When Obedience Costs Something

When Obedience Costs Something

I have noticed that we tend to speak of obedience as though it is straightforward. Hear the instruction, follow it, done. But the obedience that costs nothing is not really the obedience the gospel is talking about.

If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. (Luke 9:23)

Daily. Not once, not in a crisis, not in the one grand moment of surrender. Daily. Which suggests that the life of following Jesus is made of ordinary, repeated, unremarkable choices to put something down — and keep walking.

Sometimes it is a comfort we cling to. Sometimes it is a relationship that has become an anchor of the wrong kind. Sometimes it is a version of ourselves we have carefully constructed that feels safer than the real one. Whatever it is, the invitation is the same: lay it down, take the cross, come.

This is hard to write about without sounding abstract, because the thing that costs something is always specific. You know what it is. It is the thing that came to mind as you read this.

I do not think Jesus asks us to abandon these things lightly, or with indifference to the grief of it. But I do think the invitation is real, and the hands that hold us through the laying down are steady.

What is the cross you are carrying today? And what would it mean to carry it willingly rather than resentfully?