Last week I heard someone suggest that if they were to ever get a tattoo it would say, 'Grace given to me, for others.' That little phrase has been whirring around my head all week.
When you read through the epistles, it's clear that this motto belongs to the Apostle Paul. Even in prison, Paul is able to write 'for me to live is Christ and to die is gain'.
Sometimes it's easy to imagine Paul as some kind of super-Christian, the superhero of the early church. Paul's passion for the gospel and his ability to endure great suffering for the sake of it must surely only have been because God had given him extra special supernatural powers which enabled him to go on.
We in the West are uncomfortable with suffering and generally do our best to avoid it. We distance ourself from the kind of life Paul had, believing that his life motto was only for those few super-Christians and definitely not for us.
Suffering is normally a sign that something is wrong and yet the Bible tells us over and over that suffering goes hand in hand with being a follower of Christ. Paul's God is our God and that same power that was available to Paul to endure suffering is available to us. If God is to be treasured in our hearts above anything else then we are to expect suffering.
Now, suffering comes in all shapes and sizes and it's never helpful to compare. If we seek to live life with that motto of 'Grace given to me, for others', it means we are constantly choosing to sacrifice our desires for the sake of others. We are self-forgetful. Instead of ourselves being at the centre of our lives, God and his purposes are.
Mums and dads of newborn babies get to taste a little of the self-forgetfulness and sacrifice that we are called to as Christians. Our own babies were never great sleepers and for years we sacrificed decent sleep because our children came first. That new, tiny person is fully reliant on their parents to live and thrive, and with great joy and great suffering, parents lay down their own preferences so that this can happen.
I've been convicted recently that when I linger on my own suffering for the sake of the gospel, life becomes about me and not the great God that I seek to lay down my life for. So how, in an age that is so 'me' focused, do we truly live life for God and his purposes? How do we live for others? How do we love God with all our heart, soul and strength and our neighbour as ourself?
We can't do it on our own. Our hearts are so self-centred that even the ministries we are involved in are always in real danger of becoming self-serving.
The secret, I think, is to treasure Christ above all else, and we do that by spending more and more time with him. As we get to know Christ by reading the Word and by hiding away with him in prayer, his heart becomes our heart. His power is our power. His purposes become our purposes and ultimately our lives become more about him.
As Paul said: 'What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ... Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus' (Philippians 3: 8, 13-14).
Lizzie Bassford is a wife, mum and missionary living in inner-city Manchester. Follow her on Twitter @captivated01.
