Spend the next five minutes meditating on this verse.
This is exactly the opposite of what makes sense to the world. The world says, "Hang on to what is yours. Get as much as you can. Keep yourself in the center of your own life. Try to save your own life."
Jesus said to do just the opposite. If you try to save your life...if you try to do all the things that make up a great life, do all the things the world says will make you happy...you might have all the stuff, but you'll have an emptiness inside that you can't describe.
You will have an empty life, and you will wonder why. You will have everything the world says will make you happy, but you won't have happiness.
Jesus says, if you lose your life for My sake...that is, if you give Me your whole life, your time, your finances, your vacations, your energy, if you lose everything for Me, if you become selfless - then you gain real life.
I have never seen this more clearly demonstrated than in young people going on mission trips. They give up what the world says are fun things or popular things that everybody craves to do in the summer.
They give up all that and go on a mission trip. People think they are weird...strange. Then these young people come back and talk to their friends and say, "What did you do this summer?"
Their friends say, "Ahh, I don't know. Just hung out, just had a job. I can't even remember what I did."
But when they ask that young person who went on a mission trip, "What did you do?" he responds, "Oh, man! I went to this village and people got changed and people got healed and my life was changed and God spoke to me!"
He comes back with real riches you can see in his eyes. You can see it in his heart. Something changed in his life. So the person who thought he was going to have a fun summer, who was trying to save his summer, save his own life, lost it all.
He can't even remember what he did. But the young person who gave his life away got real riches.
This is your time to go on a missions trip. It needs to be the time when you quit hearing about it, quit listening to other people talk about it, quit just feeling convicted about it but not doing anything about it. This is your time to go.
Ask the Lord right now where He wants you to go. If your church doesn't already have a trip they're taking to another country, begin to pray about what organization you should go with.
Somehow, some way, you need to find a way to go. Do something - just don't stay at home.
Give yourself away and show that there's some maturity in you that's driving you to give your life away. And watch out to see how God is going to bless you because of it.
In Christ by Ron Luce.
Excerpt permission granted by Albury Publishing
Ron Luce was the co-founder and president of Teen Mania Ministries from 1986-2015. Ron and his wife Katie dreamed to raise young people who would change the world. 
