LET us remind ourselves that in this teaching Jesus is reacting to the response of Peter when he said he had to go to Jerusalem and suffer at the hands of the Jewish leaders. Jesus has already said that suffering is an integral part of discipleship, and warned that seeking to avoid such suffering will mean the loss of life, and to accept it in following Jesus would mean the realizing of life both in this world and the next. Now he presses home this lesson. The choice is ours whether we choose life, but Jesus wants us to make the right choice so he brings the argument of verse 26 to urge all to make the right choice.

The fact is that every human being has an immortal soul. By immortal we must understand an eternal conscious existence that can feel and know and experience whether it is joy or sorrow, pain or peace. This is something most people either forget or deny. Most seem to forget. If asked about the future beyond this life, they seem to assume that it will be to go to a better existence and find peace, but there is no sure ground for this hope. Rather than think about the future people would rather just live for this life. However Jesus speaks of the soul as being able to be lost.

This is a curious way of speaking. If the soul is our life, the person we are, how can we lose it? The soul is not something attached to us which we can put down and mislay. The soul is our essential person. How then can we lose our soul. The fact is that what Jesus is speaking of is losing the well-being of our soul. We lose our soul when we lose its peace, joy, happiness, satisfaction. To lose our soul is to find ourselves in eternal misery and suffering. When we realize this and face this truth, then the losing of our soul is a most terrible and terrifying thing. Pain and suffering in this earthly life has the possibility of coming to an end. People who feel suffering in this life to be unendurable will seek to escape by committing suicide. What Jesus is calling us to realize in this verse 26 is that to escape from suffering in this life by suicide is jumping from the frying pan into the fire unless in this life we have found the salvation of our soul.

The thing that is so tragic is that most people ignore eternity, and live for this world, and seek salvation of the soul only in the pleasures of this life in this world. We see it all around us in the United Kingdom today, and no doubt it can be seen just as vividly in other countries. In the UK we see it in the everlasting hunger after earthly riches. The goal is to gain the world, and the more of the world that can be gained the better people feel it to be. People want to be rich because riches are perceived to be the way suffering and pain can be avoided, and happiness and pleasure and security can be found. For this life this is mainly true. The rich have the best in life. If they can't avoid sickness, they can afford to buy the best medical care. If they can't avoid depression or discontent, they can be depressed in comfort. Riches can buy friends and praise and position.

However the point Jesus is making is that what is gaining all the world can offer if in eternity our soul is lost, and we spend eternity in misery and utter loneliness. Also it is true that even in this life gaining wealth and position does not bring the soul alive. The fact is money can't buy love. All it can buy is a travesty of love. Living for oneself in selfishness does not in the end bring enduring happiness.

So the grand question Jesus is leading us to is where safety, or the saving of our soul, can be found. This is where our thinking begins, and if we face it squarely we shall begin to realize that our souls are lost until they are saved, because whatever we do in this life to save our soul ends in failure. We can give all our money to the poor. We can spend our lives in seeking to alleviate suffering where ever it is found in the world. We can seek to be honest and true, kind and thoughtful. We can scour heaven and earth to save our soul, and having done all we can, we shall still remain empty, and without any life in our soul. Nor will we find any peace concerning eternity. In fact the more we seek to save our souls by our own effort, the more lost we will know we are, and despair may well set in.

When we start such a course we may well feel something that feels like life in the soul, and we may be able to live with this measure of peace all our lives, but at the point of death it will be found to be a broken reed.

In such searching and longing, however, there is good, for if it teaches us we can't save our soul ourselves, it will move us to look outside ourselves. This surely is where Jesus would bring his disciples and all of us who read these words. Peter saw for Jesus that the saving of his soul was by avoiding suffering and death. However Jesus knew that by losing his life he would save it, and not only save himself and win heavenly glory, but he would win it for all who would take up their cross and follow him.

Saving of the soul is always by the cross. What Peter failed to see is that Jesus came to win salvation for the soul, and the only way it could be done was by his death. Souls are lost because all souls born into this world naturally are born in sin and corruption, and separated from God and under the wrath of God. This is why our souls are lost, and living only for happiness in this life is so short sighted. We all travel along the broad way which leads to destruction and to the loss of our souls, and it is only the cross of Jesus that opens the narrow way to life.