Self-Serving or Serving Jesus? Are We in Charge or is Jesus?

Jesus said in John 12:25…“Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew that if the church in Germany was going to stand up to Hitler, then there had to be a surrender to the will of Jesus.

Bonhoeffer detected a complication in the modern-day rejection of Christian discipleship: the failure to take Jesus at his word, still less to obey Jesus’ commands in all their forthrightness and simplicity.

The question Bonhoeffer hoped to resolve through a renewed sense of discipleship was how to bring self-seeking and self-centeredness under the authority of Jesus Christ and his standards of Christian conduct in the Sermon on the Mount.

His search for an answer brought him to affirm the single-minded obedience to Christ that he believed to be the essence of Christian faith. (The Cost of) Discipleship is as much a communication of his own shift from being a “self-serving Theologian” to the reality of following Christ as it is a challenge to the German church in its struggle against Nazism (The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 133).

How about today? Are we more self-serving than serving Jesus?