Soma

This past weekend we had a good friend of ours, Matt Moore, come down to Shoreline as a guest preacher.  The message that he brought was an incredible challenge and an incredible blessing (to me personally and to all of us as there).  It’s one that every person at Shoreline should listen to…twice!  If you haven’t heard it, click here to listen to it.

His message brought back a powerful lesson that I learned almost three years ago as we were preparing to plant the church.  As Lara and I got ready to sell our house, change our health insurrance, have our first baby, plant a church with 20 people, and look for different ways to support ourselves financially, I heard a common refrain of advice from many people (Christian and non-Christian) around me: “Count the cost!”

Nobody likes getting halfway into a project, only to realize that they don’t have the resources to complete it.  And it some ways, it may have looked like that was exactly what we were heading into.  Counting the cost is a good suggestion, we all need to make sure that the numbers add up and that everything makes sense before we proceed with each new endeavor God would have us embark upon.  We need to plan and crunch numbers, we need to assess and make sure that the way we are serving and loving others is within our “ability” and won’t leave us in more trouble than those we are serving. I mean, it’s Biblical…right?  At least it sounds Biblical.

The advice came from multiple trustworthy sources in my life, so I didn’t want to disregard it.  But, for some reason it just didn’t sit right.  So, I decided to look it up in Scripture myself (novel idea!).  This search led me to Luke 14.  In verses 28-32 Jesus says this:

For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

See, it is Biblical!  Or is it?  The problem is that we take this worldly annalogy and assume that Jesus’ point is that we need to make decisions that same way…we assume that that is wisdom.  However, if we look at the context (what another novel idea!) we realize that Jesus is making a very different point.  Here are the two verses (27 and 33) that contextualize this passage:

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple…

…So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

Jesus point?  Count the cost before you become my disciple.  Counting the cost is not something we do every time we have a decision to make.  We are not to repeatedly ask ourselves whether or not the cost of obeying Christ and sacrificing our lives for his Kingdom is appropriate or not.  We are to ask ourselves (and answer) that question once.  You count the cost once. And if you are willing to renounce all that you have (your possessions, your finances, your career, your dreams, your family, your rights), you then spend the rest of your life not continually re-counting the cost, but simply making decisions in light of that one decision you made to let go of everything and follow Christ.

So, if you desire to follow Christ but have never truly thought through the significance of what it means for Him to be your Savior and Lord, I would invite you to count the cost.  And, if you have already counted the cost in light of the price Christ has paid for your salvation and freedom from sin, and have decided to be a disciple of Christ, stop re-counting it…and start living in light of that decision!

That’s not “Christianity”…that’s living like Christ!