The Cost - Packer

"Anyone of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be My disciple."

If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life [i.e., put them all decisively second in his esteem], he cannot be My disciple.  And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it...or what king, going to war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand. Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he send a delegation and asks conditions of peace.  Luke 14:26-32

The repentance that Christ requires of His people consists in a settled refusal to set any limit to the claims which He may make on their lives.

Our Lord knew--who better?--how costly it is to retain this refusal, and let Him have His way with them all the time, and therefore He wished them to face out and think through the implications of discipleship before committing themselves.

He did not desire to make disciples under false pretenses. He had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following Him actually demanded of them.

In our own presentation of Christ's gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ, and make the sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness.

In common  honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness, in one sense, will cost everything, or else our evangelizing becomes a sort of confidence trick.

And where there is no clear knowledge, and hence no realistic recognition of the real claims that Christ makes, there can be no repentance, and therefore no salvation. Such is the evangelistic message that we are sent to make known.

 -- J. I. Packer,  Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God


P.S. When God calls a man, He calls him to die.....
Dietrich Bonhoffer


...A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything...)
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets