Live Dead Joy: 30 Days of Living and Dying with JesusSample

“All In”

God is not reluctant to kill those whom He calls. In one of the more puzzling turns of biblical events, God called Moses to go to Egypt on a rescue mission and then “on the way . . . the Lord met him and sought to kill him” (Ex. 4:24). Tracing backwards from the intervention of Zipporah (she circumcised her son and threw the bloody foreskin at Moses’ feet) helps us identify and understand the offense. Evidently Moses was not in full compliance with the Abrahamic covenant.

God demands all. Those who are called must give everything. We are masters of the partial surrender. We excel at giving Jesus almost everything. Yet to hold something back is to doom both our calling and our long-term health. God sets impossible and costly terms for following Him. It is impossible for a camel to go through the eye of a needle (Matt. 19:25–26). It is impossible to come into the kingdom on our own terms. Inevitably, our terms are that we give God almost everything but retain control of the one thing most precious to us. God puts His finger on the one thing we won’t surrender and says, “You have to be all in. That retention scuttles the whole covenant. Yes, I have called you, but I will discard you if you do not surrender all.”

The cost of a calling is not only one for leaders to count. Moses’ son certainly had an abrupt introduction to the communal cost of God’s call—it was his blood that saved the day. Those who would emerge from slavery must participate in the cost and escape under duress. Deliverance for both deliverer and escapee is a painful process, not an immediate translation to a trouble-free station. In the process of deliverance, things often get worse before they get better. “Anguish of spirit and cruel bondage” (Ex. 6:9) often restrict us from hearing and receiving what would help us to life.

Those who agree to deliver others while working under God’s authority must realize they cannot do this with secret faults or presumptuous sins (Ps. 19:12–13). Presumptuous sins anger God, and secret faults destroy us from the inside out. We may continue for a short season in a public role (while being presumptuous in sin and hiding secret faults), but there will be no transformative power to our words or witness. External words and appearances without internal purity and truth only leave us naked and wounded, vulnerable to the demonic powers (Acts 19:16). Anything less than all for Jesus leads to our death—even on the road to deliver others. When God calls you, if you are not “all in,” you are not in at all.

Pray for the Unreached:

Sonar Hindus of India

7,199,000

0.0% Evangelical

Pray that Christians from around the world would work together to reach the Sonar and that the Sonar would be joined to the Body of Christ (John 17:20-23).