Lose Your Life to Find It

The following is from a letter I wrote to someone recently, and I believe there is wisdom in it for the whole Body, so I’m posting it here.

I am compelled to tell you that what you might see in us is only Resurrection Life from the ashes of our dying. His life over our death.

I have learned for many years not how to live with God – but how to DIE for Him. Ironically that is the skill to learn! THAT is the way to live alive to God.  How to lose my life and find HIS.

Someone asked at the conference, “How do you die?”  Great question…and I answered it.

How to die to self? My life is truly in a fiery crucible now with private and secret agony. The crucible is my personal Gethsemane of dying to my will, surrendering utterly to HIS way and HIS will. To be REAL about it with Him, to FEEL what you feel and not suppress it. That is literally what it is to die to self. It is a real death…

I had quite a Habakkuk time with the Lord yesterday and it was full of ‘sound and fury.’  And the most terminal repentance.  The only answer ever is that He is God and He is right. And HE has conquered me with His Love and mercy…but know this: I am DYING daily.

Lose Your Life for Christ

Chambers says: “There is a battle royal before sanctification (holiness).”

There is nothing idealistic about a genuine transformation into His life and mind. It is not easy, that is why it is so rare. My secret is this! Lose your life – for Christ – and find it.

Unless you lose, you do not find. Today, in our instant-insanity, we think we can find/possess/gain without having to lose! Death must occur or never will there be true Resurrection.

From the beginning of his time with us, John always said, “People want what you have, but they won’t pay the price you have paid.”

Lose Your Life & Be Free

For some 20 years after my mother’s death (when I was 14), I was determined to have a ‘mother.’ Every ‘mother’ I chose and I latched onto was a nightmare of cruelty and futility. Oh my poor victims, how I expected them to fill that void!

Of course they were unable and unwilling. God overruled! I finally bowed and said, “I get it, I give up. I do not have a mother, I never will. Such was Your sovereign plan and Your good pleasure. I thank You that You took my mother. YOU are my mother, my only mother.  I let go of what You have taken away.”

I let go of my mother. I died to her death…and then I was free of ME, with a new level of intimacy with the Father.

I think I am saying that you have to live in childlike raw honesty with yourself – from your heart, not your head! You have to live THROUGH your pain, not around it, not in spite of it, not burying it.  That is Habakkuk. (See All and Only.)

Well, I didn’t mean for this to be so long and so intense, but the unction is here and I am in joy of the Spirit…

and HIS LOVE,
Martha