Hi, and welcome to the Five Word Prayers Daily, a five-day-a-week daily devotional where we share the

word, prayers, in our heart. I'm Lisa Whittle, and I welcome you to just five minutes with me,

which I trust and pray will be five minutes well spent. Well, this hardest thing study is coming to a close,

and this is the last week of it, in fact. I think we've saved the sweetest topic for the end, and maybe the hardest, too, that

of dying and living.

Paul says in the word, for me to live as Christ and to die as gain.

And what I want to talk to us specifically about this week is how do we hold in the balance

of dying to self while living for Christ at the same time. It seems to contradict that Jesus would ask us to do these two hard things at the same time,

but really, it's all the same, I think, Jesus having our entire life.

John Piper wrote extensively about this passage I just talked about in Philippians 1,

where Paul writes that

to live as Christ and to die his gain, and here's what he says, Christ is most magnified in us

when we are more satisfied in him than in what we lose in death and what we have in life. In both cases,

the goal of Paul's life is attained when Christ is magnified in his body, whether by life or by

death. The key to magnifying Christ in life and in death is to find him more precious, more valuable,

more satisfying, more joyful, more boastworthy than everything we lose in death. To die is gain,

and everything we have in life to live is Christ.

I personally find living in this world and also dying to myself in this world, maybe the

toughest personal thing God has ever asked me to do, which I know veers a bit from the context

of this verse, but in a sense it's all about the same. Everything being about Jesus, him being my

whole life, him having my whole life, to where in the end death is in fact a gain because

nothing compares to him. I honestly don't know how every day to live here and be here and not

...