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Faith

An exclusive faith

“No one who looks back after putting his hand to the plow is fit for the Kingdom of God,” according to Jesus in Luke chapter 9. It is a very exclusive statement for him to make; you are either fully in or fully out, when it comes to the Kingdom of God. Either you keep living your life like everyone else until it gets away from you and you die, or you choose to die now to the life that everyone else is living so that you can have a new kind of life which lasts forever.

The problem is that we like the security of what we are used to. We like to keep doing the things we have always done. We like to control those bits of our life which we know how to control, and we like to avoid thinking about the things which we can’t control. Our preference would be to add Jesus and the Kingdom of God onto what we’re already doing in life, rather than having to give up everything that we are doing and starting something new, which we cannot control, with no safety net.

Unfortunately, Jesus does not promise that the Kingdom of God will be as comfortable and agreeable as our old way of life. In fact, he says, “Foxes have holes, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The Kingdom of God is very exclusive, not in the sense of wealthy people wanting to keep the riff-raff out, but in the sense of not letting anyone in unless they are prepared to abandon everything else in life.