Everything To Lose

The phrase "Everything to Lose" has much more meaning than we give it. Or, at least, there is a different way at looking at it. Saying that we have everything to lose can generally be used for someone who is about to take a huge risk; who is putting much, if not everything they have, on the line in order to try and succeed at something different.
But while listening to Switchfoot's "This Is Your Life", the phrase totally hit a new meaning for me. I thought of it almost backwards, thinking that maybe the goal is not to risk everything in order to gain more, but to take everything you have and to lose it.
Hearing time and again that he who loses his life for God's sake shall find it, or that we must give up all our sins to know God, we see that the less we have, the closer to Heaven's Gate we seemingly become. And so contemplating on this, I pulled out the Bible, wanting to look further. Coming across Matthew 19, I found an even deeper sense of having everything to lose. In verses 16-20 a young rich man asks how to gain eternal life, and states that he has kept the basic commandments from his youth. Seemingly, he believes his absence of bad behaviors the same as good behavior. Which, yes, the absence of bad behavior is a very good thing, but, to me at least, it is not the same as good behavior.
If your mother asked if you had been a good boy/girl today, and you told them, "Yes, i didn't run with scissors, I didn't beat up my brother, and I didn't steal from the cookie jar", that in no way means you were a good boy/girl today. It just means that there were specific wrongs that you avoided. Which, I guess, is a good start. But I believe what Christ was showing here in these verses was that this Gospel is a Gospel of action.
As he continues on in verse 21 Christ lays out what the man must do to gain the eternal life that he sought. And for all intents and purposes, we could pretty much say that this man had "everything". He had 'many posessions' as state in the next verse. This man had everything to lose. And what was required of him to gain the kingdom of heaven was for him to give it all away; to lose it all.
And so, in verse 23 and 24, Christ states "Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
If we have everything to lose, then we are a long way from where we need to be. As it was shown by the Savior so long ago when he lived, this life is about serving others and giving it all away. If there hardly will be a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, it seems that we best spend this life losing it all; making sure that the "everything to lose" that we have is, to the best of our ability, lost.
With this Gospel of action, learning to serve and giving our all only improves. Having everything to lose may mean that we have too much.