Conclusion
Chapter one
Jesus Is Worth Everything
Jesus is up front with us that there is a cost to following him. From God’s side, the gift of life in him is free—or rather, already paid for by what Jesus suffered for us. But we live in a world that challenges our faith, so from the world’s side our faith is bound to cost us hardships. Yet God empowers us by his Spirit to maintain our witness for Christ in this world no matter what.
Jesus Comes Before Everything Else
We could explore various ways that Jesus calls us to make disciples of all peoples (Matt. 28:19), and we will explore one of those ways later in this book. One obvious feature of making disciples for Jesus, however, is teaching everyone to obey Jesus’s commands (28:20), not least those that specifically concern being his disciples. Jesus is king in God’s kingdom (28:18), so obeying him is paramount.
In Matthew’s Gospel, being a disciple of Jesus ranks above job security. Commercial fishermen and tax collectors normally made a better-than-average living, but some members of both professions leave behind their livelihoods to follow Jesus (Matt. 4:18–22; 9:9; compare Mark 1:16–20; 2:14).
Jesus is also above residential security. As Jesus prepares to cross the Lake of Galilee, a prospective disciple offers to follow him wherever he is headed. Jesus makes clear that following Jesus is costly. Foxes and birds have homes, but Jesus’s mission leaves him no permanent place to lay his head (Matt. 8:19–20; compare Luke 9:57–58).
Jesus is above financial security. When a person of means asks how to receive eternal life, Jesus summons him to give away his wealth and follow Jesus. Forced to choose, the man chooses to keep his wealth (Matt. 19:16–22; compare Mark 10:17–22).
Jesus is above family ties. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37; compare Luke 14:26).
Jesus is above all social obligations. Burying one’s parents after their deaths was the ultimate act of filial piety; failing to bury one’s father could leave one a permanent outcast from one’s village. When someone asks to attend to his father’s burial before following Jesus,1 however, Jesus makes clear the necessary priority: “Follow me, and let the dead people bury their own dead” (Matt. 8:22; compare Luke 9:60).
Finally, Jesus is above life itself. “And whoever doesn’t take up their cross and follow me isn’t worthy of me” (Matt. 10:38; compare Luke 14:27). “Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anybody wants to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’” (Matt. 16:24; compare Mark 8:34).
The Cost of Discipleship
In his book The Cost of Discipleship, theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer comments more extensively about the rich man who chose to keep his wealth rather than to follow Jesus (Matt. 19:16–22; Mark 10:17–22; Luke 18:18–23). Bonhoeffer remarks that the difference between the rich man and us is that Jesus stood before him so he could not conveniently reinterpret Jesus’s words. Bonhoeffer compares a boy told by his father to go to bed; the boy has studied theology, however, so the boy now can reinterpret his father as ultimately just wanting him not to be tired. Surely going out to play will cure the exhaustion just as well as going to bed, right? All too often, Bonhoeffer complained, professed Christians reason away the Lord’s demands in like manner.2 Bonhoeffer’s theology changed over time, but he maintained the path of resisting evil. In connection with this resistance, he was executed under Hitler.
Each of the Gospels qualifies Jesus’s radical teachings with narrative, revealing an absolute standard implemented with grace. Jesus’s disciples, most of whom were probably teenagers, discovered that while their spirits were willing, their flesh was weak (Matt. 26:41; Mark 14:38). They had abandoned everything else to follow him (Matt. 19:27; Mark 10:28), but when it came time to follow him to the death they all abandoned him (Matt. 26:56; Mark 14:50). When the time came to carry the cross and follow Jesus, Rome’s soldiers had to draft a bystander, Simon of Cyrene, because Jesus’s “followers,” who were supposed to take up the cross, were nowhere in sight (Matt. 27:32; Mark 15:21).
Yet Jesus did not repudiate his disciples. He doesn’t lower the standard to what we are, but his patient grace transforms us into what he has called us to be. “Follow me,” Jesus promises, “and I will make you fishers of people” (Matt. 4:19; compare Mark 1:17). Jesus empowers us by his Spirit (Matt. 3:11; Mark 1:8).
How Much Is Jesus Worth?
Many Christians are familiar with the story of Richard Wurmbrand, who endured fourteen years of torture and imprisonment in Communist Romania. Wurmbrand emphasizes that our identity is determined not by the creed we recite but by what we are “ready to die for.” Those who remain faithful when tested by persecution or other hardship reveal what they really believe in their hearts.3 He mentions one young prisoner, a high official’s daughter who had become a believer. She loudly recited the Apostles’ Creed as she was marched to her execution. She was proclaiming the eternal hope to which the Creed bears witness.4
Matthew 26:6–16 offers three contrasting estimates of Jesus’s worth.5 For the woman who anoints Jesus in 26:7, Jesus is worth everything; she lavishes her affection on him, pouring out all her expensive ointment. Whereas others are thinking about their roles and gains in the future kingdom (e.g., 18:1; 19:27; 20:21), and Jesus welcomes the many who seek him for blessings (e.g., 4:24; 8:2–3, 5–17; 9:2–7, 27–30), she comes not for what she can get from Jesus, but what she can offer him. She is a model of the deepest devotion to the Lord.
By contrast, the male disciples, soon to fail the Lord in his time of testing (Matt. 26:40–56), oppose her action as wasteful. They think of other, supposedly better, uses for the resources (26:8–9). Their interest is not selfish per se; they want to expend the resources on the poor, which is in keeping with Jesus’s own teaching. After all, Jesus told a young man who wanted to follow him to sell all his goods and give to the poor (19:21). But their focus is distorted; they criticize a particularly devoted follower for lavishing her love on Jesus. God must be the supreme object of our love (22:36–37). Jesus had told that young prospective follower not only to give his resources to the poor but, “Come, follow me” (19:21). Without Jesus being central and renewing us, all our other service, no matter how good, can just burn us out.
The devotion of the woman who anoints Jesus contrasts with the collective attitude of the male disciples, but it contrasts even more starkly with Judas’s mindset. Like some professed worshipers of God today, Judas seeks only what he can get from Jesus (Matt. 26:14–16). Once Judas learns that Jesus’s kingdom will not profit him materially (and may even cost him his life), he chooses to get what he still can from his lengthy investment in Jesus. He sells his Lord for the Old Testament price of a slave (Matt. 26:15; Exod. 21:32). Like another disciple of old (2 Kings 5:26–27), Judas abandons his spiritual birthright for material prosperity. In saving his own life, he loses it for eternity (Matt. 16:24–27; 27:1–10). Like Judas, some people even today decide that the cost of serving Jesus is higher than it is worth.
Jesus and his kingdom are like a pearl of great price or treasure hidden in a field. Jesus is worth sacrificing everything else for this one treasure that is more valuable than everything else put together (Matt. 13:44–46). The rich young ruler chose to keep his earthly wealth over following the king who grants eternal life. True disciples must follow Jesus no matter what the cost.
Baptism in the Spirit and Suffering
Those of us who value the gift of the Spirit often emphasize how the Lord uses this gift to empower us for mission. Sometimes, however, we forget what that mission may involve.
Instead, you’ll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you’ll be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and as far as the end of the earth. (Acts 1:8)
See, I’m sending you out like lambs among wolves. (Luke 10:3)
Luke’s two-volume work uses the Greek term dunamis (“power”) to refer to healing or exorcism more than to anything else (Luke 4:36; 5:17; 6:19; 8:46; 9:1; Acts 3:12; 4:7; 6:8; 10:38). The plural form of this word is usually translated “miracles” (Luke 10:13; 19:37; Acts 2:22; 8:13; 19:11). Vineyard leader John Wimber was right, then, to speak of such witness in terms of “power evangelism.” Throughout the book of Acts, the most common means narrated of getting people’s attention for the gospel is signs (e.g., 2:12, 16; 3:11–12; 4:29–30; 14:3; 15:12). Luke does not directly associate them with every believer, but neither does he limit them to the apostles (Acts 6:8; 8:6, 13; 9:17–18). The Spirit’s role may also include leading us to know how and when God wants us to bring healing in Jesus’s name.
Yet such power evangelism is hardly associated with a life of ease. As suggested by Jesus’s earlier instructions (Luke 9:3–5; 10:3–4, 10–15), Jesus’s agents in Acts must travel fairly simply and face considerable opposition (e.g., Acts 12:2–3; 14:5–6, 19; 16:22–23). Already in Acts 4–5, the temple authorities arrest, beat, and consider killing the apostles. Signs don’t guarantee that people will be converted. Jesus criticizes many towns whose residents witness his miracles without repenting (Matt. 11:21–23; Luke 10:13–15). Miracles by themselves don’t convert people; they just make the gospel impossible to ignore. Some will respond in faith; others will respond by trying to shut down the message (e.g., Acts 14:3–5). That’s why we need the Spirit to continue granting us boldness (Acts 4:8, 13, 29–31).
Jesus’s warning about what Spirit-empowered witnesses will face appears in all the Gospels, in one form or another:
When they hand you over, don’t worry how you’ll speak or what you’ll say, because what you should say will be given you in that hour. That’s because it’s not you speaking then, but the Spirit of your Father speaking by you. (Matt. 10:19–20)
And the good news must first be preached among all peoples. And when they bring you to court and hand you over for arrest, don’t worry beforehand about what you should say. Instead, speak whatever is given you in that hour, because you’re not the one speaking it, but the Holy Spirit. (Mark 13:10–11)
When they bring you before the synagogues and the rulers and authorities, don’t worry how you should defend yourselves or what you should say, because the Holy Spirit will teach you in that very hour the things you need to say. (Luke 12:11–12)
[Initially], they will just throw you out of synagogues; but the time is coming for everyone who kills you to suppose that they are offering worship to God! (John 16:2)
Both in the Bible and today, reaching the lost usually entails a measure of hardship.
Our Model for the Spirit-Empowered Life
Toward the beginning of his Gospel, Mark shows us what Spirit-baptized Christians should expect. Jesus, who baptizes in the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:8), is endowed with the Spirit himself at his baptism (1:10). Jesus thus becomes not just the Spirit-baptizer but also the model for the Spirit-baptized life.
Yet the Spirit does not lead Jesus into a life of ease; sometimes God’s call sends us into greater hardships for a greater purpose (see, e.g., Exod. 3:10; Josh. 1:2; 1 Sam. 22:5; Jer. 1:17–19; Acts 9:16; 16:9).6 The Spirit immediately hurls Jesus into the wilderness for testing, for conflict with Satan (Mark 1:12–13). This is how Jesus begins modeling the Spirit-baptized life for those he will baptize in the Spirit! The rest of Mark’s Gospel recounts Jesus performing Spirit-filled miracles—and facing increasing opposition from Satan’s religious and political agents. Do we really want to be baptized with the baptism that Jesus was baptized with (10:38)? Such a price should not surprise us since the servant is not greater than the master (Matt. 10:24–25; John 13:16).
Signs get attention. They do not always get acceptance.
He casts out demons by the ruler of the demons! (Mark 3:22)
It’s enough for the disciple to be like their teacher and the slave like their master. If others have called the head of the house Beelzebul, how much more the members of his house! (Matt. 10:25)
What are we doing about this man doing many signs? If we let him keep doing this, everyone will believe in him! (John 11:47–48)
They came, not just because of Jesus, but also so they could see Lazarus whom Jesus had raised from the dead. So the chief priests decided together to kill Lazarus as well, since many Judeans were going and trusting in Jesus because of him. (John 12:9–11)
Stephen, full of grace and power, performed great wonders and signs among the people. . . . Then they secretly instigated some men to say, “We heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.” (Acts 6:8, 11)
So they stayed there for a long time, speaking boldly for the Lord, who testified to the message about his grace by granting signs and wonders to be done through them. But the town’s people were divided, some favoring the Jews, but others the apostles. And when both gentiles and Jews, with their leaders, rushed to abuse and stone them . . . (Acts 14:3–5)
Revivals Among the Broken
The Spirit’s work is often deepest where people are most desperate for him, and people are often most desperate in hardship. Spirit-filled scholar Jack Deere notes that in general miracles are reported most “where persecution was the most intense and godly people were desperate for God’s help.”7
Iris Global is a Spirit-filled (and in the common sense noted in chap. 2, apostolic) church-planting movement. Its participants have witnessed abundant signs—including healings of blindness and raisings from the dead—with tens of thousands won to Christ. Here is the third among its five core values:
We look for revival among the broken, humble and lowly, and start at the bottom with ministry to the poor. God chooses the weak and despised things of the world to shame the proud, demonstrating His own strength and wisdom. Our direction is [humbling ourselves] lower still.8
Iris’s members depend on God alone, rather than worldly power, recognizing that God’s power is revealed in human vulnerability.
In biblical times and today, reaching the lost usually involves suffering. Even where the most dramatic miracles are occurring today, suffering is also present—including among those through whom the miracles are accomplished.
In the early twentieth century, Shang-chieh Sung (John Sung), from Fujian Province in southeast China, engaged in the apostolic sort of evangelism with signs and wonders that we see in Acts. He was China’s best-known evangelist of that era9 and is usually regarded as one of the leading early figures of indigenous Chinese Christianity.10 He has been called “probably the single most powerful figure in Chinese revivalism in the mid-1930s,”11 perhaps “the greatest Chinese revivalist of the twentieth century,”12 and “China’s George Whitefield.”13 He impacted Asia beyond China,14 and his strategic form of discipleship through small groups remained important even in Indonesia.15 Yet Sung spent three years suffering from an agonizing illness that finally took his life.16
Conferences about miracles are well attended. Far less common in the charismatic spotlight is the global persecution of Christians. What about conferences on global missions that remind us that spreading good news about Jesus is worth any price?17 Or those that cultivate empowerment and gifting for the purpose of mission?
What about conferences focusing on how revival usually comes to the lowly and the broken?18 Brokenness is often the matrix for revival. Revival is rarer in centers of status.
Revival movements often emerge among young people who feel alienated from society’s structures. These include the Jesus Movement or, again, Nigeria’s student movement through Scripture Union. Briefer college outpourings, such as the life-changing one many of us experienced at Asbury University in 2023, have often come to young people desperate for a fresh touch from God. That is, God is near the lowly (Ps. 138:6; Prov. 3:34; Matt. 23:12; Luke 14:11; James 4:6; 1 Pet. 5:5) and those who hunger and thirst for him (Pss. 42:2; 63:1; Matt. 5:6).
Revival May Prepare Us for Hardship
Sometimes revival comes after hardship, but sometimes it comes to get us ready. An 1857–1859 prayer revival started among businessmen in New York City and led to an estimated million conversions (about 4 percent of the US population at the time)—on the eve of the bloody Civil War (1860–1865). Many of those stirred by the Welsh Revival of 1904–1905 perished on the battlefields of World War I. Recent years of miracles and massive conversions in Mozambique prepared the growing church there for the current wave of martyrdoms and intense persecution the Christians have been facing.
In 1965, God sent a revival in West Timor, Indonesia, during a period of instability. Even greater instability soon struck the nation as a whole. Several days after the revival began, Indonesia claimed a Communist coup attempt, which over the next year led to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of suspected Communist sympathizers in various parts of the country. In some other parts of the country, dismay at the massive slaughter turned many to Christ.20 More recently, Mel Tari, a leader in that revival, shared with me the important insight that revival is never the end of a work of God; it is the beginning.21
Here I comment especially on the Korean Revival, which strengthened the church in the face of continued foreign domination. Korean Christians understand han, a sort of suffering that one cannot translate into English with a single term.22 Koreans faced unimaginable sufferings from the Japanese occupation during World War II. A particularly hideous example is that soldiers forced an estimated two hundred thousand Korean women into sex slavery, each of them raped an average of twenty to thirty times per day, and most killed afterward to conceal the atrocities.23
The overlords forced all students to worship at shrines of Japanese deities. Christians who resisted were mercilessly beaten, had bamboo needles thrust under their nails, and were tortured in other ways.24 Prisoners were fed such meager rations25 that one group of them, for example, divided and devoured a cowhide belt.26 They endured numbing cold; in warmer weather, nocturnal chinch bugs crawled all over them, leaving many bites.27 One minister recounted, “I have never heard God’s voice so clearly as in these days. . . . Only at such times as these of persecution and disorder by the hands of Satan do believers awaken in faith.”28
Although the Korean Revival started in the north, eventually the church in the north had to go underground. While the proportion of Christians in South Korea is now the second highest in Asia, the repression of Christians is harsher in North Korea than in any other country in the world. In 1950, some three hundred thousand Protestants and fifty-seven thousand Catholics lived in North Korea, but repression came quickly, with Christians being crucified, roasted over fires, and “crushed under steamrollers.” North Korea’s leader insisted that progress required the state to execute all believers who would not recant their faith.29 Authorities sent Christians’ children to prison camps where they could be “reeducated.”30 Vast numbers, variously estimated from one million to five million, fled south, abandoning their homes.31
One Christian torture victim explains that her captors nearly suffocated her, knocked out her teeth, and tore out her nails.32 She estimates that thirty to forty captives in the camp died each day; prisoners “were so hungry that we would take food from the mouths of dead people, or fight for the undigested corn husks found in animal faeces.” “Cells” in her camp lacked roofs.33 Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Nina Shea open their book on global persecution with the report of a North Korean woman summarily shot to death when a Bible was discovered in her home.34 Still, we need not conclude that North Korea is without hope. Albania once hosted the atheist regime that was the most repressive against faith; today fewer than 4 percent of Albanians are atheists, with 80 percent professing some religious faith.
Conclusion
Jesus is worth everything, and he more than rewards us eternally for any sacrifice we make to follow him. God’s Spirit empowers us for his mission in the world. But mission is not always easy—as is true for life itself. Indeed, Scripture illustrates this pattern in the missions and lives of apostles and prophets.
1 Whether the father is already dead or the son asks for a longer delay is debated; so also is whether he envisages the original funeral or secondary burial. The demand is more about the priority of following Jesus than about the urgency of following him, but Luke 9:61–62 supplements this account with another that does address urgency.
2 Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, 90.
3 Wurmbrand, Tortured for Christ (2023), 67; compare also 110–11; “Afterword,” 161.
4 Wurmbrand, Wife, 226.
5 I develop these paragraphs from Keener, Matthew, 364–65.
6 Note the hardships that then follow obedience to each of these words from the Lord. Compare many other passages, possibly including Judg. 20:18.
7 Deere, Voice, 87.
8 See Iris, “Core Values.” Much of the wording reflects 1 Cor. 1:27.
9 See, e.g., Yung, “Endued,” 81; Young, “Miracles,” 116.
10 Tan, “Secret Work,” 98; Leung, “Conversion,” 89, 106; Oblau, “Healing in China,” 309; Aikman, Jesus in Beijing, 43.
11 Bays, “Revival in China,” 173.
12 Robert, “Introduction,” 15.
13 Wu, “Dora Yu,” 98. Benjamin Franklin discovered that thirty thousand people could hear Whitefield at one time (Noll, History, 93).
14 See, e.g., Anderson, Introduction to Pentecostalism, 129; Shao, “Heritage,” 96; Koch, Revival in Indonesia, 54–57, 60–62.
15 Brougham, “Chinese in Indonesia,” 141.
16 Keener, Miracles, 1:308, following especially Sung, Diaries, 190–91, 221–25 (although some question the work’s authenticity).
17 Uncommon though they are, some conferences do address this. Thus, for example, I participated in a conference of the Every Nation movement in Cape Town, South Africa, that included the voices of persecuted believers.
18 On some of these revival movements, see Shaw, Global Awakening, including 33–53 for the revival in Korea; Noll and Nystrom, Witnesses, 174–81.
19 See, e.g., Ojo, “Civil War Revival.”
20 On this last point, compare Johnstone, Operation World (1993), 293; Johnstone and Mandryk, Operation World (2001), 339.
21 Personal correspondence, June 4, 2023.
22 See especially Park, Hurt.
23 Park, Conflict, 12–15.
24 Kim, If I Perish, 33–34. For many living in secret or in the mountains because they refused to worship at the shrines, see, e.g., 49, 52. Some detention areas were too crowded for everyone to be able to lie down (118).
25 Kim, If I Perish, 137, 161.
26 Kim, If I Perish, 222. Kim herself counted rotten apples a delicacy (226).
27 Kim, If I Perish, 161, 171.
28 Kim, If I Perish, 57.
29 Shortt, Christianophobia, 223.
30 Shortt, Christianophobia, 220.
31 See, e.g., Kim, If I Perish, 266.
32 Shortt, Christianophobia, 221.
33 Shortt, Christianophobia, 222.
34 Marshall, Gilbert, and Shea, Persecuted, 1. For recent suffering in North Korea, likely the world’s most repressive state, see, e.g., Martin and Bach, Crimson Crucible.