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Faith

A price never paid

In Luke chapter 14, Jesus makes it clear to his followers that there is a high price to be paid by anyone who wants to follow Jesus. Family relationships will be strained. The follower will have to carry a cross. Like someone who builds a tower, the follower will first have to sit down and count the cost. Like a king thinking of going to war, the follower will have to work out whether he or she has enough soldiers to win the battle. The follower will need to be prepared to give up everything.

If the cost of discipleship is so high, why is it that hardly anyone seems to pay it? Most Christians inhabit a version of Christianity which has no costs, other than the possible inconvenience of attending a church service on a Sunday morning when they could be sleeping in – and many Christians do not even pay that price very often. Faith has become institutionalised and ritualised, and it has become something which gets added on to life, rather than something which replaces your life.

Maybe this explains why Christianity has largely stalled in the West. We have reinvented the faith so that living dangerously has been replaced by living in absolute security; the conflict promised by Jesus has been replaced by bland pleasantries; the self-sacrificing required of a follower has been re-interpreted as easy-to-do ritualistic obligations; and the sharpened sword has been replaced by a blunt plastic dagger. As Crocodile Dundee once said, “That’s not a knife…”