Matthew 13 So many have nearly given eve

Matthew 13

So many have nearly given everything, they nearly entered the victory place of total devotion but stopped short of ‘everything’.

v46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

John Huss was a Czech priest and a key predecessor to the Protestant movement of the 16th century. Before the Catholics burned him at the stake and lying in chains in prison he wrote this:

Without you I cannot do anything and especially, for your sake I cannot go to a cruel death. Grant me a ready spirit, a fearless heart, a right faith, a firm hope, and a perfect love, that for your sake I may lay down my life with patience and joy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Pastor, whose book The Cost of Discipleship is a classic was part of a staunch resistance to the Nazi dictatorship. He was executed by hanging in April 1945 while imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp, just 23 days before the German surrender.

He wrote these words before his death:

Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil; it spells death to evil … The worse evil, the readier must the Christian be to suffer.

Majasobtsova began her early life as an atheist but then gave her life to Christ who would ask her to give everything for Him. Her and her father helped many Jews escape the occupation.

On Easter Saturday 1945 at the Ravensbruck concentration camp she took the place of a Jewish woman who was going to the gas chamber, one day before the Red Cross liberated the camp.

She wrote these words as she went:

Lord, I am your messenger. Throw me like a blazing torch into the night.

When Jesus is your pearl of greatest value then you will sell all for Him. Everything.