Marked By My Professor

Jerram Barrs.  Dude put his mark upon me. So many memories of things he taught me about knowing, loving, and walking with Jesus in humility. How I wish I learned it more deeply! Anyway, when thinking about the taking up cross passage I found myself wondering what he thought.  Per usual, he was so thoughtful and helpful.  Here’s an extended excerpt from a book he co-authored w/ Ranald Macaulay

This attitude—the willingness to give oneself away, to give up good things for the sake of better—appears at first sight to be negative but is in fact positive. It is the affirmation of one’s true, human identity. The “unnatural” existence, the denial of one’s true identity, is the self-centered existence.
Some measure of this reality must be present in every believer.  The degree is not the central issue, and care must be taken that this never becomes a principle of self-glorification or a basis on which to condemn others who have not spent themselves to the same degree (1 Cor 4:5). But the church and the individual ignore this principle at their peril. We are to be concerned about this principle of giving ourselves away not only because the law of God states that we should love in this way, and not only because Scripture points us to Christ as our great example (though both are true), but because that is in fact what love means, and what in fact we were created to do.  It is our nature. Only as we learn to live in this new way will we be fulfilled.

We ought to be careful as we come across passages in the NT which appear to give a negative slant to the Xn life.  Negative they may be, in that they involve the eradicating of what is wrong or the enduring of persecution or the laying aside of pleasurable and legitimate experiences.  But when seen in the context of the biblical view of humanity, the negative element fades away and these experiences, though painful, are seen to be positive—the recovery and the expression of our true identity and dignity.  –Jerram Barrs, Being Human