Cheap Disciples

 "If you want to be My disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else - your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters - yes, even your own life. Otherwise you cannot be My disciple. And if you do not carry your own cross and follow Me, you cannot be My disciple." Luke 14:26-27......"We have a cheap Christianity that makes no demands for total allegiance to Christ our Lord. Our Lord could have had a multitude of cheap disciples, but always made discipleship costly and often lost His crowd."

....Vance Havner

I once had a little book titled "The Difficult Sayings Of Jesus." I don't remember if the above verses were in it, but they certainly are among His most difficult. After all, how do we reconcile His words telling us to hate those who would naturally be the ones we most love? It doesn't make sense to our flesh, so it requires discernment to see what He's saying here. He is not telling us to literally hate them as we understand the word. He is telling us that to follow Him will mean that we will make choices in our devotion that make others feel like we do hate them as we choose our devotion to Him over devotion to them. We do love them, but our first love is given to Him. And that love will cost, especially in our relationships with others. No matter how precious another may be to us, He is more precious. The choice will cause pain, to them, and more, to us. It is all part of the cross carrying He calls us to.

Frankly, this truth is not much found in a great deal of the message and invitation of the church unto the lost and unconverted. We like to emphasize the benefits, the "perks" of coming to Him. Peace, abundance, joy, heaven....especially heaven on earth, and all as we would define them. The message of the cross doesn't find much room there. It's out of sync with the offer. Mark Buchanan said that we present Jesus as "The Caterer King." He provides....richly and lavishly. Our part is to simply enjoy. He paid the price, we reap the benefits. There is no place for, or thought of the cross as we sit at His table and feast on His gifts. What we end up with are a horde of cheap disciples who know nothing of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called "the cost of discipleship." Bonhoeffer called that message one of "cheap grace." His grace that cost Him everything to give but costs us nothing to live in.

Here in the west, in America, we have specialized in cheap grace and cheap discipleship. King David said that he would not offer His God "worship that costs me nothing." We invite people to do so each week in so many of our fellowships, but I believe that message will not much longer survive. I believe the churches that center their message to "consumers of His blessings," will have little if anything to offer when life suddenly seems to have so little of those to offer. When personal comfort begins to be threatened in our culture, which it already has, professors of Jesus Christ will need to have a strength that is not of this world. A strength too few know of. A strength that only comes by way of the cross, the tomb, and the resurrection. A strength that is forged in the fire. A strength that comes when iron enters into our souls.

I believe a pruning of the church has already begun. Cheap disciples will be and are the first to be pruned. Not because He wishes to be rid of them but because they have no wish to be anything more. Every fellowship must allow His Spirit to search its heart in order to know just what their message has been and continues to be; centered on the desires of the flesh or upon Christ and His cross. Have we produced and are we producing cheap disciples or true ones. Which is our church/ Which are we?

Blessings,

Pastor O