Detachment & Surrender
Mt 3:4 - John the Baptist’s Clothes
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about detachment and surrender.
I don’t know about you, but as I’ve gotten older I continue to find myself in situations and experiences - let’s call them opportunities - that require me to sacrifice some interior attachment that I thought I had dealt with years ago.
Whether one has just encountered Jesus Christ for the first time or has been trying to follow Him for years, our need for detachment and surrender runs incredibly deep.
Our disordered attachments to earthly things - possessions, perceptions, or people - will drain the living Spirit out of us.
Although detachment & surrender are not rocket science, they are mountain-moving.
In the mind, they’re simple. In the will, they’re the heaviest bit of weight-lifting we’ll ever do and will involve a lot of time, sacrifice, and pain.
For love of Christ at a depth that’s difficult to imagine, John the Baptist embodied detachment and surrender.
I wonder how animated by the Spirit he was and how much charisma, courage, and confidence he had to not simply preach the Gospel with his words, but actually do it.
In terms of his looks, John was a new Elijah (2 Kings 1:8). But the comparison is deeper than clothing.
Both prophets confronted evil kings for their sinfulness and were persecuted for it, and both were harbingers of another prophetic figure that would succeed them.
Elijah → Elisha; John → Jesus.
And both their successors cleansed a leper, raised a child from the dead, and multiplied loaves to feed a multitude.
John was a fool’s fool for Christ. A garment of camel’s hair for clothes and locusts for food?
So much for keeping up with appearances.
Onward and upward,
Ted
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