Description
Jesus said that he was the way, the truth and the life. He had discovered the secret which not only delivered all life and love to him, but at the same time it delivered all power to him. It is this life, this love and this power that he came to tell us about. Since he so completely proved his point, it is wise for us to follow the rules he laid down for us. He stated one of these rules when he told us that we must lose our lives if we wish to find them.
Of course, this saying has been interpreted in many ways by many people. And you and I also are in search after the same truth and the same freedom. So it is well for us to try to find out just what Jesus meant when he said that we have to lose our lives to find them.
At first this seems like a very hard and strange thing to do. For none of us really wishes to lose his life. It cannot be possible that Jesus meant that we should literally lose our lives but rather that there must be things in our lives that we should let go of — as he said to the obsessed man, “Loose him and let him go.” There must be something that is attached to us that doesn’t really belong to the real man that Jesus was talking about. And so we should seek to find the fundamental truth that Jesus taught.
If we do this we shall find the thing that Jesus laid the greatest emphasis on the idea that we are spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe right now; that God, the supreme Spirit and Intelligence in the universe and the Power that governs everything, is not some far-off presence but rather something that is immediate, a Presence that is here with us now. Jesus said that this Presence is not only with us, it is within us, we live in It and It moves through us.
When Jesus said then, that we must lose our lives, he must have been referring to that part of us that denies this supreme Presence, that part of us that lives contrary to It, that past of us that is out of harmony with it. Jesus really was telling us that there are certain things we have to surrender or let go of before we can find our true center, the real spirit and the perfect man which he always assumed to be there.