As usual, the Desiring God Blog provides worthy reading this morning. This time it comes from Sam Crabtree. These paragraphs give the gist of the article, “Survival Isn’t Always Important,” which he gave as a devotional to the Bethlehem staff:

“If we make survival the chief goal, we very often can survive, but what do we become in the process? To survive we pay the price of bondage. But if we can settle the issue of survival, we are truly free. Survival wasn’t the issue for Jesus. Jesus was willing to die, hence no one could make him do anything that would compromise his integrity or mission.

On occasion I have said to the staff and elders that I don’t care whether Bethlehem goes out of existence, if in order to survive we become the wrong Bethlehem. If we can first settle the issue of what God wants us to be, who we are, what we are, what we believe and stand for (because we must), survival becomes secondary. If we survive, we survive. If we perish, we perish. If we grow, we grow. If we diminish, we diminish. To settle the issue of survival is freedom! ”

I recommend the whole article to you, and you can find it here.