1 John 3:16-18 — Laying Down Your Life

• John 3:16…1 John 3:16: “For…” vs. “This is…”

1. Laying your life down…

16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.

• The essence of laying your life down? – Recognizing you are not the most important thing.

2. A moment of brilliant sacrifice…or a lifestyle

The men of Block 14 were digging gravel outside the Auschwitz concentration camp in July 1941. Suddenly, the sirens began to shriek. There’d been an escape. That evening their fears were confirmed: he was from their block. Next day, the block’s 600 men were forced to stand on the parade ground under the broiling sun. “At the day’s end,” wrote reporter Connie Lauerman, “the deputy commander, Fritsch, arrived in his crisply pressed uniform and shiny jackboots to announce the fate of the terrified men in dirty, striped prison suits. ‘The fugitive hasn’t been found,’ barked Fritsch. ‘In reprisal for your comrade’s escape, ten of you will die by starvation.'”

The men slated for starvation were selected. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, a Polish army sergeant, was sobbing, “My wife and my children.” Then a Polish Franciscan priest, Maximillan Kolbe, pushed his way to the front as S.S. guards sighted their rifles on his chest. “Herr Kommandant,” he said, “a request.”

“What do you want?” barked the commandant.

“I want to die in place of this prisoner,” pointing to Gajowniczek. I’ve no wife and no children. Besides, I’m old and not good for anything.”

A stunned silence, and then “Request granted!” Source: Harold J. Sala, Heroes (Promise, 1998), pp. 274-75

• But what if this “laying down your life” moment isn’t a moment…but a series of moments across decades?
• Marshall Daigre – 5Q mg…thinking of two guys…spent their lives in one place…invested too much to just roll on down the highway to the next place.
• Roll of quarters
• Parents
• Big things, yes. But also little.

3. Have Compassion

17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?

Valdimir Nabokov, the Russian-born novelist who achieved popular success with his novels Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969).

One summer in the 1940s, Nabokov and his family stayed with a wealthy man in Utah, where Nabokov took the opportunity to enlarge his collection of butterflies and moths. Nabokov’s fiction has never been praised for its compassion; he was single-minded if nothing else. One evening at dusk he returned from his day’s excursion saying that during hot pursuit near Bear Gulch he had heard someone groaning most piteously down by the stream.
”Did you stop?’ Laughlin asked him.
“”No, I had to get the butterfly.’
“The next day the corpse of an aged prospector was discovered in what has been renamed, in Nabokov’s honor, Dead Man’s Gulch.”
While people around us are dying, how often we chase butterflies! Source: Vernon Grounds, Denver, Colorado. Leadership, Vol. 7, no. 3.

4. A Faith of Syllables?

¹⁸ Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

In September of 1940, Witold Pilecki, a Polish army captain, did the unthinkable-he snuck into Auschwitz.

That’s right, into Auschwitz. Pilecki knew that something was terribly wrong with the concentration camp and as a committed Christian and a Polish patriot he couldn’t sit by and watch. He wanted to get information on the crimes of Auschwitz, but knew he could only do that from the inside.

So he was provided with a false identity and a Jewish name, and then Pilecki allowed the Germans to arrest him during a routine Warsaw street roundup. Pilecki was sent to Auschwitz and assigned inmate number 4859. Pilecki, a husband and father of two, later said, “I bade farewell to everything Ihad known on this earth.” He became just like any other prisoner-despised, beaten, and threatened with death.

But he organized the inmates into resistance units, boosting morale and documenting the war crimes. Pilecki smuggled out detailed reports on the atrocities. By 1942, he had also helped organize a secret radio station using scrap parts.

In the spring of 1943, Pilecki joined the camp bakery where he was able to overpower a guard and escape. Once free, he finished his report, estimating that around 2million souls had been killed at Auschwitz. When the reports reached London, they thought he was exaggerating. Of course today we know he was right.

Here’s how a contemporary Jewish journal summarized Pilecki’s life: “Once he set his mind to the good, he never wavered, never stopped. He crossed the great human divide that separates knowing the right thing from doing the right thing.” Pilecki: “There is always a difference between saying you will do something and actually doing it. Along time before, many years before, I had worked on myself in order to be able to fuse the two.”

Source: Rob Eshman, “The man who snuck into Auschwitz,” JewishJournal.com (12-5-12); Captain Witold Pileck, The Auschwitz Volunteer (Aquila Polonica, 2012)