The cost of not being a disciple is so much greater than any cost discipleship itself might entail. Non-discipleship makes us nothing. Discipleship makes us something.
There are so many ways we unintentionally invalidate the truth of the gospel. Simply by going through the church calendar, we can see that Christians are asked to "give instead of receive" at Christmas, to "give up" something for Lent, to "take up their cross" at Easter and to "burn with fire" at Pentecost. We can make our faith sound about as appealing as castor oil - strong medicine that we know must be good for us because it tastes so bad.
The truth, of course, is that Christianity is about the good news, that Jesus' message was about life abundant and that spiritual fulfillment will enrich our lives beyond all measure. Yet how many sermons have been preached to a worn and weary congregation about "the cost of discipleship?" We intimate that people must be prepared to give up something of great value in order to "buy into" the Christian system of salvation, as if it were some kind of heavenly time-share condominium.
This whole notion of the "cost of discipleship" needs re-examination. The lifestyle that costs us our very lives is, in fact, non-discipleship - as Jesus pointed out when he revealed that "those who want to save their life will lose it" (Luke 9:24).
It is in becoming Christ's disciples that we receive the greatest gift possible: complete forgiveness, utter salvation, total redemption. Furthermore, in Paul's words, we receive this unmerited justification "by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 3:24). Note that "as a gift": We do not lose anything of value in becoming disciples; we gain our very lives.
What blinds most people to the heart of the good news of the gospel today is a growing conviction that the concept of human sinfulness is some kind of an ancient, outmoded, simplistic myth. Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, we continue to believe that somehow our flaws are only temporary shortcomings and our downfalls are still salvageable through the use of bootstraps or some simple attitude adjustment. Neo-orthodoxy, which flowered after the Holocaust and Hiroshima carnage of World War II, no longer wafts an alluring enough scent to the souls of today's spiritual searchers. We seem to crave a sweet, almost cloying, nostrum - one that will so mask our own soul's scent that we can detect no trace of rottenness.
As of this writing the #1 book on The New York Times' self-help best seller list is Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), a commentary on the 1200-page A Course in Miracles. Many of your people may be reading it right now. They need to know that if ever there were a blatant example of Richard Niebuhr's indictment - "the story of how a God without wrath brings men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross" - it is this book.
Williamson believes that her "Christic" teaching will appeal to "people who seek Jesus, but without the judgment, the guilt, the punitive doctrine." In other words, Williamson has very little use for things like sin (she says we are "by nature psychologically incapable of sin," only being "mistaken"), or like "forgiveness" (which implies judging when we are all already "Christ-mind" or God).
The first problem with simple philosophical monisms like this one is that everything becomes God. Or as Williamson puts it, "There's actually no place where God stops and you start, and no place where you stop and I start...at our core, we are...actually the same being...there's only one of us here"). New Agers like Williamson are not the only ones saying this. Faith teachers like Robert Tilton, Kenneth Copeland, Kenneth E. Hagin and Earl Paulk espouse similar "little gods," teaching that is based on the syllogism:
dogs have puppies
cats have kittens
God has little gods
As descendants of the first "little gods" Adam and Eve, we must claim our godhood, they say; we must believe in ourself. Or in the words of Kenneth Copeland: "You don't have a god in you. You are one." The Bible is the story of Lucifer wanting to be "like the Most High," and falling (Isaiah 14:14); or earlier, Adam and Eve being seduced by the promise ("you shall be as gods"), and falling.
The second problem with simple monisms is that there is no place for salvation. If everything is of God, why the need for salvation? There is certainly no need or place here for a cross. Historian Christopher Lasch formulates the problem memorably: "The New Age replacements for religion soothe the conscience instead of rubbing it the wrong way" (Thanks to Ralph Blair's Review: A Quarterly of Evangelicals Concerned 16 [Spring 1992]).
Jesus' words at the temple undoubtedly rubbed all his listeners' souls so briskly that it made their hair stand on end. Like a bunch of bristly, electrified cats they puffed up in panic and demanded that Jesus give them some kind of early warning system in hopes that they might seek some protection. But the warning signals Jesus described were hardly comforting. Being warned that the Day of the Lord is upon you appears to be about as useful as were all those 1950s civil defense drills children went through at school. Hoping to escape the judgment of God on that Day is about as likely as surviving a nuclear bomb attack by hiding under your grade-school desk.
The terrors, torments and trials Jesus listed appeared to be nothing less than a litany of death. Yet at the conclusion of these predicted disasters - personal and global - Jesus surprised his audience by announcing that "not a hair on your head will perish" (v.18) for "by your endurance you will gain your souls" (v.19). Only those who practice non-discipleship, who live their lives for their own sakes, need fear the Day of the Lord. For them, physically surviving these political and natural upheavals is of no consequence. Their souls remain in mortal danger as long as they continue to invest only in things and keep trying to buy God's pardon with gifts. The cost of non-discipleship, ultimately, is death.
The modern media provide us with innumerable portraits of non-discipleship. In the best-selling weekly magazine in America, TV Guide, there are listed a dozen ways per page to misdirect the focus of your life. Here are some suggestions to get your own creative juices going:
One cost of non-discipleship is a "Saturday Night Live" life. You might be Saturday Night live, but the other six days of the week you're dead - working and waiting for the weekends.
What about a "Love Connection" life made up of an endless daisy chain of "love connections" without any lasting connections?
Another is a "Jeopardy" life - where knowledge will save you. But the world is filled with information even while it is dying for wisdom.
Another is a "Who's the Boss?" life, seeking to control others in order to control your own life.