If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters,
and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.
We are called to begin our path of discipleship by understanding that it is necessary to resolve to put nothing ahead of Jesus, not possessions, not family, not even our own lives. If we don't realize at the beginning that it will be necessary to make sacrifices in order to choose Jesus we may find ourselves unwilling to do so when the need arises. We may never need to choose between family and following the Lord. But we need to commit virtually to choosing Jesus over anything else, however good. Without such a commitment we risk being like those who began a work but failed to finish because they didn't properly assess what would be required when they began.
Which of you wishing to construct a tower
does not first sit down and calculate the cost
to see if there is enough for its completion?
We ought to understand from the beginning that we are being called to a path that is, humanly speaking, impossible. If Jesus hadn't paid our debt there could be no tower allowing us access to the heavens. Our human resources are far to small to oppose another king with twenty thousand troops, unless, as with Gideon, God himself chooses to give victory to our smaller force.
Jesus is not asking us to prepare simply so that we will be ready to grit our teeth and apply all of our own strength to what is asked of us. Rather, he is suggesting that from the beginning we ought to prepare to encounter circumstances which seem humanly impossible, but immediately rely on him to get us through. Without this resolution it will be all too easy to choose our possessions, whose value to us is something we have proven through experience, over the untried and apparently unlikely possibility of success in doing what he commands.
Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another;
for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
We aren't being called to anything as abstract as a construction project or as violent as a battle between earthly powers. We need to remember that the project is actually all about love. But in remembering this we should also keep in mind that we do not yet love as we ought to love, and that the kind of love being asked of us is not sentimental, but superhuman. If we treat love lightly we will fail when everything is on the line. But if we remember the advice of Jesus and turn to him in our need we will experience his own victory in our lives.
Relient K - For The Moments I Feel Faint
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