A Sacrifice of Obedience: Gethsemane Moments in the Life of Jesus

By Michael Phillips

The Christian author and George MacDonald biographer shares an enlightening meditation on the need for sacrifice in contemporary Christianity.

Michael Phillips began writing A Sacrifice of Obedience in 2002, more than a decade before it was published. As the world moved further into the twenty-first century, the message of his book took on a more profound urgency. Christians everywhere—including Phillips himself—seem resistant the imperatives of sacrifice and obedience. Yet they remain the bull’s eye of the Christian faith. Now, after revisiting and expanding on his original manuscript, Phillips shares his candid and perceptive thoughts on the difficult yet deeply rewarding life all Christians are called to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9780795350641

Michael Phillips

Professor Mike Phillips has a BSc in Civil Engineering, an MSc in Environmental Management and a PhD in Coastal Processes and Geomorphology, which he has used in an interdisciplinary way to assess current challenges of living and working on the coast. He is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research, Innovation, Enterprise and Commercialisation) at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and also leads their Coastal and Marine Research Group. Professor Phillips' research expertise includes coastal processes, morphological change and adaptation to climate change and sea level rise, and this has informed his engagement in the policy arena. He has given many key note speeches, presented at many major international conferences and evaluated various international and national coastal research projects. Consultancy contracts include beach monitoring for the development of the Tidal Lagoon Swansea Bay, assessing beach processes and evolution at Fairbourne (one of the case studies in this book), beach replenishment issues, and techniques to monitor underwater sediment movement to inform beach management. Funded interdisciplinary research projects have included adaptation strategies in response to climate change and underwater sensor networks. He has published >100 academic articles and in 2010 organised a session on Coastal Tourism and Climate Change at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in his role as a member of the Climate, Oceans and Security Working Group of the UNEP Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts, and Islands. He has successfully supervised many PhD students, and as well as research students in his own University, advises PhD students for overseas universities. These currently include the University of KwaZuluNatal, Durban, University of Technology, Mauritius and University of Aveiro, Portugal. Professor Phillips has been a Trustee/Director of the US Coastal Education and Research Foundation (CERF) since 2011 and he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Coastal Research. He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Victoria, British Columbia and Visiting Professor at the University Centre of the Westfjords. He was an expert advisor for the Portuguese FCT Adaptaria (coastal adaptation to climate change) and Smartparks (planning marine conservation areas) projects and his contributions to coastal and ocean policies included: the Rio +20 World Summit, Global Forum on Oceans, Coasts and Islands; UNESCO; EU Maritime Spatial Planning; and Welsh Government Policy on Marine Aggregate Dredging. Past contributions to research agendas include the German Cluster of Excellence in Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) and the Portuguese Department of Science and Technology.

Book preview

A Sacrifice of

Obedience

Michael Phillips

A Sacrifice of Obedience

Copyright © 2017 by Michael Phillips

Unless otherwise noted, passages of Scripture are from the New International Version. Passages noted RSV are from the Revised Standard Version.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Electronic edition published 2017 by RosettaBooks

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-7953-5064-1

www.RosettaBooks.com

THE AUTHOR

Michael Phillips is one of the most versatile writers of our time. In addition to his reputation as a best-selling novelist, he has penned more than two-dozen non-fiction titles. These diverse but lesser known devotional and theological writings illuminate biblical themes with profound wisdom and insight.

Phillips is also known as one of the men who helped rescue Victorian Scotsman George MacDonald from obscurity in the 1980s with his new publications of MacDonald’s works. His efforts contributed to a worldwide renewal of interest in the man C.S. Lewis called his master. Phillips is today regarded as a man with rare insight into MacDonald’s heart and spiritual vision.

Phillips’ corpus of more than a hundred fiction and non-fiction titles is praised by readers, theologians, laymen, and clergy across the spectrum of Christendom. About Make Me Like Jesus, companion to this volume, Bishop William C. Frey said, Michael Phillips offers a much-needed corrective to…superficial descriptions of the Christian life. He dares us to abandon all candy-coated versions of the gospel. Commenting on another title, Eugene Peterson adds, Michael Phillips skillfully immerses our imaginations…he takes us on an end run around the usual polarizing clichés.

The impact of Michael Phillips’ writing is perhaps best summed up by Paul Young, author of The Shack, who said of the afterlife fantasy Hell and Beyond, When I read…Phillips, I walk away wanting to be more than I already am, more consistent and true, more authentic a human being.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Introduction

1     What Do We Sacrifice to Obey

2     The Sacrifice of Self-Rule

3     The Sacrifice of Autonomy

4     The Sacrifice of Ambition

5     The Sacrifice of Reputation

6     The Sacrifice of Orthodoxy

7     The Sacrifice of Comfort

8     The Sacrifice of Results

9     The Sacrifice of Self

10   The Sacrifice of Fear

11   The Ultimate Sacrifice

12   The Triumph of Obedience

FOREWORD

A Sacrifice of Obedience was written through the years 2002 and 2003 as an intended sequel to Make Me Like Jesus. It was never published.

Fifteen years have now passed. As I look at the world around me, it seems less likely than ever that Christians in very large numbers will be drawn to a message about sacrifice or obedience. And I am no different. I resist both imperatives just like everyone else. I had hoped by this time in my life to be a little further along.

But obedience remains the bull’s eye of the Christian faith, and the very personal bull’s eye of my own life. Thus, the time at last seems right to revisit this manuscript and share it with whatever fellow pilgrims there may be on that isolated and occasionally lonely path.

You who read these words may be few. Even in Christendom, where the image of the cross looms large in the imaginations and theologies of its many churches and their members, the actual cross-life of sacrifice and obedience is not so well known.

Yet to such a life we are called. It is the only life to which we are called.

Let us, then, courageously explore together a few high points along the Lord’s earthly Calvary road to see what they have to reveal about that life.

Michael Phillips, 2017

A SACRIFICE OF OBEDIENCE

INTRODUCTION

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.

—Luke 2:52 (RSV)

When I was eight years old I was given a part in our small church’s Christmas pageant. Dressed as a shepherd and clutching a staff taller than my head, I was to stand in front of a silent congregation and recite certain lines I had been given.

I practiced and practiced for weeks, memorizing and repeating them over and over, terrified lest I should forget a word. And it was a long speech for one so young to remember.

My mother quizzed me. I recited the lines in the kitchen, in front of the mirror in the bathroom, and outside at play.

Finally the big night came. Trembling nervously, I awaited the fateful moment when every eye in the place would rest on me.

Then it was time.

I stepped out from among the small cluster of shepherds and to the front. Then at last I repeated the words that ever since and all my life have remained almost as deeply burned into my consciousness as my own name:

And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man.

Then it was done. A few moments later, when we shepherds were through with our various proclamations, I returned in triumph to my chair beside my proud and beaming mother.

I had pulled it off without muffing my lines!

It was an inauspicious beginning to my stage career. To this day, notwithstanding the jubilation I felt for having gotten through the thing, fear of the podium remains as deeply a part of me as Luke’s words.

That verse has forever remained with me. As the years have gone by its revolutionary power has steadily infiltrated my heart and brain far beyond what I was capable of apprehending as a child, deepening within me the sense of progressive growth in Jesus’ life.

He increased in wisdom.

He had to grow spiritually.

This has been a powerful truth and anchor in my life. Gradually I found myself asking what kind of growth it was that the Lord experienced. How did he grow? Was his growth anything like mine has been over the years in my walk with God? And what was the intrinsic nature of that growth?

One conclusion I arrived at was that his was a growth in the capacity to deny himself, to lay down his life, along with an increase in his capacity to discern God’s voice and obey it.

As I have continued to reflect on Luke 2:52 for more than fifty years since that night in front of the church, it has become for me a constant reminder how much the Lord’s life truly does resemble our own.

(I intentionally use the present tense in that last phrase. For the life of which we read in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John lives forever in the eternal present. I try never to read it as a historical text, but a living and breathing story of which I am an integral part. I hope the somewhat unusual device of intermingling personal fictional vignettes through the narrative will heighten the sense of there-ness for each of us. We are truly present in this story!)

Jesus had to learn as he went.

To my heart that brings him very close.

Everything in the life of the Christian is progressive.

We grow into increasing maturity, strength, and wisdom. Having, therefore, examined some of the prayers Jesus prayed in the book Make Me Like Jesus, what then? What happens when we walk out of our prayer closets and resume life in the world of men?

At that point we are called to live in the reality of those prayers by following in his footsteps of daily self denial. To make such a life more real and accessible, we will look at certain key moments in the earthly life of Jesus from the perspective of what I call the Lord’s continual sacrifice of obedience.

I invite you to accompany me as we practically probe these sacrificial aspects of the progression of growth in the life of Jesus which ultimately led him to Gethsemane and the cross.

In invite you to step into the gospel drama with me.

Michael Phillips, 2003

ONE

WHAT DO WE SACRIFICE TO OBEY?

To obey is better than sacrifice.

—1 Samuel 15:22

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living θυσιαν (THUSIA, sacrifice), holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world…

—Romans 12:1-2 (RSV)

Some forty years ago I participated in a unique Bible study on the Gospel of Mark that changed my entire perspective on Scripture.

I had read the New Testament through several times. And in this Mark study I did not suddenly acquire a multitude of facts from the gospel or principles I hadn’t known before, or find new revelations pouring in by the dozen.

It was my outlook on Scripture that changed. Its pages and stories and characters came alive with new reality. A tired and somewhat shopworn phrase, I know. Yet it was a reality I could reach out and touch. I saw how superficial my previous gospel knowledge had been.

DUST, SWEAT, AND SILVER

I felt the dust, smelled the sea and the fish and the sweat of hard labor. I heard the crowd noise and the shrill cry of gulls above the water. . .and the dissonant metallic clatter of silver scattered across the stone floor of the temple by the hand of a tearful and bitterly repentant disciple who had just betrayed a savior he loved—but had not loved enough to try harder to understand.

Close-up reality. I was there!

Jesus himself, especially, as freshly illuminated in the gospel account, suddenly became so much more a flesh-and-blood man.

To this day, whenever I open my Bible to the book of Mark, I immediately recall the sense of wonder that took me over back then—perhaps because Judy and I discovered The Chronicles of Narnia about the same time—of walking through a wardrobe and out the other side.

Indeed, Mark’s gospel became a gospel-wardrobe, my own personal door into another world—luring me into an adventure where Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee and the crowds and noise and hubbub surrounding Jesus and the disciples were as captivating as the snowy wood of C. S. Lewis’s Mr. Tumnus. *

As I’m sure you know about magical worlds, entry varies from person to person and experience to experience. Sometimes it is a wardrobe, sometimes it is the salt spray flying out from a framed picture on the wall. But the windy breezes that blew into my face did not originate from the Great Eastern Ocean of Narnia where sailed a fairy vessel called Dawn Treader, but a real Galilean sea where toiled real fishing boats with real crews, among whom labored real men with names like Peter and Andrew, James and John.

Neither did Aslan step out of the pages of my adventure, but a man. . .Jesus himself.

Let me repeat: A man Jesus.

A man without a halo. A man whose face didn’t glow. A man who walked firmly on the ground. A man who lived, breathed, ate, talked, slept. . .yes, and even who got headaches and went to the bathroom, whose body sweat and smelled and feet got dusty like everyone else’s…a man who had emotions and felt happiness, anger, grief, frustration, and loneliness.

A real man.

ICONS AND HALOS

That phrase, a real man, may not seem so shocking at first. But the reality of that manhood is more difficult to discover than many realize. Christians of all persuasions find it easier to worship icons rather than the real Man of the gospels.

Every group