Worth Living For

Last winter, during my last couple of months working at the shipyard (for those of you who don’t know me well, I worked at Pearl Harbor shipyard for about three years until last March), I had very little to do. Very. Little. So for a couple of weeks I listened to the soundtracks of various musicals to pass the time. Among them was the music from Hamilton. The music is pretty good! But what really got me was thinking about those men…a group of young idealists with stars in their eyes and fire in their hearts who believed enough in what they were doing to essentially will a victory against an impossible enemy. The story of the American Revolution is a David-and-Goliath story. It was a war we shouldn’t have won. But we did, in essence, because we wanted it more. Because those men were willing to die, and live, for their cause.

It struck me HARD during that day while I was listening to this soundtrack, how much a person needs something to live for, and how little the average American has to live for. Not in the way of comforts, we have more than our fair share of those, but in the way of causes. How many Americans do you know that have a cause they would be willing to die for? Anything at all. Maybe family, for some. Or…politics? I don’t know. There aren’t that many worthwhile causes floating around. For myself, and many of the Christians that I know, I am very very thankful to have a cause worth dying for in my faith. Because, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “If you’ve got nothing worth dying for, you’ve got nothing worth living for.” So few people are living for much of anything.

It’s heartbreaking and soul-crushing not living for anything. I can see the hopelessness of it in the lives of those I work and live alongside. The tedium of each day is hard to get through. They look forward each day to being home, then they get home and look forward to going back to work because home is tedious too. In such a weird and counterintuitive way, being devoted to something “to the death” makes life much sweeter. It’s not that you throw your life away, that you don’t care for it…it’s that every day is worth living because you’re living it for a reason.

Anyway, this is beginning to sound like I’m getting desperate for material. “Allison, that’s nice, but that all happened 9 months ago…has your life become so stale that you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel this way?” No, I’ve not turned to reminiscing. I bring all of this up because I had a realization while praying just a few nights ago. I realized that, just as I’ve found my cause and reason for living in my Lord, Jesus Christ, and in my God, their cause was and is me.

Ponder this for a moment: the cause of the Son of God, the reason He drew breath and the reason he gave his last breath was YOU. You, me, us. We were the passion that kept a spark in his eye, that drove him to choose the right way every time, even when he was tempted not to. We were the great love of his life, for whom he was willing to suffer and die. We were his great reward, the thing that was so worthwhile that it didn’t matter whether he lived or died, only that he furthered our cause with his life and/or death. We were his everything. We still are.

Hebrews 7: 25 ESV

²⁵ Consequently, he is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.

He “always lives to make intercession for [us]!!!” We were and are his reason for living. Consider: he never would have actually had to live if we hadn’t needed a savior. We were very literally his reason for being alive.

We are also God’s greatest and pet cause. He is utterly devoted to His children, going so far as to give up His greatest treasure: His only begotten son. He made us to be His companions and then designed and created the most unfathomably extensive, most unspeakably beautiful habitation imaginable for us to play in. We’re always on His mind, always in His thoughts. I think (and this is just me here, but I feel strongly about it) that if our Heavenly Father could die, He would be willing to do it for us, His kids. I’m sure any parent would tell you that they would rather give their own life than sacrifice their child’s, but He was willing to let His son give his life for us; that’s an enormous amount of love.

Guys, before we ever even had a passing thought for God or for Jesus, they were each entirely devoted to us. I am a cause worth living and dying for. You are a cause worth living and dying for. As Dan Mohler said, “Nobody pays a high price for nothing.” You are not nothing to God. In fact, you are EVERYTHING. It’s hard to wrap your mind around. Causes are supposed to be grand and worthwhile. The greater good, or something. And I’m just…me. A little blip on Earth’s timeline, an even smaller (much smaller) one on God’s. But I’m a blip that God has been holding His breath (figuratively, of course) for since before time began, and that He’s rather fixated on now that I’m here. He feels the same about you. Just…wonder for a little bit at the “overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God.” And then let that love drive you to love Him a little deeper, pursue Him a little further, rekindle your determination that He’s worth dying, and even more than that LIVING, for.