Day 4131 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Proverbs 4:7 NIV

considers the cost

Because, well, nothing in life is free as rather everything costs someone something, even things given unto us without a cost which we need to pay. For even then, say someone gives you a gift without any strings or stipulations, even if this person is someone you will never ever see again, they literally just walk up to you on the street and hand you something for free and walk away, even then do we not have a price to pay? Even then are we not indebted in some way? Even then has not the sudden, entirely surprising gain of this new-to-us something brought with it a cost of finding room for it, appreciation of it?

Is not being grateful a cost as it does cost us at least the effort of emotion?

Are our emotions free? What about our time, our interest, our attention and effort? How can these things be free whenever we could give them to something other than whatever we do? Have we always given them unto the best things we could have chosen to? Or is this not what we know of regret, of shame, sorrow perhaps?

Have not our lives been lived all over the proverbial map as we’ve had within them so many varied priorities and thus differed pursuits all chosen seeking some reward of which we thought, hoped, perhaps truly believed would make it worth the journey taken in either walking or waiting?

Are not both costs?

And yet doesn’t He ask we do both? Take up crosses and follow Him whilst also sometimes sitting still and waiting with eyes torn toward the sky seeking a sign of His coming back to let us leave? Is that promise free? We hear around here all the time of the freedom of His great grace as, well, yeah, it is given us freely as He chooses to do so. So too with such apparent gains as our free will which has allowed us to do all we’ve done up to now.

Are they both really free though?

Let’s take His free gift of grace for example. Does it really cost nobody nothing? How can it not cost Him something who deserves to be wrathful, vengeful, angry, perhaps even hateful at this point? Honestly, should not God hate us in response to all the times inside our lives that we’ve made it well clear we weren’t the biggest fans of Him? Is this not exactly what we do each and every time we give in to sin? It’s missing a chance to do right, to thus live righteously.

Sinning is letting the darkness keep winning despite His call that we walk in the light as He is the Light, a request made in response to a promise gave in that all that’s done in the dark will be brought to light but that, upon that day, many will find such a happening happening by surprise as they then find the entire sum of their lives turned asunder just as the tables He turned the same.

And since we’re told that all have sinned and fallen short, a collective cost that accumulated unto His being lifted high upon that cross that helped Him die, we’ve thus too incurred the same wrath so long as we refuse to consider said cost of that cross and turn from the way of life we’d lived that insisted Him there.

Thus grace is a very costly thing in that it cost Christ his life, God his due recompense, and all of us the necessity of changing our lives and seeking to live them correctly for once.

Or what about free will? Is that something truly void of cost or consequence? Again, just the other day we discussed regret and how it’s something we should at the very least consider making friends with. And why was that? Because it helps us see those times that we’ve fallen short and thus sinned in so doing. And the misery it leaves in our realizing we have, well, it encourages us to make whatever changes may be needed so as to hopefully avoid the same misery going forward.

So then does doing as we please, which is a definite byproduct of the gift of free will, does it really then hold no cost whatever to ever consider?

What about salvation, the entire point of everything from free grace to the free will which, when used incorrectly, then must rely upon the grace given? Is not salvation but the most supreme form of forgiveness? And indeed, does this not harken back to the whole point we made with grace costing God the justice He deserves in having watched us live so unjustly as we have?

And true, we’re told that such salvation as that which we’ve all been offered as was offered freely in the free gift of grace given in place of where grace was already gave, and that to overcome the sins on top of sins that we’ve chosen to commit inside our lives and how we’ve all misused free will within the lot of it, the lot of them, it is a gift of God and not then given based upon works or merits.

Meaning then that salvation is truly accomplished in the mere act of believing in the finished work of Jesus.

But then again, does that belief truly cost us nothing?

And if it does, well, then what can it be worth?

I watched a video last night of this young man who’d been delivered from homosexuality. And his passion for such a testimony was amazing to see, truly more on fire than many I’ve seen recently. But in this video the point he was making is that our faith needs to cost us something. Not that it should, which it should, but that it needs to, that, in truth, we need it to.

Why?

Because if it doesn’t then how can we know what it does?

How can we know what it is? How can it be anything at all really if it doesn’t change anything, do anything, cost anything?

Indeed, if such gifts as life is, as faith is, as hope should be in every hope we can’t see, a hope which thus asks that we believe, if these cost us nothing then what have we to give them? And if we haven’t to give them anything then how can they mean anything?

Do you see what I’m saying?

It’s that in the Scriptures, the Gospels specifically, there’s a lot of talk and truth aimed unto what all we’re meant to lose. Jesus talks time and again of the cost of following Him. He tells them that they will have trouble here, that they’ll be delivered over to those who hate them because they know Him. He instructs the one man to go and sell all he has and give to the poor and then, when he’s finally nothing left to be let remain in the way of the following part, to then come and follow Him.

There’s even that part in which He’s talking with His disciples and they bring up this rather quick list of everything they’d left or lost or simply stopped looking for in order to follow Him.

“Peter answered him, ‘We have left everything to follow you! What then will there be for us?’” Matthew 19:27

Ah yes, that age-old worry as to what’s in it for me.

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.” Luke 18:29-30

I’m reminded here of Job who famously lost everything within a single afternoon. We’re talking family, his farm, even the mercy of his friends who came along to find him suffering in misery only to sit there and argue with him.

What happened after God had so allowed such misery to come upon him?

Well, “after Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before.” Job 42:10

But that’s just it. How can we expect to receive a double portion of what we’d had before or, as Jesus puts it, many times as much if not because we’ve lost something, left something behind, let something go?

Indeed, what can even Heaven mean and the promise that in Him we’ve the chance to go and make there our home if we’ve not left behind the commonest of all ideas and expectations in this life in this place which has so very many convinced that their home is this place, is this life?

But how can we do this if we’re always comfortable? How can we ever be inspired to move so long as we find doing so of little necessity? Again, how can the gift of salvation and it pointing toward the promise of eternal life in Heaven mean anything at all when our lives are still focused on all we have within them?

How can our faith mean anything if our faith costs us nothing?

And, well, how can we even begin to measure how much it might one day matter if we don’t at first sit down and do as asked in Luke 14:28?

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?”

But you see, there’s the problem. It’s that we’ve come upon this idea of faith in which it’s not something to be built. Instead we see it as something to have. Because, well, we just know to see basically everything like that. Everything in life has devolved into only a matter of our having it, holding it, knowing it, keeping it. And so I guess it was just inevitable that faith would eventually be seen the same. As merely one more thing that we could find and then have and hold and keep real close once we did wherever we had.

But friends, faith not only doesn’t work like that but it can’t work like that.

Because, again, if it costs us nothing then it’ll eventually prove to mean nothing too.

And, well, that simply cannot ever be the case as within this faith what we find is that Jesus literally came on this earth and laid down His life for our to have the gift of forgiveness and the freedom it’s meant to become for us.

Freedom from what?

Everything of which we need the forgiveness!

You see, that’s another glaring discrepancy that we’ve all but determined to keep alive and well within our understanding of faith. It’s that His forgiveness is something so endless that we can afford to basically take it for granted. Paul takes on this very issue within the opening of Romans 6.

“What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.”

And yet there we find the answer and the gift.

It’s that no, salvation, whilst a gift given us, it’s one that demands something of us (namely a new life, thus one lived in place of the old one), from us given in return. And that simply because all gifts really do. Again, whenever given a gift, should we not feel at least obliged to pretend we appreciate it? And is not such gratitude, if even forced and faked as sometimes happens to sadly be the case, is this not a cost? How much less should our appreciation and gratitude be given to the Savior who die in our stead?

Yes, said given was given in grace and thus freely from Him who’d decided to give it, grace defining it as a free gift as, well, His very Word says that salvation is not of works lest any man should boast. No, He chose to offer us salvation, forgiveness, the freedom accomplished in our having received the both.

But again, thus enters in Paul’s letter to Rome.

Having been given grace, should we continue to do that which demanded it given? No way! Rather we’re, if we do truly believe in the fullness of the Gospel and all that it means, we’re then those who’ve apparently agreed to do as asked and have in fact taken up our crosses and are, at present and as we speak, following Him.

Is that a free thing to do?

Yeah.

Does it cost us nothing to do it?

Not at all.

Rather, in truth, it should cost us everything.

In fact I’ve spent the better part of the last several days walking back through many of the changes I’ve made to life over the years. And honestly, there are entirely too many to recount right now. But suffice to say that I am indeed very little of who I was once. Just in terms of physicality, I was thinking about this the other day, I am literally today just about half the human I used to be as I used to weigh somewhere in the vicinity of 330 or so and have managed to change my life in such ways in which today I weight about 180.

Not quite half but as close as I feel it safe, healthy, reasonable to go.

Because I feel better. Indeed, what hit me was that I’m roughly half the person but twice the man, and that because of the strength I’ve found that was hidden inside me all that time that I lived that life that I’ve now left behind.

And I couldn’t be more grateful, so much so that I still get up every single day and delight to do something that I know will help me continue to get better, stronger, healthier.

All accomplished in my losing of something. Something such as the time given to exercising or the love affair I used to have with junk food. I have truly denied myself things I used to adore for so long now that I literally cannot remember the last I had any of it. Just last night my dad joked about how much I love chocolate. I did as a kid but haven’t had any at all in maybe a decade.

I truly don’t know how long it’s been, so long though that I have forgotten.

And what’s amazing is that I don’t want it anymore. At all.

Wonder if we could do the same with sin?

Well, yeah. Why? Wisdom. The more we grow in Christ, as is only accomplished in changing our lives, the more we’ll come to see the many dumb things we’ve done for the stupidity they always were. And those feelings of guilt and regret and remorse, they’ll become the horse we ride to what is in every way a better life.

A life we can only find whenever we’ve agreed to let the old life go.

Thus the cost.

It’s everything. This faith should cost us everything. Because it should mean so much to us that we’re willing to give away everything just to know more of it. It should mean enough to us that we do take time to sit with the cost, to consider what all it takes and what all it’s taken already.

We should have at least some working list of the work He’s doing in us!

Because, well, if we don’t, then how can we say He is?

It’s like this verse for example. How can we know we’re getting wisdom if we’re not able to see any ways in which we’re living wiser? How can we contend that we’re deepening our understanding of anything if our understanding of something has us still standing in the same place we were both yesterday and ten years ago?

How can we say that in Him we have come to grow, and thus He too in us, if our lives are no different than before?

Friends, that cross is a cost and it should cost us everything we were before we heard of the story of the glory which played out upon it.

For if it doesn’t, then how can we claim it means anything at all?

“Though it cost all you have.”

Because, well, sometimes some things are just worth it.

Again, just like that rich man that came to Jesus and asked what he was missing. He clearly did so because he felt that something was missing! And what did Jesus respond to him by saying? “’One thing you lack,’ he said. ‘Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.’”

Said because, as the opening of that verse mentions, “Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

Yet in His love for this man Jesus asked of him to go and get rid of all he had. He pointed this man to the cost of being His follower. A cost that again Peter mentioned in that passage referenced above. A cost Job knew too in that, being a believer, he found that his faith was in a God that allowed him to be tested up to the point of death itself.

Because God reserves the right to measure our lives at whatever time He may choose and that by doing whatever He determines to do.

Wisdom’s beginning is found, as the Word tells us, in the fear of God. And too that knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. And here we’re told to get wisdom and, though it cost us everything we have, to get understanding too.

And indeed, the fear of God should inspire us to lose what should be becoming now that way of life we USED to live. That person we USED to be. All those plans and priorities we USED to have.

This faith should cost us something.

Because nothing is free.

Much less such things as wisdom, understanding, hope, peace, purpose, meaning. All of these should all be things that mean so much to us that everything else means nothing.

But can we say that? Or are we perhaps still just wise enough unto the ways of this world that we still wrestle with the widely held contemplation that faith is foolishness?

Friends, my point is that we’ll never get anywhere so long as we think that everywhere we could ever go is entirely simple to get to. And that’s because, take Heaven for example, do we really think He’s going to open those gates should we reach them only at best halfheartedly hoping He would?

No. And that’s because He literally gave everything for us to have the chance to call that hope our home.

How then can we give it anything less?

Not that He asks us to earn our entry as neither does He nor could we. But He does ask that we remember not the former things but rather go and sell everything and, having done so, come and follow Him.

What does it cost to follow Him?

I contend the same as is said here of understanding:

All we have.

But until we’re willing to give Him that much, well, don’t think we should expect Him to mean that much.

And I’m just not able to understand how He would ever be pleased with that being the measure of our belief.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold