Teachings of Jesus - SOM

Who Shall Save His Life Shall lose It
(Based on Matt. 16:24-27)

This is another of those mystical saying of Jesus which must be carefully considered before accepting it. Does God demand that we give up everything if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Of course not! To suppose that God wills us to be limited, is to contradict the Divine Nature. God’s only will is to Be, and for all to Be, for God can conceive of man only as part of Himself.
     It must be, then, that what we are to lose is the sense of living apart from life. We find ourselves in the Divine Idea, immersed in the infinite Godhead, one with the Perfect Whole. But should we think that we, of ourselves, without this relationship rightly established, can be, or can express, then we cut the cord that binds us to the main power line and lose what little power we have.
     We are powerful only as we unite with Power. We are weak when we desert this Power. Not because God is jealous, but because this is the way things work. The idea of a false renunciation – of the giving up of al pleasure and benefits in this life – is not even suggested in the teachings of Jesus. Self-effacement, the neglect of the body, the belief that we must be unhappy and poor is order to serve the Truth, all these are immature ideas which deny the divine birthright of the soul, the incarnated Spirit of the Most High within us.
     When we are willing to lose a personal sense of responsibility; when we let go of the thought of isolation and claim a real unity with God, then we lose the personal and find the Universal. But remember, as the greater includes the lessor, so the Universal always includes the personal, which is a personification of Itself.
     Man is to lose the small estimate of himself, the isolated person, and is to find the greater reality, the incarnated and real ego. The image of the Father cannot be defaced nor can all the wit or the sham of man really obliterate this image. The Eternal Light is God, and this Light illumines the pathway of the personal where there are no obstructions.
     Who leans on the Truth, throwing all –with and undivided attention – on the scales of Reality, will find them balanced rightly, through the great law of compensation, which weighs and measures everything exactly as it is.
Science of Mind