Today’s passage is Luke 14:25-35. To the crowds following him Jesus says that to be his disciple, we must turn away from our family and our own life and carry our cross. He says that someone who builds a tower first determines the cost so that he will have enough and not be ridiculed for starting but not finishing. He says that a king going to war estimates the chance of victory and may sue for peace. He says salt that has lost its saltiness must be thrown away.
Does the command to hate our family really mean hate?
Why a tower and not some other sort of building?
“Estimate the cost” (28)
For most of my life I’ve been poor at estimating the cost of my desires and decisions.
And I don’t know why.
I hope that God will show me in this QT. Maybe I’m ready to hear and apply.
The only time that I’ve been good at estimating the cost was when I was in charge of the money for a two week trip with a school hockey team playing in Europe for two weeks.
To my surprise, I did it so well that I made a profit for us!
With my own money, however, I seem to inevitably end up in the red.
When I graduated from high school I went to Europe by myself with the money I had saved from my after-school jobs.
I did pretty well on my expenses but as I grew more confident I grew careless and in the end I had to call my dad to ask him to re-arrange my flight home a week earlier because I’d failed to follow my plan and ran out of money.
On the second time I went to Europe a few years later when I bought a motorcycle and traveled around, the same thing happened.
I grew careless and overspent and had to return earlier than I had intended.
When I began my affair with my first wife I didn’t estimate the cost of my adultery, her divorce, having children and going to grad school.
The suffering of those impoverished years was only exceeded by the years of emotional, spiritual and financial anguish that resulted from my adultery near the end of my first wife’s life.
I did not estimate any cost, but rather saw only the benefits from what I was certain would be a vast increase in my happiness.
Instead, I lost my job, was threatened with deportation, lost my money, deepened my debt, and ended up in a room in the YMCA with just enough unemployment assistance to pay for the room and eat two meals a day.
A few years ago I met a friend I’d gone to college with who had become a teacher too.
His life was completely different from mine because, in part, he had estimated the cost.
At the end of our first university degrees, he sat down and estimated the cost.
Instead of grad school, he decided to go to teachers college and focus on special education because that’s where the jobs were.
I didn’t care about a job and went to grad school, my head full of future benefits.
His plan was to teach special ed for a few years, then transfer to regular education, which he did.
Like me, he became head of an English department. Then he took the principal’s course and became a vice principal, principal, inspector, assistant director and finally a director of education.
He is quoted in leadership books.
All along the way he estimated the cost and became a worldly success.
In retirement he sits of the boards of hospitals and charities.
His wife has breast cancer.
When we met, I opened my story to him, but he chose to relate only his successes.
He talked about the cost of retirement and he showed he had estimated that cost too.
In worldly terms, he is an admirable man.
I think a lot about him because I worry about his spiritual focus. Death approaches.
I never estimated the cost of following Jesus.
Even though Jesus warns us that it will cost us everything, as in today’s passage, I didn’t know how great that cost would be.
Like so much of my life, I looked mostly at the divine benefit of following him, which is eternal life with the Lord.
I think that if I had measured the worldly cost of following Jesus I never would have obeyed his command to follow him.
Blessedly, his command was impossible to ignore for me, although I tried.
I like CS Lewis’s description of the benefits.
He says living in the world is like playing with mud pies while living with God is like life in the most glorious palace imaginable, a reworking of Jesus’ statement that his father’s house has many rooms.
I think Jesus’ warning about the cost of following him is meant to alert us to the hardship and suffering that will follow that decision.
Dying daily to my sins and carrying my cross is not fun.
It’s an endurance race I wish was finished, but from which I also gain ongoing benefits such as love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, self-control.
Jesus knows that life is hard and chasing worldly ease does not make it less hard.
The lesson I never applied to myself is to consider all the money I receive as someone else’s money that I will have to give an account for, just like the hockey trip money.
It’s not my money. And it’s not my time.
Because I will have to give an account for my time and my money, I need to do better than I have done and am currently doing.
That’s how I must estimate the cost.
Application: to keep a daily record of my spending to check what I spend on selfish gratification rather than on what is truly required in my circumstances.
Lord, inspire me daily with your Spirit to know more deeply that it’s not my time and not my money but yours. Let me be ready to give a daily account to you.
