like these kind of gyms just go, do their programme then leave again. That’s it, they never stop to talk to people or communicate and help others, it’s all about discipline and goals. They look really good on the outside, fit, trim, muscular – it’s easy to envy them.

Gyms can be overwhelming – all those machines. Should I try the treadmill, cross-trainer, bench press? How much weight should I lift – 9kg, 12kg, 24kg? How many times should I lift the weights, 10, 20, 30? It can be overwhelming!

Sometimes gyms can be very crowded. Just when you move towards something, someone else jumps in and you have to wait. Even when you’re working on a machine, someone is waiting and there is pressure to finish quickly and stress and anxiety levels build up.
Sometimes you can pick up contagious diseases in gyms if they are not cleaned properly. If those in charge of the gym are a bit slack and neglect to clean the showers properly for example. Or someone who is sweating a lot, drips sweat everywhere and neglects to wipe the machine down after they have used it.

Anyway, I’m sure you get my point. Gyms can be dangerous places, maybe places to be avoided. It wasn’t because I was unaware of the dangers or naïve that I decided to join a gym, but I needed something that I thought the gym could provide.
The first thing I noticed when I went to the gym was that it was easy to park and when I walked in the front door, people were really friendly. I was greeted warmly and felt welcome. I felt valued and important. I had a need and the staff at the gym were all geared up, focused and ready to meet my needs.

Somebody showed me around, explained how things worked, then asked me for my money, and arranged a time for me to get started. Next week at 1pm.

In that week, would I change my mind? Was there something I saw that I didn’t like in my visit? I had time to think about my decision. I could back out if I wanted to. I received a phone call on Sunday reminding me of my appointment the next day! Ok.

I met with Amy, a young girl probably less than half my age. Straight away I liked her, I trusted her and I listened to what she had to say, after all she wouldn’t be in the role she was in if she didn’t know something about exercise. This reminded me that really age means nothing. We can be old and know nothing or young and have wisdom (1Tim 4:12).

The first thing she asked me was, ‘What do you want to achieve?’ She didn’t presume to know me and what I needed for physical fitness. She could easily have said – do this, do that, bossed me around even ordered me about – but she didn’t, she showed wisdom, because she knew that when I owned the exercise programme, I would be motivated to continue. Sure I would submit for a while to a military style programme, but as soon as I could, I would probably quit. But Amy respected me and gave me credence for knowing what I needed.

Here’s the thing, I’ve been talking about a gym, but I could just have easily been talking about a church. Whether we are looking for a church or we are part of a church – we can learn something from a gym.

Jesus said, ‘If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves’ (Matt16:24). We want to follow Jesus, we need to think about that. What does it mean to deny ourselves? It means we no longer think of ourselves as important. We stop making ourselves the centre. We are no longer self-centered, we are other-centered. We deny ourselves.

We can see a little more who we are when we think about our goals and ambitions. What is the number one priority in my life? Is it family, is it pleasure, is it relaxation, is it work? What is our number one goal and what do we do to achieve that goal? Where are we heading? For example, this year I have been studying and at times I had to put everything aside and make that my number one priority if I was going to be successful. Fortunately I had my husband’s support and he was ok when the house became a mess (he said it was ‘comfortable’). He learned to cook his own meals and he told me when he had run out of socks so I could do the washing.

Jesus said, ‘If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves’. Do we want to follow Jesus? What will our goals be and how will we live our lives to achieve those goals? What muscles do we need to build up to get there? Do we need prayer muscles, perseverance in Bible Study and meditation, exercise forgiveness, deny judgement and condemnation, cultivate the fruit of the Spirit?

We usually have to give up something in order to achieve something better, to reach our goals. Building the church means we have to deny ourselves, our own agendas and making ourselves the centre and to put others first, working together in unity until the whole church is built up and mature (Eph 4:13).

We must take up our cross, Jesus says, ‘If anyone would come after me they must deny themselves and take up their cross…’ In other words total commitment is required.
The Bible says that when the time came, Jesus had to go to Jerusalem, take up His cross and die, paying the price for sin. His life, the perfect life to redeem the souls of sinners, you and me. Jesus gave His life that we might live! One day we may have to literally take up our cross and follow Jesus into death, but for today, we must decide what we would do if faced with the decision. Will we deny we know Jesus or will we die for Him? Jesus says, if you try to hold onto your life or soul by denying Him you will lose eternal life, but if you give up your life to Him you will gain eternal life.

I would like to close by reading you a message about the church and I hope you will be as encouraged as I was when I read it. This comes from an OAC newsletter.
Quoting satan by Chad. J. McCallum. Senior Pastor, Compass Church.
Ever look around the church and get discouraged? I do. The Enemy seems to be making gains on all fronts.

However, consider how you’d feel if you were on the ‘other’ side – the Enemy side. Put yourself in the shoes of one committed to destroying Christian faith. Talk about discouragement!
You’d be thinking something like this:

These Christians are a stubborn lot, almost impossible to get rid of. For twenty centuries we’ve tried to stomp them out; yet, in spite of our efforts, they’ve spread their religion to every corner of the world.

It’s awfully hard to destroy – you cut off the head, and twenty grow back. You persecute them, and they go underground and develop a purer strain of their religion. You kill them, and they build on their martyr’s blood. Get them to water down their faith, and a little group somewhere will rediscover the real faith and start over again. They have an infuriating way of regenerating themselves.

And these Christians know how to turn a negative into a positive. They turn our best-laid plans upside down. Get a couple of their famous religious figures to commit adultery or visit a prostitute, and they’ll simply produce a thousand seminars and books on sexual fidelity, and the net effect will be greater morality among many of them, not lesser. It’s discouraging!
Denominations are, of course, good targets. However, as quickly as one cools off, they’ll start a new one. These Christians produce new denominations faster than roaches reproduce baby roaches. Same with the local churches-no sooner do we get a local church to die spiritually, and there’ll be two brand-new ones cropping up in some school auditorium across town. It’s hopeless, I tell you.

A few times in history, we’ve pretty well got the whole church to go lukewarm-but not for long. Along comes a John Wesley or a John Knox, and a whole nation turns back to God. Even when all of organized religion is waning, they go out and launch a new strain of pure Christianity in some religious order or Para church organization.

Make’em poor, and they praise God. Make them rich, and someone like St. Francis will come along and teach them to live the opposite way. Get them totally absorbed in their fancy buildings and elegant worship, and some Quaker-like group will sprout up and reintroduce a religion of simplicity and plainness.

Close all their buildings and lock all their doors, and they’ll shrug their shoulders and move into homes, declaring it an improvement. Close a nation to missionaries and they’ll sneak in as tentmakers and infect people one at a time. Kick out all the missionaries and suppress Christianity like we did in China, and what do you get? Twenty-five years later, we got several hundred thousand committed Christians who practiced their faith underground. They’re hard to get rid of, I tell you.

Introduce division and strife among the churches, and they’ll invent something like Promise Keepers or these new Citywide Worship events to restore a sense of unity. Divide them, and they multiply; create strife, and they make peace.

And they’ve got money-lots of money! They give billions every week! That’s ‘B’ as in ‘billions,’ and ‘W’ as in ‘week’! Christianity is the largest single economic enterprise in the world, dwarfing pip-squeak outfits like Kraft Foods. Millions of them give 10% of their income every week-it adds up! Just think if non-believers were that committed.

And they support a zillion different enterprises: Colleges and universities to train millions of their youth, radio programmes up and down the dial, even entire radio stations now.
And they sponsor TV programmes, bookstores, publishing houses, seminars, training programmes-they even have their own full line of Christian music. I tell you, it’s discouraging for us non-believers at times. As soon as our side gets hold of a new medium, Christians come along and swamp us with their message. Look what they did with books, radio, and TV, and who knows what else they’ll do on the Internet!

We do have one advantage: Christians are easy to get off-track. But the discouraging thing is, once we’ve got them sidetracked, a whole new wave comes along and gets the church back on track. It’s as if there’s some invisible spirit correcting and guiding them. It’s discouraging, I tell you!

How do we crush these Christians out of existence? Rome couldn’t do it. The dark Ages didn’t do it. Darwin couldn’t either. Rationalism couldn’t. Neither could liberalism, communism, socialism, democracy, nor even modernity. You can’t tax them into oblivion or legislate them out of existence. And if you ignore them, they won’t go away. I tell you, they’re hard to beat!
Divide them and they’ll unify, beat them down and they pop back up. Create strife, and they make peace. Criticise them, and they listen with a smile; hate them, and they love you back. Take their coat, and they’ll give you their cloak, too. Persecute them, and they’ll multiply; arrest them, and they witness to you; beat them, and they sing; kill them, and they simply go to heaven!

We are blessed to be a blessing!!!!