THE COST OF DISCIPLESHIP by Jon Bloom

We hear a lot about the cost of discipleship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote the beloved book The Cost of Discipleship, where he says so memorably, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

This is true. Jesus said, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple… Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27, 33). To be Jesus’s disciple is costly.

But, according to Dallas Willard, the truth is that “the cost of nondiscipleship is far greater.”

The Cost of Discipleship

One day, just as Jesus was leaving town, a young man ran up to him, dropped on his knees, and blurted out, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17-22). It turned out this man was both wealthy and religious. I imagine most observers assumed God blessed the man’s piety with wealth. But something troubled him; something wasn’t right.

So, he came to Jesus for the answer. And Jesus loved him for his earnestness, so he gave him the answer in the form of an invitation: “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21). This invitation devastated the young man. Suddenly he understood he could not serve God and money (Luke 16:13).

The result:  he walked away sorrowful because the cost of discipleship was too high.

The Cost of Nondiscipleship

On another day, while walking through Jericho, Jesus saw a short man sitting in a sycamore tree (Luke 19:1-10). Zacchaeus was also wealthy—but religious? Not so much. I doubt most observers considered Zacchaeus’s wealth to be God’s blessing, since he was a Roman tax collector, and a fraudulent one at that. But something troubled and intrigued this man enough to make him climb a tree to get a glimpse of Jesus.

When Jesus saw him up there, the Spirit moved him to say, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5). The result of this encounter was that Zacchaeus also suddenly understood he could not serve God and money.

The result: he joyfully gave half of his wealth to the poor and repaid his fraud victims four times what he had stolen—I imagine there was not much left over. For Zacchaeus, the cost of nondiscipleship was too high.

Don’t Count the Wrong Cost

Two men both encountered Jesus. One was unwilling to lose his possessions; the other was unwilling to keep them. What made the difference? The thing they each treasured most. They each counted the cost and made their choice.

Jesus tells us to count the cost of discipleship (Luke 14:26-33). But if we count the cost primarily in terms of what we will lose on earth, we’re focusing on the wrong cost. Jesus wants us to count the cost of nondiscipleship: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26).

So let’s think about what it cost the rich young man to keep his possessions:

• He lost the forgiveness of all his sins and reconciliation with the Father.
• He lost the joy of having fellowship with the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3).
• He lost the empowering presence and joy of the Holy Spirit (Acts 13:52; 1 Thessalonians 1:6).
• He lost the profound sign and wonder and joy and strength and comfort of being part of Christ’s body, the church, and the everlasting fellowship of the saints (Colossians 1:18; Acts 2:42; 1 John 1:7).
• He lost the provision of God’s sufficient grace for every need (2 Corinthians 9:8; Philippians 4:19).
• He lost the privilege of participating in the destruction of the devil’s works (1 John 3:8).
• He lost the unspeakable joy of knowing every precious and very great promise of God found their yes for him in Jesus (1 Peter 1:8; 2 Peter 1:4; 2 Corinthians 1:20).
• He lost the triumphant joy of seeing others delivered from the domain of darkness (Colossians 1:13).
• He lost the abundant life Jesus would have given him (John 10:10).
• And he lost eternal joy! He walked away from the heavenly treasure of eternal life with God and an inheritance so great that the worst suffering of this age is “light” and “momentary” by comparison (John 3:16; 1 Peter 1:4; 2 Corinthians 4:17).

He lost God! He chose money over God, and so chose inconceivably destitute poverty. This is the tragedy of any idolatry. Don’t let it happen to you!

Don’t Walk, Climb!

We count the cost of discipleship based on what we treasure most. Our hearts stay with our treasures (Luke 12:34). We will not part with what captures our heart.

What’s capturing your heart? If, like the rich young man and Zacchaeus, something’s troubling you, go to Jesus. That’s the right thing to do.

If Jesus exposes an idol, something you feel you can’t give up in order to follow him, don’t walk away. You don’t have to walk away. Your story can be different than the rich young man’s. Don’t choose the poverty of any worldly gain over eternal gain, for you will find it no gain at all (Matthew 16:26).

Instead of walking away, climb. Climb whatever sycamore you must in order to get a glimpse of Jesus. Christ is the real gain (Philippians 3:8). Christ is the real treasure (Matthew 13:44). The Spirit causes a treasure-transfer to happen as we look to Jesus. Look until you see him. Ask, seek, knock (Luke 11:9). Climb. And when you see him, like Zacchaeus, you will with joy give away what used to capture your heart rather than lose the treasure of Christ.

Count the cost, the right cost. Don’t walk away. The cost of nondiscipleship is much too high.

Jon Bloom serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don't Follow Your Heart. He and wife live in the Twin Cities with their five children.

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The Teaching of Adversity

The typical view of the Christian life is that it means being delivered from all adversity. But it actually means being delivered in adversity, which is something very different. “He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. No evil shall befall you, nor shall any plague come near your dwelling…” (Psalm 91:1,10)—the place where you are at one with God.

If you are a child of God, you will certainly encounter adversities, but Jesus says you should not be surprised when they come. “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” He is saying, “There is nothing for you to fear.” The same people who refused to talk about their adversities before they were saved often complain and worry after being born again because they have the wrong idea of what it means to live the life of a saint.

God does not give us overcoming life—He gives us life as we overcome. The strain of life is what builds our strength. If there is no strain, there will be no strength. Are you asking God to give you life, liberty, and joy? He cannot, unless you are willing to accept the strain. And once you face the strain, you will immediately get the strength. Overcome your own timidity and take the first step. Then God will give you nourishment—“To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life…” (Revelation 2:7). If you completely give of yourself physically, you become exhausted. But when you give of yourself spiritually, you get more strength. God never gives us strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the moment. Our temptation is to face adversities from the standpoint of our own common sense. But a saint can “be of good cheer” even when seemingly defeated by adversities, because victory is absurdly impossible to everyone, except God.

Embrace the Race God Gives You by Jon Bloom

You have a race to run. It’s a race you’ve been given, not one you’ve chosen. 

It’s possible you wouldn’t have chosen your race at all, had the choice been yours. Or perhaps you wouldn’t have chosen this particular route. Or perhaps you wouldn’t have chosen your pace. Or perhaps you would have chosen different racing environments, teammates, or coaches. Or perhaps you would have chosen different capacities, strengths, and resources, ones you believe would help you run more effectively. Or perhaps you would have chosen a different distance.

But here you are: in this race, on this route, at this pace, on this terrain, in this climate, with these people, and your strengths, and your limitations, for this distance. Like it or not, this is your race.

And the question is this: Will you embrace your race or keep trying to escape it? What mindset will you choose? For though you may not have chosen your race, you do get to choose how you run it. 

You Can’t Escape

Of course, escape is not a real option. However, fantasy provides a seductively compelling illusion of escape. And the world offers you an overwhelming number of fantastic virtual experiences to “relieve” you from the rigorous realities of your race. 

By “fantasy” I don’t mean “imagination.” The two are not synonyms. Imagination is the God-given gift to human beings that allows us to fulfill our mandate to be sub-creators and stewards of our little corner of creation (Gen 1:28-30). Nor by “fantasy” am I referring to the literary or cinematic “fantasy” genres, which, when used rightly, are imaginative sub-creations that can help us better understand and embrace reality. 

By “fantasy” I mean something we are all very familiar with: the use of our imaginations for faithless ends—to faux-create an alternative to reality as a means of trying to “escape” reality. You know what I mean: sexual fantasies, anger fantasies, power fantasies, revenge fantasies. These are sinfully preferring a race God hasn’t given us; they are pretending we are in a race of our own choosing—a race in which we get to be God in our own way.

But the problem with such fantasies is that they aren’t real. They get us nowhere. They provide a temporary illusion of happiness, but as soon as we take off the virtual-reality goggles, so to speak, we are the same person, in the same race, on the same route. Nothing has changed, except that we have lost valuable time and burdened ourselves with more discontent and more guilt. We are more unhappy runners than we were before, which often just make us want to escape again.  

How to Run Free

There’s only one way to real freedom and real joy: we must renounce our fantasy races, routes, paces, terrains, climates, teammates, strengths, or distances, and embrace the race we have been given. This is how to run free and for joy:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God (Heb 12:1-2).

This text shows us how to run our race and run it well.

1.   Learn from great runners.

You are running a unique race, but not an unprecedented race. No one has experienced exactly what you have, but many have experienced the same emotions, temptations, and various other challenges common to man (1 Cor 10:13). That’s why the Bible includes a “great cloud” of  examples of faithful race-running.

If you want to run well, study other runners. Hebrews 11 provides a helpful starter list, but it is by no means exhaustive. Study the great faith-runners. Examine all aspects of their courses. God did far more abundantly than all they asked or thought (Eph 3:20). He will do more for you, too, if you run faithfully.

2.   Run as light as possible.

      This is your race. God has given it to you. This truth is for your liberation, not your limitation. It’s meant to free you, not constrict you. It’s folly and sin to waste time wishing your race were different or resenting God’s choices. Most of those in the great cloud of witnesses had no idea all that God was doing while they were running very difficult races. Neither do you. But learn from the witnesses that God’s purposes are bigger and better than you can imagine.

      Lay aside all the weights of fantasy and escape. Lay aside the weights of past sins and regrets. It makes for miserable, slow running. The cross pays for all the past, and the future joy will make all present difficulties now seem light and momentary (2 Cor 4:17). Focus on your race, and only carry what God gives you. His burden is light (Matt 11:30). 

3.   Run with endurance.

Endurance is only increased by pushing our current limits. It’s hard, yes. And you don’t know how you’ll ever be able to run like other great faith-runners. Neither did they when they began. Begin today, and push your limits. When tomorrow comes, run and push your limits. What exhausts you today will be much easier in six months, but then you’ll be pushing different limits. Don’t look at your fantasized ideal of a great faith-runner. Let Jesus make you into whatever runner he wants. You faithfully and prayerfully aim to increase your current endurance limits.

4.   Keep your eyes on the prize.

Look to Jesus—he is your greatest example, your Savior, and your greatest intercessor (Heb 7:25). He is the source of your greatest joy—your one great prize for running well (Psa 16:11; John 15:11). A race is only run for a prize. If the prize is not before your eyes, you will lose motivation. If you feel unmotivated to run your race, it may be because the prize has been  obscured. First priority: eyes on the prize again, whatever it takes — whatever it takes! And then “run that you may obtain it” (1 Cor 9:24). 

Embrace Your Race

This is your race. God has set it before you. There is more glory in it than you yet comprehend. How are you going to run?

You can’t change the past; stop trying. There’s much you can’t change about the present; stop trying. There are many fantasies singing like sirens to allure you into the illusion of indulgent escape; stop listening, and don’t let them eat your race time and weigh you down. 

Embrace your race. Study the great faith-runners, run as light as possible, push your current endurance limits, and get your eyes on the Great Prize. Run freer, run faster, and run for joy.

Jon Bloom (@Bloom_Jon) serves as author, board chair, and co-founder of Desiring God. He is author of three books, Not by Sight, Things Not Seen, and Don’t Follow Your Heart. He and his wife live in the Twin Cities with their five children.

HE FIGHTS

Posted: Jul 13, 2017 1:57 PM

this describes exactly why I still support President Trump...

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum.  They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”  Here’s my answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.  We tried statesmanship.  Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain?  We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney?  And the results were always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party.  I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks.  I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent.  Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s.   To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale.  It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war.  While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.
With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end.  Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors.  Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming.  Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today.   Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man.  He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch.  In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank.  But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich. 

Trump is fighting.  And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!”  That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.
That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis.   It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do. 

First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN.  He made it personal.  Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”
Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.

Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position.  With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat.  They need to respond.  This leaves them with only two choices.

They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.
The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve.  It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.
Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.
Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.
This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN.  This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”
This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do.  The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious.  Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.
And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes.   Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.
Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme.  This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him.  If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.
Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.
This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.
So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well -- do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”?  Of course I do.   These aren’t those times.  This is war.  And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting  without opposition for the past 50 years.
So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times.  I don’t care.  I can’t spare this man.  He fights.

Evan Sayet is the author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks.  His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history.  Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.

https://townhall.com/columnists/evansayet/2017/07/13/he-fights-n2354580