Some people are like that with their lives. Christ will give you a new life. He will pardon you and forgive you, but you cannot come to him because the life you have got at the moment is still too precious to you. It means too much to you; you are too proud of it. You say, ‘This life I live is – my fame, my fortune, my possessions, my opinions, my money, my accomplishments – counts for too much for me to lose it. I think far too much of these things. Listen to the Saviour as he appeals to you with great kindness. ‘Whosoever will save his life’ – because it's too precious, it's too important – ‘shall lose it.’ If your greatest endeavour is to save your life as it now is, then one day you will lose it.
‘But whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.’ If you're prepared to resign your self-dominion, the life you have at the moment; if you say, ‘It’s a rotten life. Yes, I have some pleasures and enjoyments, I have some clean and wholesome fun, but in general terms, life as a whole with all its sin and with all its selfishness and rebellion against God and its obstinate self-determination; it is a rotten life. If you lose that life for Christ; if you come to Christ and say, ‘Lord, I will thrown away the life I've lived up to now and all its sin and all its rebellion’, then you will save your life. He will save his life in the sense that his soul will be eternally saved, but you will also save your present experience of life. You will save it from deterioration, because if you don't have Christ, you will deteriorate. You will deteriorate morally and in every sense. You will be subjected to more and more satanic exploitation. We are bad enough now, but if we don't belong to Christ, in ten years' time, we will be very worse, and in twenty years' time, we will be worse still. The devil will exploit us and bring us down and harden us and cheapen us. He will make us more and more entrenched in our sin. You are saved from all that if you come to Christ. You are saved from disappointment and tragedy and aimlessness. You are saved, of course, from condemnation and rejection from God. If you give up your present life, you are delivered from just being a tossing bark on the ocean of life, subject to all kinds of chance forces running downhill, and then eventually being condemned and judged by Almighty God.