Right now my job is to raise support. I have been called as Church Planter Recruitment Director for Mission to North America, but this is not a salaried position. I must raise my support for this position. So how do I do that without making it the focus of my life? And even beyond that, how do not let the ups and downs of support-raising dictate my life? How do I keep myself from feeling encouraged when money comes in and discouraged when it does not? How do I do what I am supposed to do without gaining my sense of joy and identity from it? In other words, how do I live my life without gaining my life from my life?

I believe it is like this. We must live our life without loving our life. Listen to Revelation 12:10-11. This is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. “And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, ‘Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. 11 And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.’” In the context of the visions of Revelation, this voice is heard right after Satan and his forces were defeated.

So let’s play this out a little bit. How do we conquer Satan? What does verse 11 say? We do so through the blood of the Lamb and through our testimony. We do so through the sacrifice of Christ, the objective truth of the gospel, and through our testimony, our subjective faith in the truth of the gospel. But notice how can we have such a victory? The last phrase of verse 11 tells us: “for they loved not their lives even unto death.”

You see, it seems that there is something more important than life. It is possible to not love your life. You see, if we don’t love our lives, it must mean that we view our lives as secondary to something else. We all know that we must supremely love something. That is how God created us. Outside of the transforming power of the cross, we supremely love self. Through the transforming power of the cross, however, we are able to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and then out of that love we are able to love our neighbor.

So, let’s go back to Revelation 12. Satan is defeated when we have such faith in the cross that we would love something more supremely than our own life, and to do so unto death. That’s what it says. What an amazing phrase—to not love our lives even unto death. What a God-honoring juxtaposition of words—to think less of life all the way up until death. Now what does it mean to think less of life? What does it mean to live life knowing that there are things more important than life, and to live this way all throughout your life, even unto death? It means freedom. You see, if we don’t love our life, then we are free to give it up. We are the master over our life; it does not master us. Whatever we love, masters us. And whatever we love supremely, that thing supremely masters us. And we know that this is true. We all give ourselves to whatever we love, and thus that thing to which we give ourselves has great control over us. And so to love not our lives, to consider something else—namely Christ—more important than our lives gives me great freedom. No one can hold anything over on me. No one can take anything away from me. No one can control me with promises of this or that, because I already consider the most important thing that I have, my life, of secondary importance.

This is how we live our life without loving it. We consider Jesus more important, more satisfying, more necessary than even our own life. What this means practically is this. We can live our life without gaining our life from our life. I can live my life as a pastor without gaining my life—my contentment, my fulfillment, my identity—from my life as a pastor. I can raise support without gaining my life from raising support (feeling good when money comes in, feeling bad when it doesn’t), and I can do this, according to Revelation 12:11, through the truth of the cross and my faith in that truth, for having faith in the cross shows that I don’t love my life supremely, that I love Jesus supremely.