Following Christ is not a prayer we pray so that we might reap a temporal life of earthly comfort. It is a recognition of a truth so transforming that we can find no more appropriate response than laying down our lives in gratitude.
When the cost of following Jesus seems too high a price to pay we ought to remember this: we were bought with the price of His life. He surrendered His perfection on our behalf. We were enslaved to death, imprisoned by fear. There was no underground railroad to which we could run, no way out of our bondage. There would be no emancipation for our souls, no reparations for our suffering. We would die. The fear of that death drove us to fill this life with all manner of sensual pleasure and attempts at building a legacy on this earth in order to render our memory, if not our soul, immortally enshrined in the minds of men. There was no other way towards significance or fulfillment, and we intensely desired to matter, to live.
Can the cost be too great when we realize the price of our freedom not just to choose, not just to become the best possible version of ourselves, but even more fundamentally, to LIVE and to live forever? The blood-debt we owe Him is one we can never repay, and so joyfully we enslave ourselves to Him because we are at last truly free to choose our own master and there is none so gracious and generous as He.
Rather than bemoaning the cost of discipleship, rather than begging Him to spare us the hardship or save us from the difficulty we ought to plead for the opportunity to go. Reveling in the great joy of our rescue we should find ourselves petitioning God to send workers out with his message of freedom and truth: liberty to those held captive by death! More than asking Him to send others, we should answer the call of Heaven "whom shall I send and who will go for us?" by shouting and leaping in a frenzy of desire to be chosen for the task, "ME! I WILL GO! PICK ME! CHOOSE ME! SEND ME!"
God should not have to coax, cajole or bribe us into proclaiming hope to our neighbors and to the nations. We ought to be like finely-tuned racehorses in the Triple Crown, foaming and anxious to run, stopped from all-out pursuit of His kingdom only by the closed gate in front of us and the reins of the Holy Spirit holding us back until the time He has chosen to fire the pistol and let us spring into action.
The cost of surrendering everything we own, our dreams for ourselves and even our physical life is mere pennies in comparison with the bottomless treasure of eternity.
