Study Questions
Chapter 9
Counting the cost
So far we have looked at some of the evidence for the unique deity of Jesus of Nazareth; we have considered our need as sinners, alienated from God, imprisoned within ourselves and out of harmony with one another; and we have set out the main aspects of the salvation which Christ has won for us, and offers to us. It is now time for us to echo the very personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, ‘What shall I do, Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the jailer at Philippi, ‘What must I do to be saved?’
Clearly we must do something. After all, Christianity is far more than accepting a series of statements about Jesus, true though they are. We may believe everything there is to believe about Christ, and admit that we are indeed sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves totally to him as our Saviour and Lord. We shall consider exactly how we do this in the next chapter. Meanwhile, we shall look at some of the practical implications of what it means to be a Christian today.
Jesus never concealed the fact that his religion included a demand as well as an offer. Indeed, the demand was as total as the offer was free. His offer of salvation always brings with it the requirement that we obey him. He gave no encouragement at all to those who applied to become his disciples without thinking it through. He brought no pressure to bear on any enquirer. He sent irresponsible enthusiasts away with nothing. Luke tells us of three people who either volunteered, or were invited, to follow Jesus; but not one of them passed the Lord’s tests. There was also the rich young ruler – an individual who was good, earnest and attractive in many ways, but who wanted eternal life on his own terms. He went away sad, with his wealth intact, but possessing neither eternal life nor Christ.
On another occasion, great crowds were following Jesus. Perhaps they were shouting out slogans of allegiance and giving an impressive outward display of their loyalty. But Jesus knew how superficial it all was. So he stopped and turned to speak to them, telling them a pointed parable in the form of a question:
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
The Christian landscape is strewn with the wreckage of derelict, half-built towers – the ruins of those who began to build and were unable to finish. All too many people still ignore Christ’s warning and undertake to follow him without first pausing to reflect on the cost of doing so. The result is the great scandal of so-called ‘nominal Christianity’. In countries to which Christian civilization has spread, large numbers of people have covered themselves with a decent, but thin, veneer of Christianity. They have allowed themselves to become a little bit involved; enough to be respectable, but not enough to be uncomfortable. Their religion is a great, soft cushion. It protects them from the hard unpleasantness of life, while changing its place and shape to suit their convenience. No wonder cynics complain of hypocrites in the church and dismiss religion as escapism.
The message of Jesus was very different. He never lowered his standards or changed his conditions to make his call easier to accept. He asked his first disciples, and he has asked every disciple since, to give him their thoughtful and total commitment. Nothing less than this will do.
So let us look at precisely what he said.
He called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? Or what can you give in exchange for your soul? If any of you are ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.’
The call to follow Christ
At its simplest, Christ’s call was ‘Follow me’. He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause.
Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to give up all lesser loyalties. In the days of his ministry on earth, this often meant a literal abandonment of home and work. Simon and Andrew ‘left their nets and followed him’. James and John ‘left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him’. Matthew, who heard Christ’s call while he was sitting at his tax booth, got up, left everything and followed him.
In principle, the call of the Lord Jesus is unchanged today. He still says, ‘Follow me,’ and adds, ‘those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciple.’ In practice, however, this does not mean for most Christians that they will need to move out of their home or leave their job. What it does imply, though, is the need for an inner surrender of these things, and a refusal to allow either family or ambition to occupy the first place in our lives.
Let me be more explicit about what needs to be abandoned, which cannot be separated from what it means to follow Jesus Christ.
First, there must be a renunciation of sin. The word for this is repentance and it is the first step in Christian conversion. There is no way round it. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin.
Repentance is a definite turning away from every thought, word, deed and habit that we know to be wrong. It is not enough to feel pangs of remorse or to make some kind of apology to God. In essence, repentance is a matter neither of what we feel nor of what we say. It is an inward change of mind and attitude towards sin which leads to a change of behaviour.
There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever let go of; but we must be willing to let them go and ask God to deliver us from them. If you are unsure about what is right and what wrong, about what must go and what may be held on to, do not be too greatly influenced by Christians you may know and what they do. Go instead by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the right path. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be someone you spend time with or something you do, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or a refusal to forgive.
Jesus told his followers to gouge out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if these caused them to sin. We are not to obey this literally, of course, by mutilating our bodies. It is a vivid figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the ways through which temptation comes to us.
Sometimes, true repentance has to include making amends. This means putting things right with other people whom we may have hurt. All our sins wound God, and nothing we do can heal the injury. Only the atoning death of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, can do this. But when our sins have harmed other people, we can sometimes help to repair the damage, and where we can, we must. Zacchaeus, the dishonest tax-collector, more than repaid the money he had stolen from his clients and promised to give away half his capital to the poor to compensate for the thefts which he was unable to make good. We must follow his example. There may be money or time for us to pay back, rumours to be contradicted, property to return, apologies to be made, or broken relationships to be restored.
We must not be unduly overscrupulous in this matter, however. It would be foolish to rummage through past years and make an issue of insignificant words or deeds long ago forgotten by the person we offended. Nevertheless, we must be realistic about this duty. I have known a student own up to the university authorities that she had cheated in an exam, and another return some books which he had stolen from a shop. An army officer sent a list of items he had ‘scrounged’ to the Ministry of Defence. If we really repent, then we shall want to do everything in our power to put things right. We cannot continue to enjoy what we have gained from the sins we want to be forgiven.
Second, there must be a renunciation of self. In order to follow Christ, we must not only forsake isolated sins, but give up the very principle of self-will which lies at the root of every act of sin. To follow Christ is to surrender to him the rights over our own lives. It is to abdicate the throne of our heart and obey him as our King. This renunciation of self is vividly described by Jesus in three phrases.
It is to deny ourselves: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves.’ The same verb is used of Peter’s denial of his Lord in the courtyard of the high priest’s palace after the arrest of Jesus. We are to disown ourselves as completely as Peter disowned Christ when he said, ‘I don’t know this man you’re talking about.’ Self-denial is not about just giving up occasional luxuries, either temporarily or even for good. It isn’t a matter of denying things to myself, but of denying myself to myself. It is to say ‘no’ to self, and ‘yes’ to Christ; to demote self and give first place to Christ.
The next phrase Jesus used is to take up the cross: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’ If we had lived in first-century Palestine and seen a man carrying his cross, we should at once have recognized him as a convicted prisoner being led out to be put to death. For Palestine was an occupied country, and this is what the Romans forced convicted criminals to do. In his commentary on Mark’s Gospel, Professor H. B. Swete wrote that to take up the cross is ‘to put oneself into the position of a condemned man on his way to execution’. In other words, the attitude to self which we are to adopt is that of crucifixion. Paul uses the same image when he declares that ‘those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires’.
In Luke’s version of this saying of Christ, the word ‘daily’ is added. Every day the Christian is to die. Every day we are to hand over the independence of our own will. Every day we are invited to renew our unconditional surrender to Jesus Christ.
The third expression which Jesus used to describe the renunciation of self is to lose our life: ‘Whoever loses their life...will save it.’ By ‘life’ here Jesus doesn’t mean our physical existence or our soul, but our self. The psyche is the ego, the human personality which thinks, feels, plans and chooses. There’s an important sense in which those who commit themselves to Christ lose themselves. But this does not mean that we lose our individuality. Our will is indeed submitted to Christ’s will, but our personality is not absorbed into Christ’s personality. On the contrary, as we shall see later, when we lose ourselves, we actually find ourselves and discover our true identity.
So, in order to follow Christ we have to deny ourselves, to crucify ourselves, to lose ourselves. The full, inescapable demand of Jesus Christ is now revealed in full. He does not call us to a sloppy half-heartedness, but to a vigorous, absolute commitment. He calls us to make him our Lord.
Many people think that we can enjoy the benefits of Christ’s salvation without accepting the challenge of his absolute authority. There is no support for such an unbalanced idea in the New Testament. ‘Jesus is Lord’ is the earliest known summary of what Christians believe. At a time when the Roman Empire was pressing its citizens to say ‘Caesar is Lord’, these were dangerous words. But Christians did not flinch. They simply could not give Caesar their first allegiance. Why? Because they had already given it to the Emperor Jesus. God had placed his Son Jesus far above every other authority and given the highest possible status to him, so that ‘every knee should bow’ before him ‘and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’.
He does not call us to a sloppy half-heartedness, but to a vigorous, absolute commitment.
To make Christ Lord is to bring every area of our public and private lives under his control. This includes our career. God has a purpose for every life. Our task is to discover it and fulfil it. God’s plan may be different from our own ideas or those of our parents and friends. If we are wise, we will do nothing rash or reckless. We may already be occupied in, or preparing for, the work God has for us to do. But we may not. If Christ is our Lord, we must open our minds to the possibility of a change.
What is certain is that God calls every Christian to ‘ministry’, that is, to service, to be the servant of other people for the sake of Christ. We are no longer to live just for ourselves. What is not certain is what form this service will take. It might be the ordained ministry of the church, or some other kind of full-time church work in our own country or overseas. But it is a great mistake to suppose that every committed Christian is called to this. The truth is that every form of work in which we see ourselves as cooperating with God in the service of others merits the job description ‘Christian ministry’.
Do not be in too great a hurry to discover God’s will for your life. If you are prepared to do it and listening out for God to reveal what it is, he will let you know in his own time. Whatever it turns out to be, we are not to be idle as Christians. For whether we are an employer, an employee or self-employed, we have a heavenly Master. The challenge is for us to understand God’s purpose in our work, and be wholehearted about it, as if we were ‘serving the Lord not people’.
Another area of life which belongs under the lordship of Jesus Christ is our marriage and our home. Jesus once said, ‘Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ He went on to speak of the clash of loyalties which sometimes arises within a family when one of its members begins to follow him.
Such family conflicts still take place today. We should never actively look for them. We have a clear duty to love and honour our parents and other members of our family. Since we are called to be peacemakers, we will make as many concessions as we can without compromising our duty to God. Yet we should never forget what Christ said: ‘Anyone who loves his father or mother...son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.’
Going on from this, a Christian is free to marry only a Christian. The Bible is definite here: ‘Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.’ This command can bring great distress to somebody who is already engaged or nearly so, but it must be honestly faced. Marriage is not merely a convenient social custom. It is something given to us by God. And the married relationship is the deepest into which human beings can enter. God designed it to be an intimate union, not only physical, emotional, intellectual and social, but spiritual. For a Christian to marry someone with whom he or she cannot be spiritually one is not only to disobey God, but to miss out on the full extent of what he intends marriage to be. It also puts the couple’s children at risk by introducing religious tension in their own home and making the distinctively Christian nurture they should be receiving from both their parents impossible.
Indeed, Christian conversion is so radical that our whole attitude to marriage, and to the relationship between the sexes, is likely to change. We begin to see sexuality – the fundamental distinction between man and woman, and the need of the one for the other – as itself the creation of God. And sex – the physical expression of sexuality – is no longer spoiled by selfish irresponsibility and made into something casual and essentially impersonal. Instead it becomes what the Creator meant it to be, entirely good and right, the expression of love, bringing God’s purpose to completion and fulfilling the human personality.
Other previously private matters over which Jesus Christ becomes Master, when we commit our lives to him, are our money and our time. Jesus often spoke about money, and about the danger of wealth. Much of his teaching on the subject is very disturbing. It sometimes seems as if he was recommending his disciples to sell everything they had and give it all away. No doubt he still calls some of his followers to do this today. But, for most of us, his command is to an inner detachment from money rather than to a literal rejection of what we have. The New Testament does not imply that possessions are sinful in themselves.
Christ certainly meant us to put him above material wealth just as we are to put him above family ties. We cannot serve God and money. It follows from this that we are also to be careful in the way that we use our money. We should think of it as no longer ours but as a resource we hold on trust from God. And in a world in which the gap between rich and poor is getting wider all the time, and in which the work of Christian mission is often severely held back by lack of funds, we should be generous and disciplined in what we give away.
There are many things that compete for our time, and becoming a Christian will bring with it the need to reorganize our priorities. If we are students, academic work will come high on the list. Christians should be known for their hard work and honesty. But we will also need to make time for new things. It’s important to take our busy schedules and carve out time for daily prayer and Bible reading, for setting Sunday apart as a day of worship and rest, for developing friendships with other Christians, for reading Christian literature, taking in Christian teaching, and for some kind of service in the church and the community.
All this is what is involved in forsaking sin and self, and following Christ.
The call to acknowledge Christ
We are commanded not only to follow Christ privately, but also to acknowledge him publicly. It is not enough to deny ourselves in secret if we deny him in the open. He said:
If any of you are ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of you when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.
Whoever publicly acknowledges me I will also acknowledge before my Father in heaven. But whoever publicly disowns me I will disown before my Father in heaven.
The very fact that Jesus told us not to be ashamed of him shows that he knew we would be tempted to be ashamed; and the fact that he added ‘in this adulterous and sinful generation’ shows that he knew why. He clearly anticipated that his church would be a minority movement in the world; and it requires courage to side with the few against the many, especially if the few are unpopular and we may not be naturally drawn to them.
Yet this open acknowledgment of Christ cannot be avoided. Paul declared it to be a condition of salvation. In order to be saved, he wrote, we need not only to believe in our hearts, but to confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord, ‘for it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved’. He may have been referring to baptism, which is certainly something for new Christians to undergo (if they have not already been baptized). Baptism is partly about receiving through water the visible sign and seal of our inner cleansing and new life in Christ. But it is also about acknowledging publicly that we have trusted in Jesus Christ as our Saviour and Lord and now belong to him.
But acknowledging Christ is not limited to baptism. We must also be willing for our family and friends to know that we are Christians, especially at first by the way we live our lives. This is likely in due course to lead to opportunities to speak about our faith, although we need to be humble and honest here and not blunder tactlessly into other people’s privacy. We also need to become members of a church and to join with other Christians at our school, college or place of work. We must not be afraid to own up to our Christian commitment when challenged about it. And we need to make it our aim to win our friends for Christ by praying for them, living in a way which honours God and taking opportunities to share our faith in conversation.
Incentives
Jesus makes heavy demands; but he also gives compelling reasons for them. Indeed, if we are to be serious about the total surrender he asks for, we shall need these powerful incentives.
The first incentive is for our own sake.
Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for you to gain the whole world, yet forfeit your soul? Or what can you give in exchange for your soul?
Many people have a deep-seated fear that, if they commit themselves to Jesus Christ, they will be the losers. They forget that Jesus came into the world that we might ‘have life, and have it to the full’, that his purpose is to make us rich not poor, and that to serve him is perfect freedom.
Of course there are losses to face when we submit to Christ. We have already thought about the sin and self-centredness which we have to put behind us; and we may lose some of our friends. But the rich and satisfying rewards more than compensate for any loss. The astonishing paradox of Christ’s teaching and of Christian experience is that when we lose ourselves in following Christ, we actually find ourselves. True self-denial is true self-discovery. To live for ourselves is insanity and suicide; to live for God and for others is wisdom and life indeed. We do not begin to find ourselves until we have become willing to lose ourselves in the service of Christ and of others.
To reinforce this truth, Jesus drew a contrast between the whole world and the individual soul. He then asked a commercial question of profit and loss. Suppose you were to gain the whole world and lose yourself, he asked, what profit would you have made? He was arguing at the lowest level of personal advantage and pointing out that to follow him is undoubtedly to have the best deal. For to follow him is to find ourselves, whereas to hold on to ourselves and refuse to follow him is to lose ourselves and squander our eternal destiny, whatever material benefits we may have gained in the meantime. Why is this? Well, for one thing we cannot gain the whole world. Secondly, even if we did, it would not last. And, thirdly, while it did last, it would not satisfy. ‘What can you give in exchange for your soul?’ Nothing is valuable enough even to make an offer. Of course it costs to be a Christian; but it costs more not to be one.
The second incentive for Christian commitment is for the sake of others. We should not submit to Christ simply for what we get, but for what we can give. ‘Whoever loses their life for...the gospel will save it.’ ‘For the gospel’ means ‘for the sake of making it known to others’. We have already seen that we must not be ashamed of Christ or of his words; now we are to be so proud of him that we want to spread his good news to others.
Most of us feel demoralized by the heart-rending tragedy of this chaotic world. Our very survival is in doubt. The ordinary citizen often feels a helpless victim of the tangled web of politics, or a faceless unit in the machine of modern society. But the Christian need not succumb to this sense of powerlessness. For Jesus Christ described his followers as both ‘the salt of the earth’ and ‘the light of the world’. The use of salt before the invention of refrigeration was largely negative – to prevent decay in fish or meat. So Christians should stop society from deteriorating, by helping to preserve moral standards, influence public opinion and secure just legislation. As the light of the world, Christians are to let their light shine. They have found in Jesus Christ the secret of peace and love, of personal relationships, of changing people for the better; they must share their secret with others. The best contribution anyone can make to putting the world to rights is to live a Christian life, build a Christian home, and radiate the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The greatest incentive of all, however, is for Christ’s sake. ‘Whoever loses their life for me...will save it.’ When we are asked to do something particularly hard, our willingness to do so depends very much on who asks us. If the request comes from someone to whom we owe a favour, we are glad to agree. This is what makes Christ’s appeal to us so eloquent and so persuasive. He asks us to deny ourselves and follow him for his own sake.
This is why he describes the renunciation he demands as ‘taking up the cross’. He asks no more than he himself gave. He asks a cross for a cross. So we should follow him not just for what we can get or for what we can give, but supremely because of what he gave. He gave himself. Will it cost us a great deal? It cost him more. He left the Father’s glory, the security of heaven and the worship of countless angels when he came. He humbled himself to assume human nature, to be born in a stable and laid in a manger, to work at a carpenter’s bench, to make friends with ordinary fishermen, to die on a criminal’s cross, and to bear the sins of the world.
It is only as we see the cross that we become willing to deny ourselves and follow Christ. Our little crosses are far eclipsed by his. Once we catch a glimpse of the greatness of his love in willingly suffering such shame and pain for us who deserved nothing but judgment, only one course of action will be open to us. How can we deny or reject such a lover?
If, then, you suffer from moral anaemia, take my advice and steer clear of Christianity. If you want a life of easy-going self-indulgence, then do not, whatever you do, become a Christian. But if you want a life of self-discovery, deeply satisfying to the nature God has given you; if you want a life of adventure in which you have the privilege of serving him and other people; if you want a life in which to express something of the overwhelming gratitude you are beginning to feel for him who died for you, then I urge you to yield your life, without reservation and without delay, to your Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.