I.B.S. #35

Philippians 3:10

- "That I may know Him, and the power of His ressurection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death."

When I first copied this verse down, I initially wrtoe the power of His righteousness. I think the reason why I did that was because I never recognized the amount of power that He showed during His ressurection. The beauty in the fact that He died, rose from the dead, and lived forever. I remember a study that I heard a while back that said something along the lines of Jesus, while He raised the dead, was the only person to die, raise Himself back up, and never die another earthly death again. Interestingly enough, I always figured that yes Jesus can bring the dead back to life (in the physical sense) so of course He could raise Himself from the dead however, I guess I never saw the power, the magnificence in the fact that Jesus never truely died, He lives even still to this day. While we've been this week of I.B.S. on the theme of sacrifice, I've been realizing that we don't actually sacrifice anything to gain eternal life. I remember a little skit we did in highschol. It had two people with full trashbags over thier shoulders who were in desperate need to get rid of it. They both realized that little by little the trashbags gradually got bigger and bigger with more barbage inside of them. Then Jesus comes along and asks one of them to give them their trashbag. He asks what the catch is. Jesus says there is no catch, just give me your bag, I'll get rid of it all, and you won't have walk around with this burden any longer. So he gives Jesus the bag, is immediatley happy, and skips of the stage. Jesus then asks the next person and they say no. He asks him why? He replies, well it may be stinky and heavy but this is my trashbag and while I would like to give it up, I might need something in it later on. This is how I feel about when I "sacrifice" something. Everything that we live for in this world is trash compared to what Jesus has for us. The sad part about it is that most people, like myself, for whatever reason, want to hold on to those bags of garbage even we know it may be bad for us or unnapealing to others. I contually find myself holding on to trash and I just need to give it all to Christ.

I'm going to write trashman on my arm to remind myself to take all the trash to Jesus like a trashman takes garbage to the dump.