Living Life "All In"

My nine year old son Ezra wants to learn to play Poker. He has a book called “The Most Dangerous Book For Boys” that has all of these cool things in it that would interest boys his age and Poker happens to be one of them. So we were looking at the book recently and it talks about how to play different Poker games and it gives some of the different Poker terms. It describes terms like “straight” and “flush” and what it means to “call.” And one of the things that it talks about is what it means to be “all in.” To be “all in” is defined as every one of a player's available chips being committed into the pot. When a player is all in he is playing this hand going for broke; he is betting it all and everything he has is out of his hand and in the pot.
And as we read this Ezra is thinking cards and I am thinking about how you follow Jesus. I thought, “That’s how you live the Christian life: you live the Christian life all in.” We have a book called the Bible that could also be called “The Most Dangerous Book For Christians” because if you take it seriously it will challenge you to radical living for Jesus Christ.
1 Kings chapter 19 describes the call of the prophet Elisha into the service of the Lord. The Bible tells us there that as the prophet Elijah was nearing the end of his ministry the Lord told him to go and call Elisha to serve as God’s prophet in his place. Elisha was a farmer and as Elijah came up to Elisha, his future predecessor, Elisha was plowing a field with twelve pairs of oxen.
When Elijah saw him he threw his mantle on him (which would have been like a cloak) and this symbolized that Elisha was now being called to follow and serve the Lord as a prophet. He was being called to commit his entire life to follow after the Lord and serve Him in all that he did.
This was a call that would have taken Elisha away from everything that he knew and everything that he was comfortable in and comfortable doing. This was a radical call to commitment; a radical call to be “all in.” It was the call to forsake all that he had and to venture with God into the unknown as he walked by faith and served God as a prophet.
And do you know how Elisha responded to this call to commitment? The Bible says he killed two of the oxen and took the oxen’s equipment and chopped it up and set it on fire and cooked the oxen over the fire. He then gave the meat to the people there and he arose and followed Elijah. That is a picture of being “all in.” Where there is no turning back. When you kill the oxen and burn the yoke you have truly set your course to follow hard after God.
That is the commitment that we need in our service to the Lord Jesus: total commitment that kills our self-centered way of life and burns our past, and follows Jesus. Sold out, total commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ.
John Leonard Dober and David Nitschman are names you may not readily recognize. They were men with ordinary occupations (one was a potter and the other a carpenter), but who lived extraordinary lives for Christ. These two men became the first Moravian missionaries in 1732.
What makes their story unique is that they felt the call of God minister to the slaves of the West Indies. To accomplish this they willingly sold themselves into slavery and gave up all their rights so that they might go and share the Gospel. One of the men had his wife and children standing on the dock as the slave ship left its port begging him to stay. But it is recounted that as the ship pulled away from the wharf the men cried, “May the Lamb that was slain receive the reward of His suffering.”
I read that story and think, “I do not have a clue what it means to be all in for Jesus Christ.” But I want that. I desperately ache for that. I want that so deeply for me and for my family and for you. It does not mean that you have to become a missionary and sell yourself into slavery, but it does mean that you have to fall so deeply in love with Jesus that you live your life in the pursuit of making nothing of yourself and everything of Him.
And I want that because that is life! That is what it means to live! That is what Jesus has saved you for: He saved you from sin and hell, but He saved you for a life like that here and now. He has saved you to live “all in.”
To be “all in” is defined as every one of a player's available chips being committed into the pot. Where are your chips at today?