Christmas Sales, GST Hike Sales, New Year Sales, Warehouse Sales… Especially during these couple of months, we have been bombarded left right centre by lures to splurge our money on ourselves and our loved ones. Spending is very much a part of our materialistic culture here in Singapore and we hardly think twice about how many of our ‘wants’ have become more like ‘needs’ to us. But aside from the spending of material resources that we are all too familiar with, let us ponder for a moment the real true meaning of being spent; of being emptied, and Christ Jesus as that biblical model.Christ was spent
What exactly does it mean for the Son of God to empty Himself and become poor for our sakes? J.I Packer in “Knowing God” summed it up as “a laying aside of glory; a voluntary restraint of power; an acceptance of hardship, loneliness, isolation, malice and misunderstanding; finally, a death that involved such agony – spiritual, even more than physical – that His mind nearly broke under the prospect of it.”
Matthew 27:46 - “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”.
Out of obedience to the Father, Jesus Christ “made Himself of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men” (Philippians 2:7). He was born in a manger to common folk and later hung on a cross bearing the scorn of men so that we now can have a hope of reconciliation and eternal fellowship with our Creator God. All that Christ took upon Himself to endure is just something that we cannot spend too much time meditating upon.
Being spent like Christ
Fulfilling our side of the bargain simply ought to mean the replicating of the character of Christ in our lives, in word and deed. The priests and the Levites in the parables of Jesus still can be found in our communities today – people who see the needs of others around them, but perhaps after a little guilt trip and a short prayer, walk on by and carry on with life. Out of sight; out of mind. Living in our affluent, middle-class homes, it is definitely a challenge to truly identify with the widow who gave everything down to her last penny to the Lord or the Samaritan who went out of his way to help a stranger. Given our privileged circumstances in life, few among us really know what it means to give till it hurts just as Christ did for us.
The Christian spirit of being spent is the spirit of living out our entire lives based on the principle of making ourselves broken and spilled out to minister to our fellow humans out of love for Jesus. It is the sacrificial giving of service, time, effort, care and concern whenever the need arises. If the one thing we desire for ourselves in the new year of 2004 is spiritual renewal, one step we should take is to seek to cultivate this spirit in ourselves – to be emptied and spent so that He might fill us completely.
For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that,
though He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor,
that ye through His poverty might be rich
2 Corinthians 8:9
