Owning Discipleship
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done. – Matthew 16:24-27, NIV
“The difference between Jesus and the Pharisees lies in their conception of priorities in the will of God: for the Pharisees the first priority is obedience to regulations, for Jesus a mission to people. A healer must get his hands dirty.” – R. T. France
“Commitment to Jesus must be without reservation. Such is the importance Jesus himself attached to his own person and mission.” – D. A. Carson
Saturday, my family helped a family who needed someone to ‘dog sit’. In reality, that translated into we took their dog for the day. We already knew the dog and there was mutual affection so, all in all things went well. However, having a dog to watch for a day is far different than ownership of a dog. We went to a park with the dog, everyone assumed we owned the dog, of course. They told us how beautiful the dog was and how wonderful the dog was with people. We had the dog in our home. We had the dog in our yard, and cleaned up its messes from time to time. We played with the dog, fed the dog, even gave the dog a partial bath (that’s a tale for another time). In general, for those few hours on Saturday, we ‘had’ a dog. But not really. The dog wasn’t ours, even if we were doing dog owner like things. If you came to my house after the dog left, you might still think we owned a dog. There was dog slobber on a ball and the smell of dog in the air. Dog hair on the furniture and our clothing, even in our van. But, we didn’t and don’t own a dog. That’s my point. We had lot of ‘dog owner’ qualities and characteristics for a few hours but, we weren’t real dog owners. In my mind, this is rather illustrative of some people’s relationship with Jesus. Trust me, I know there are MANY breakdowns in this illustration but, I want to lean into some of the ways this does work. First, there are people who are friendly toward Jesus and might even like Him. They are happy to put up with some minor inconveniences to be around Him. They are happy to have others think of them as a “Jesus person.” They may have some of the marks of following Jesus. They are good at looking the part of a Jesus follower for a few hours each week, but in actuality, they don’t want any part in true discipleship. They don’t want to have Jesus own them. Here-in lies the danger of being around Jesus but not hearing or heeding His call to genuine discipleship. We can end up with all the trappings of Jesus while missing out on the life-giving relationship that Jesus died and rose again to impart. Maybe this describes someone you know and helps you to think about how to pray for and talk to them. Maybe this describes you and it’s time for some serious soul searching. Whatever the case, please don’t be a person who is happy to look like a disciple without genuinely being one.