Today I was thinking about how a lot of people don’t like God because they don’t feel like they’re good enough to be in a relationship with him. They think he’s already rejected them for whatever reason, “so why bother?” But being in relationship with God is not about being good enough. If any of us were good enough, he wouldn’t have sent Jesus to die in our place– a punishment we were all doomed for as sinners (2 Corinthians 5:21, NLT). A big part of being in relationship with God is choosing your relationship with him over following your own desires and your own plan and your own will for your life. So, the good news is, you don’t have to be “good” to qualify for a relationship with God. The bad news is, a lot of people take their relationship with God for granted.
Something I feel like a lot of people do is, they hear about heaven and hell and they choose to be in relationship with God because they don’t want to go to hell– and this is a reasonable choice to make; nobody who truly understands what hell is should want to go to hell. The problem, though, is that people treat their relationship with God like an insurance policy against going to hell without actually counting the cost of what it takes to be in a relationship with him. They claim Jesus with their tongues, but he is absent from their hearts, and there is certainly no evidence of him in the way they live their lives.
Jesus told his followers the reality of following him: that they would have to give up certain things in their life in order to do so (Matthew 16:24-27). Taking into account what you’d have to give up to follow Jesus is known amongst Christians as “counting the cost” (of following Jesus), and I believe the other side of counting the cost is not just counting the cost of following Jesus, but also counting the cost of NOT following Jesus. Following Jesus requires you to give up your own will and desires in exchange for God’s will for your life, but not following Jesus ends in you losing your life come Judgement Day. Deciding to enter a relationship with God is something to be done with intention. Imagine getting married solely for the benefit of having a guaranteed partner for life, only to go out and cheat on them every night. That’s how it is when we haphazardly follow God without surrendering our sinful ways. (I’m not saying you won’t struggle against sin, but there’s a difference between fighting the urges of sin and willfully living in it.)
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but having faith in Jesus is not about having your cake and eating it, too. So, I think the question people should ask themselves is: would you rather give something up just to gain more in the end, or would you rather keep it now only to lose everything in the end?
“Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang onto your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul?”
Matthew 16:24-27, NLT
