Luke 9:25 -- On Worlds and Selves and Winning and Losing

"For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world, and lose himself, or be cast away?"
Luke 9:25


This is similar to verses in Mark and Matthew, but instead of "lose himself" the others say "lose his own soul," which is also part of how the Joseph Smith translation alters the wording here. Clearly that is a good interpretation, but I like the phrasing here because it makes me think of how we in our society often talk about "finding ourselves."

Christ here is explaining that to gain our ideal selves, and eternal life, we have to lose our old selves, and let go of some of what we think of as our lives now. Christ talks about it here as taking up our cross, or losing our lives for Christ's sake in order to find our (better) lives, but in Matthew and later in Luke he explains it as seeking the kingdom of God first, and then other things will be added. It is the same concept... we have to let go of our chokehold on one thing before God can give us another. We have to lose to win, let go of this toy before we can get another, better toy... we have to give up/lose our sins to know God--let go of the bad parts of ourselves and focus instead on God in order to grow into/win our good potential and eventually-perfect selves.

It isn't easy, and I don't think it is really meant to be. Part of it is figuring out that we really need the Lord's help in order to change and realizing that our relationship with God is more important than those parts of ourselves that we are losing, and that who we are working with God to become is much better than who we have been. Those are hard things to learn because part of learning them is letting go of some of our self-esteem security blankets, realizing that we aren't all that, and that we could really use some self-improvement.

That kind of makes us feel like the whole King Benjamin less than the dust of the earth thing, but of course we also know that God loves us, we are his children and therefore of infinite worth... it's trying to balance those things that brings us fill circle to this verse again, since the verses leading up to it are talking about saving our lives to lose them, and losing our lives to find them. Parts of ourselves are dust bunny prey, and parts are the precious metals God is refining and purifying. We're good *and* bad... part to lose, part to find.

Today, let's work with God to let go of our evil selves and discover our awesome, glowy, good selves. It won't happen overnight, but this is the process of becoming saints and angels and gaining heaven... slowly replacing the bad parts with good parts until we are entirely new and perfect. :) Let's focus on God, where yoked together with Christ we can overcome even the obstacles that we put in our own way, becoming better and making the world and our relationships with other people better as well.