The Cost of Discipleship

Three things, and He said them to His disciples. Deny himself. Take up his cross. Follow me.

Everyone has burdens to bear, none are excluded, saved or unsaved. But when Jesus speaks of a cross, He is speaking to those who would follow Him. The difference is that the saved do not walk this road alone, we have our Helper. So for the disciple the question is never whether Christ calls you to a cross. He does, the question is what you will do with it.

To sincerely become a true disciple of Jesus Christ is to walk the road of self denial, and from the fall of man until now, self has stood in the way of surrender to God, because without total surrender to Christ we are all, every one of us, self serving.

So what is the cross to us? It is more than an ordinary burden. Jesus puts it beside denying myself and following Him, and the very next verse speaks of losing my life for His sake. So when I speak of the cross as that place where my flesh rebels against what obedience requires, that is my application of His picture. The cross itself is stronger than inconvenience. It carries the language of death.

Even Our Surrender Can Be Self Serving

But hear this, because it is the part we miss. Even our surrender can be self serving, sometimes we do not commit the sin, so we count ourselves obedient, yet the truth is we only held back because of what the sin would cost us, our name, our comfort, our peace. That is still self at the center, and God is reaching for something higher. He is reaching for the nevertheless life of Christ.

Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine. That surrender does not put its own will first. It yields the will to His.

Joseph Shows Us the Difference

Joseph shows us the difference, when Potiphar’s wife pressed him, hear what he said.

Against God. He knew what Potiphar had entrusted to him and he knew whose wife she was, and he names them both, but the reason he ends on is bigger than Joseph and bigger than his position. It is God.

And here I must be honest, with myself first. I was talking with a sister, no special topic, and she said she had too much going on to let nonsense cost her peace. And I understood her, but it made me ask myself a question. Is my peace kept because I am carrying my cross and pleasing God, or because I am simply avoiding whatever disturbs me? Because those two can look the same from the outside, and they are not the same thing. Keeping the peace can be a holy thing, or it can be self protection wearing peace like a coat. Sometimes love picks up the very thing that costs me my peace.

Not by Gritting the Teeth

So how does anyone carry such a cross? Not by gritting the teeth. Not by willpower, I have said myself that I could never be a martyr, and perhaps you have said it too. But look again at the martyrs, bound or free, and ask why they could do it.

And here is what I believe about them, because no verse tells me what was in a martyr’s heart. They loved Someone more than they loved their lives, and the surrender came out of the love. It is the same thing behind drop everything and follow Me.

Straightway. That is what the text tells me. Why they left it does not say, and I will not put words in their mouths, but I know what love does to a person when it is called.

Jesus commanded self denial and I am not moving that. But denial is what love looks like from the outside.

And I do not believe that strength is something we manufacture out of ourselves. Jesus still asks exactly what He asked, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me.

Think of our own children, they are a direct extension of us, good or bad, and what real parent does not want their child to be all they can be? When we see a child going astray, we will do everything in our power to pull them back, even becoming at odds with them, because we love them. So it is with our Father, only greater. He made us in His image and likeness, and He has done all that was needed to bring us back to Himself through Christ. And what moved Him? Love. He gave His only Son, and Paul tells me what the Son did with that.

Obedient unto death. That the Son loved the Father is what I read behind the obedience, and Paul gives me the obedience. And all He is asking of us is the same, let love move us.

Love that answers the love that came first. He did not ask us to begin the loving.

Because he first loved us. And at the cross He showed it in a way nobody could mistake.

And that is what I see under the cost of discipleship, loving Him back with the same self giving He showed us. Not instead of the three things Jesus named, He said deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me, and I am not going to shrink His words down to one. Love is what carries a person through all three.

The Mercy Hidden Inside the Cross

And here is the mercy hidden inside the cross, the thing that sets us free. When Abraham lifted the knife over Isaac and held nothing back, God stopped him and said,

Now I know. And here is Scripture on what He knows.

The LORD looketh on the heart.

But Genesis says what it says, and I will not make it say more. What I see happening on that mountain is a man brought face to face with what obedience would cost him, and he withheld nothing. And I believe he came down knowing something about his own surrender that had now been lived and not only spoken.

And James looked back at that same day and said something about it.

Made perfect. Brought to completion. James says his faith was brought to its completion through what he did on that mountain.

I know this from my own life, even in my infant days in the Lord, people said to me that I did not have love. It was a self serving thing to say, and it could not move me, not one inch, because even while I was still in the world God had bestowed on me a bowel of compassion, and I knew it. When you know a thing, you know a thing. No one’s words can take from you what God has let you see is true in your own heart.

So I do not read that day as God needing Abraham to supply Him with information He lacked. Genesis 22:1 says God did tempt Abraham, in the sense of putting him to the test. Genesis speaks of Abraham fearing God and withholding nothing, and James says his faith was working with his works. What I take from it is that God brought Abraham to a place where what was in him became lived obedience. And look what came to Abraham on the far side of it.

The text calls it obedience, and I will call it what God called it. Abraham would not withhold from God the dearest thing he had, and God answered with a blessing that reached every nation of the earth, all the way down to you and me.

He was willing to give everything, and in the end God did not take Isaac from him. And that last part is my own saying and not a verse, so take it as mine. Love can count the cost and still say yes.