I was busy last week, so here we come to the next installment a little late … but seeing as how there were like four parts to the last one, probably good to take a break.
One of the aspects of discipleship as exemplified by Jesus was that He never accepted any excuse for disobedience or not following Him.
Now, some of these scriptures we can take with a certain grain of salt, because there were people who were ready to leave everything and follow Jesus, and Jesus told them to stay in their town (notably the demoniac, who obeyed). In other words, not necessarily a formula of what exactly to do, but the principle of immediate obedience and willingness to do whatever He asks WITHOUT EXCUSE is consistent.
Jesus was the most compassionate man ever to walk this earth, and yet we routinely see Him acting in such a way that we would today interpret as completely insensitive.
The apostles and other writers of the gospels felt it was necessary to include testimony of people who came to Jesus with excuses and then to show how Jesus dealt with those excuses.
The common story repeated in the gospels about Jesus I’ll take from Luke 9: Then He said to another, “Follow Me.” But he said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God.”
And another said, “Lord, I will follow You, but let me first go and bid them farewell who are at my house.”
But Jesus said to him, “No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
First of all, if someone came to me, whose father had just died, and they needed some time to grieve and bury him, I would guess I would say, “Sure, absolutely, take all the time in the world.”
But not Jesus. Jesus said, “Someone else will take care of that stuff, people who are dead already. You focus on preaching the kingdom of God.”
What a jerk! No allowance for grief or how the guy feels or the “necessities” of life. And those people who actually take care of those details, He calls them dead. We can assume all we want as to why Jesus felt the need to be so harsh, but they are assumptions at best.
We are given Jesus’ motivation in clear enough language. We just don’t like it.
Jesus clearly was more interested in the preaching of the kingdom, the complete and immediate answering of that call, than grief or the seemingly important details of life.
Next we have someone whose “heart” is to follow God, but needs to do something first.
Again we get Jesus the jerk. “You can’t look back and follow Me. You’re not fit for the kingdom if you do that.”
Someone really needed to sit Jesus down and explain to Him that you can’t earn salvation or it’s not about works and that as long as they want to “in their heart”, that’s good enough. Maybe His problem was He only read that mean Old Testament with all those rules and the mean God we don’t really believe in anymore.
Or maybe, just maybe, if Jesus continually questioned whether people were “worthy” or “fit” for the kingdom, and His disciples felt the need to repeat those teachings in the gospels, we should be careful not to explain away the words of Jesus, no matter how harsh the language, no matter how uncomfortable to our modern theology it can get.
Maybe, just maybe, Jesus knew what salvation was really about more than we do.
All this guy was going to do was go back home and say goodbye to some people he loved before he followed Jesus.
Jesus essentially says, “Forget following Me AFTER. Follow Me NOW. Or you won’t follow Me at all.”
The gospels make the point that certain disciples immediately followed Jesus. Yes, some of them were first disciples of John the Baptist or had probably heard Jesus’ teaching before being called, but the principle is important. Once the call was clearly made, the response was immediate. They put down their nets, left everything, and followed.
How does this balance out with “counting the cost”? All I can say is that there is a place where you count the cost, and that is good, but there is also an expectation by God that His revelation is immediately responded to. You cannot excuse disobedience with, “I was counting the cost.” You still disobeyed a clear call. God doesn’t make those calls lightly.
Also, you can count the cost while following, and likely will. Who really knows all that they are getting themselves into when they make any decision? There’s only so much “counting the cost” you can do before you just have to make a decision. Whether a marriage or job or something else, you go through several moments along the way where you have to count the cost.
Getting back to the point, though, once we hear the Lord, there is no excuse for disobedience or not following completely. None. The revelation of God is the most precious thing in existence. Treat it as such.
I hear lots of excuses for why people can’t really follow Jesus. Everything to career choices to “my personality” to lifestyle decisions either cause people to reject God completely … or come up with some new doctrine to justify why they can tell God to chill while doing what they want or feel they need to be happy. Of course the latter is just rejecting God, as well.
I believe that the early Church dealt with all this, too, hence why they included very clear stories and testimony and teaching from Jesus about the cost of discipleship and the complete absence of excuse, then wrote them down.
So we could explain them away two thousand years later? I don’t believe so.
Peace.
I think the problem with adding the qualifiers is that not only were these individuals trying to name the terms they were also coming dangerously close to accusing Christ of not caring. “Wait, I have this concern” seems to at least flirt with that. I almost wonder if He would have said “Go take care of ________ and then follow me” if they hadn’t of said anything.
Whatever the case, great post. Thanks for sharing.