Dear Friends,
While today’s devotional has the same Scripture as yesterday’s, the devotional is different. Yesterday we asked if you were a savvy investor, but it you are making the investment today’s devotional speak of, you definitely are not! Beware! God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Mark 8:35 (ESV)

  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

“…Some… are leading a selfish life. Self is the beginning and the end of their life. They open a shop simply to make money. They live at home to be comfortable. Perhaps they enlarge themselves a little by talking the wife and the children into the circle of self; still, that is all; they have no care for God, no love for Christ, no wish to help the poor, no thought about eternity. That is a life of sowing the wind, and it will end, sooner or later, in reaping the whirlwind, for no man lives unto himself without earning for himself a fearful reward. Selfishness is often like the serpent that stings itself to death. It is not possible within the compass of a man’s own soul, that he should satisfy the cravings and desires of that soul. When he loves God, and loves his neighbor, — he is really most of all blessing himself, for then is he living to true purpose. But when self is everything to a man, he confines his soul within the charnel-house of his own ribs, and his spirit dies within him, and becomes like a stone…. He gathers riches, but has no happiness or contentment in them; he is like Solomon, who, with all his possessions, had to cry, ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Or if he gets to be rich, and seems to enjoy himself a little, he suddenly dies, and strangers swallow up his estate. All that is left of him is a massive tomb, and the notice in the newspapers that he died worth so many thousands of pounds, — which is not true, for he never was really worth a farthing all his life; he was a worthless man, whose only value consisted in the money he possessed. O my dear hearers, I do implore you, with all my soul, not to live unto yourselves! If you desire the highest, grandest selfishness that can ever be attained, I charge you, throw selfishness away, remembering our Savior’s words, ‘He that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it.’ He who casts his life away for the sake of Christ, and for love of the truth, shall be the man who shall really save his life, and find true joy and blessedness; but for anyone to live for self, is to sow the wind, and to reap the whirlwind.” [Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit XLV, (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1899), p. 355-356]