The Cost of Following Jesus

The Cost of Following Jesus

Matthew 8:18-22

            One year our boys’ soccer team won the regional championship.  I was the junior varsity coach so I shared in the victory, although peripherally.  Some of the players on that championship team had come through my program, so of course I felt proud. 

            The next fall, boys came out of the woodwork to try out for the team.  The varsity coach told me this always happens when a team wins a championship.  Everybody wants to be part of a winning program.  That’s why, when you watch a sporting event on TV, you see that the stands are more full when the home team is having a winning season.

            Most of the boys who tried out didn’t make the team.  Either they didn’t have the talent, or worse, they didn’t have the work ethic.  It takes a lot of effort to produce a winning team.  The majority of these young men wanted success without paying for it.  Our varsity coach was a disciplinarian.  He insisted that his players play the game the right way, paying attention to fundamentals, strategy, and conditioning—a high price to pay for those not committed. 

            “At heart, discipleship is obedience,” say Julia L. Roller and Lynda L. Graybeal.  They understood what so many would-be athletes don’t.  You have to be willing to follow your leader, obey his/her instructions, and subordinate your own talents, ego and will for the good of the team.

            Dietrich Bonhoeffer understood this principle.  He said, “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ”—and that means, of course, no Christianity at all.  How can you have a movement if you turn your back on the leader for whom you should be willing to sacrifice whatever necessary to achieve success?

            If anyone understood sacrificing in order to follow Jesus Christ it was Bonhoeffer.  At a time when the Christian Church in Germany had either sold out to Adolph Hitler or chosen to sit on the sidelines as he obliterated freedom at home and abroad, Bonhoeffer took a different path.  He stood against Hitler and against his fellow Christians—stood for what he believed was right.  By opposing the Nazis he condemned himself to arrest, prison, and eventually death—but stand he did.  Today we remember him for his discipleship.

            The problem with becoming a member of a winning team is that you have to give up so much to achieve it:  free time to do what you want; late nights awake and early mornings in bed; weekends to hang out with friends; bodily comfort—all so you can say, “We are the champions!”

The same is true in the Christian life.  Every bit of who we are must be turned over to Jesus Christ.  His ideals, his will, his work must come first in our lives.  Paul Tripp put it this way:  “If Christ does not reign over the mundane events in our lives, he does not reign at all.”  If Jesus Christ is Lord, then no one nor anything else can be.  Everything is subservient to Christ.

            Today’s reading tells of two persons whose encounters with Christ—while brief—forced them to make a choice.  The first offered to follow Jesus wherever he went.  Jesus told him how difficult the life could be, perhaps even lacking a place to call home.  The second person wanted to fulfill his obligation to his parents before taking up the life of discipleship.  Jesus told him that unless his commitment to his Master took precedence he wouldn’t make the team.

            Did these two make the cut?  We don’t know.  We’re not told their decisions.  What we do know is what G.K. Chesterton said about discipleship.  “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and untried.”

            Amen!