Dying To Self So That Christ Is All!

One of my most common prayers these days is simply this: "Oh Father, please help me to die!"

By this, I'm not praying to die physically, but I'm praying for more death to my own selfishness.

Hear these excellent words on death to self:

Spurgeon: I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to Him.

Bonhoeffer: When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.

Thomas A Kempis: Realize that you must lead a dying life; the more a man dies to himself, the more he begins to live unto God.

Jesus: Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.

It has been reported that some missionaries to Africa in the early 1800's shipped their goods overseas in coffins because most of them knew they would probably be struck down during their first term by disease or unfriendly natives. What a great example of death to self.

Michael and Hayley Dimarco write:

To die young is to live for Christ and nothing else, to be set free from the bondage of sin and self, and to live a new kind of life. Those who die young are emotionally bulletproof (or close to it), because they have already died to everything in them that another person could damage or break. In the 1800s, missionary James Calvert left for the Fiji Islands to share Jesus with the cannibals living there. The captain of the ship that brought him tried to dissuade his going by saying,

You will lose your life and the lives of those with
you if you go among such savages.” To which
Calvert replied, "We died before we came here!"

Jim Calvert knew what it was to die young, and because of that he could do what other men were too afraid to do. His confidence was built on the fact that he had already given his life away, so no one else could harm him. His life, and the lives of those like him, are a shining example of the beauty of the death and burial of self.

When you die young, you give all of your needs, fears, worries, wants, hopes, dreams, and failures over to the One who can handle them. And you learn now, while your youth is fresh and your days are bright (if you’ve got any days left at all), to start living like you mean it - to live out of the center of your faith, giving up your rights and your demands so that His will is all you see. When you live a life bent on dying to yourself and living for the Father, you live a life of purpose and passion, a life of hope and peace, and nothing can ever shake you or break you that isn’t the very hand of God Himself molding you and shaping you into His own precious image.

When you die young you bury yourself fully in Christ.

Michael and Hayley Dimarco, Die Young, Burying Your Self In Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2012), 17-18.