Missio Dei Communities

This past Sunday we learned that Lon can string words together to create something beautifully convicting.  I wanted to post Lon's manuscript for your reading pleasure.

The Cost of the Cross

This idea of the self crucified is demanding, disturbing, and troublesome.  It is a paradox, an enigma and a mystery.  And frankly it is unattractive.  I have my rights.  I have desires, goals, and needs.  I amthe captain of my ship and the architect of my destiny.  Have you heard those lines and have you considered their implication?  Don't they seem very natural and reasonable?  And how does one "carry his  cross?" 

Seriously, does hating your parents, your brother and sister, and your own life sound reasonable?

The harsh reality is that often scriptural truth is couched in enigma, paradox, and a great reversal.  We discover the way up is down. To be first is to go last. The master is a servant.  The creator becomes creature. The Great Priest is the sacrifice.  The Lion is the Lamb. The Judge is the accused.   Bondage is freedom.  Death is life.  God becomes man.  And the examples go on and on.  The kingdom of God is upside down, backwards, and inside out.  It is illogical to the natural man, it is counter-intuitive, unreasonable, and foolishness to those who are perishing but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  (1 Corinthians 1:18) (see also 1 Corinthians 2:14)       

This really is seriously strange.

Speaking of which, in his book, Crazy Love, Francis Chan says "Having faith often means doing what others see as crazy.  Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers." Now that makes you stop and think.  It's like Noah building a huge ship on a dry plain, or Abraham placing his only son, Isaac, on an alter.  Chan's premise (although understated and oversimplified) is just that love IS sacrifice. 

And that brings us right back to the cross.  In Roman times the sight of a man carrying the cross beam to the place of his execution was not an uncommon sight.  We know that the Romans executed by crucifixion 10,000 individuals on a single day.  What goes through a condemned man's mind as he takes that last walk?  Is he wondering what will happen to his business?  Is he worried about who will need his goat and donkey?  Or would he upset that his 401k is in the toilet?

Not even.  WHAT WOULD YOU BE THINKING ABOUT IF YOU WERE CARRYING YOUR CROSS?  When we come to the close of our life will we then start to consider what's next, after our death?  To carry your cross strongly suggests the immanence of death and the culmination of our life.  To live in the severity of that awareness is to come to the end of yourself which surely realigns our priorities.  You've heard that Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew this day was his last.  His intriguing response  was that he would plant a tree.  I'm guessing he had long been carrying his cross. Paul says in Philippians 1:21: "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain."  He had faced death many times and was confidently ready, but more than that he knew what to do while waiting.  And now, here again is that beautiful paraphrase of Paul you've heard from me and others by Jim Elliot: "He is no fool  to give up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot loose."  It sounds almost too obvious if not exactly simple. Do you suppose this means: "get thee to a nunnery?"  Are we to sell the house, give away the car and donate all our money to the poor?  Some have and others still do.  For Luther, Paul, and Jim Elliot not even their very lives were too dear to be "considered loss compared to the surpassing greatness of  knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord."  (Paul's words from Philippians 3:8) The meaning of cross-bearing is surely provocative and I am convinced of this one thing...that this is the central and inescapable fact of discipleship.  I do not know if Jim Elliot meant to refer to dieing.  If not, then what?  I think what he meant was that WE ARE ALL "DEAD MEN WALKING."

Weren't we relieved after reading in the Luke 18:18 passage, where Christ tells the rich young ruler to sell everything, that the admonition was not literally directed at everyone?  Until, that is, we read in  Luke 14:27: anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple, or in 33: In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.  And again in Luke 9:24, whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. And in Luke 5:28: and Levi got up, left everything and followed him, or Luke 18:28-30: Peter said to him, "We have left all we had to follow you." And of course the story we just encountered   in Luke 19 where Zachaeus offers up half of all he has and then four times the refund of what he took  dishonestly.  The cost is our very lives and everything else besides.  We are not looking to literally end our lives or necessarily to get rid of all that we have, but instead to consider everything mortal and temporal as if already lost to us in order to invest in a forever world.  By worldly standards this is absurd. The meaning of the cross is the end of your life.  It is no longer going to mean "have it your way."  You are finally out from under the unbearable burden of having it your way.  I beg you, please don't  waste your life trying to discover why you can't bear the burden of having it your way. 

For too many centuries the church has compromised the fundamental doctrine of discipleship for an easy believism that has been termed cheap grace.  This means to split apart something the Bible teaches as being inseparable.  That is to imagine that you can know Jesus but not follow him.  You can have faith separate from obedience.  You can accept the gift of justification without the need of sanctification.  You can be free of the penalty of sin while remaining under the power of sin. You can be a Christian without becoming a disciple.  (Weren't there really just 12 disciples?)  You can experience Christ as Savior without acknowledging him as Lord.  It goes a bit like this: Jesus you can have control of the living room, kitchen, and dinning room of my life, but the bedroom, closet and the internet are off limits and are mine to do with as I choose.  This devious doctrine of dichotomy developed in a garden long ago when Adam and Eve wanted a hybrid theology, one that would accommodate God's will to their own. 

One Biblical illustration highlights the consequences.  For four hundred years the children of Israel remained in physical, spiritual, cultural, and economic bondage to the Egyptians.  Then God heard their cry, sent Moses, and brought them out of slavery.  This he did so that he could take them to a place of desolation and bareness.  A place of little water and no food where they could wander around in circles for forty years until an entire generation had perished.  WAS THAT THE PLAN?  What happened to a land flowing with milk and honey?  I'll tell you what happened—idolatry happened.  It turned out that it was easier to get Israel out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the Israelites.  They just couldn't make the leap of faith that God required to take them into the Promised Land.  And they wondered in the wilderness.

Chip Ingram has a wonderful way of characterizing Paul's admonition in Romans 12:1 as going all in.  Placing all of your poker chips on the table because faith in Christ is an all or nothing proposition.  There is no half way with Jesus.  If you want to take hold of the Promised Land, you're going to have to let go of Egypt.  You just can't add Jesus to a temporal world view.   When you want both what you get is wilderness.  What you are being asked to give up is precisely ashes, dust and soot (or you could say wood, hay, and stubble).  What you get is emeralds, sapphires, rubies, diamonds, silver, and gold.  And this is a woefully inadequate way to describe what's at stake.

What Jesus is saying in Luke 14:26 and following is that this is the greatest bargain and opportunity of your life.  More than just questioning the cost, Jesus is showing us how to pay it. The principle isn't what is the cost, but rather here's how you go about it and here is what comes of it.  We are familiar with the book: The Cost of Discipleship, but if we did this Biblically we would also have a book called "The Cost of Non-discipleship."  You see the cost of not taking up your cross is far higher.  What is offered to us is worth so much more than what it is going to cost.  The real question is never how can we afford to make such a sacrifice, but how could we ever consider not.  Satan's ploy is to get us to focus on how grim the cost is rather than for us to focus on how grim our condition is already.  And left to our own devices it's all downhill from here.  If you want to succeed in discipleship it has to be the most important thing in your life.

 I see so often the wreckage of Christian lives gone aground on the rocks of our own diligent efforts (and, that is religion) or by the proud mantra—I did it my way (and yes, that's irreligion).  Here's what that ship looks like—there's no compass, no rudder, and you're in the middle of the "perfect storm." And then we wonder why our culture is not seeing Christ in us through attitudes and actions that defy explanation and then drives them to ask the reason why, drawing them into the supernatural kingdom.

 The difficulty in all of this is that we think to resolve this problem we must re-align our priorities, make adjustments to our activities and interests.  Listen to more Mark Driscoll sermons, read better books or change churches.  We think we need to be less self centered, less selfish or self motivated.  This is like pursuing a macrobiotic diet or an intense exercise regimen to re-grow the arm you lost in a car accident.  It just won't work.  It is really about perspective.  You see selflessness and selfishness still have the same root.  Our ordinary outlook views all of life through our own eyes.  We see our world in terms of how it relates to us and affects us.  In the picture before our eyes we are always in the foreground trying to figure out how well we fit into the picture and what will it do to us, or provide for us. Put another way we have a me-first vantage point.  This is the definition of our fallen sinful state.  You see, "sin is the claim to the right to myself—and therefore the claim to my right to my view of things." (Oz Guinness) From which we get "be all you can be," or "you deserve a break today,"  or "I just want what's coming to me," "or what's in it for me?" etc.  The picture has you large in the foreground seeing life through the lens of your hurts and needs, your desires and goals.  This will always warp your view of the picture (I like to call it THE BIG PICTURE) of what is real, and true, and beyond the limits of our own perspective.  

 What is called for here is an exchange.  We need to get "the me" out of the foreground of our perspective and replace it with Jesus.  When he is looming large in the foreground of our vision and we draw closer and closer to him it's like the view through a camera's macro lens.  Jesus is in clear crisp focus and whatever else is beyond that might distract or disillusion or derail our lives become fuzzy and blurred.  All we see is Jesus and what had before held us captive falls away like cataract lenses falling from our eyes.  Then Jesus is BIG and we are little. We see with spiritual eyes what had never before been available to us, and it just feels like the great issues of our lives have become trivial.  We discover we have simply forgotten all about ourselves.  Is it possible that it is not all about me?  Who would have guessed?  You see it's not about self denial or selflessness, it's about death to self and the self crucified.  What a difference that makes.  And, lest you think you arrive at this place by great effort, by treatments, pills, or thinking happy thoughts.  This is not self help.  This is transplant surgery.  This is a new heart.  And you are going to "die" on the table.  That's the cost and it's is the only way to get you out of yourself.  Weird, huh?

Now it makes sense to look at the parallel passage found in Matt. 11:28-30 which means the same thing as the very demanding words in Luke 14:  "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."  I have come to believe that the cross is not only the symbol of Christ's own sacrifice, suffering, submission and offer of salvation, but it is also the source, motivation and the power for transfer andexchange of our own sinful, fallen identity for the new identity of the Christ life within us which then  transforms every notion, tendency, passion and false self that was our original condition.  While it is too clear that this is not the typical condition of the church today it was always meant to be the "normal Christian life," and the only way of followership.  And please don't dismiss bearing your cross as simply tolerating a demanding boss, or the sacrifice of increasing the amount of your monetary giving, or the very real suffering of the loss of a job, etc.  Those are very real trials, but the test of fully following Jesus is far more crucial when things are going well and we think we've got it all together.

We must become as Jesus is so that we can do as Jesus did!   It is not enough that Jesus is  prominent in our lives, he must become preeminent!  You see with Jesus it's all or nothing. I hope, with me, that your prayer will be...

                                  ...Lord save me from myself.