April 5

“Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” —LUKE 14:33

There is a cost to being a Christian. We talk about salvation being ‘free’ and this is wonderfully true – but only in a limited sense. It’s free in that we cannot purchase it or earn it. The Apostle Paul says it this way: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). In this regard, the Christian life is absolutely free – and if it were to be anything other than that we would be without hope.

But the Christian life being free does not mean that it is cheap or that it is obtainable by little more than nodding one’s head in God’s direction. Jesus never talked about salvation as free. He talked about it being costly. It involves full surrender to Christ as Lord and complete dependence on Christ as our Life. This means that in every aspect of our lives, we bring Christ in. We surrender all we are and all we have to Him, allowing Him complete reign in our lives.

Becoming a Christian is a deliberate, willful response to the work of God in our hearts, but trusting Him is not something we do once as we did when we first accepted Christ as Saviour. It is to be the basic disposition of our hearts towards Him from here on in. It is living day by day with love for Him, trust in Him, dependence on Him and obedience to Him. He is Lord of our life.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:11, “For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body.” And Jesus said, “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27). The Christian life is one of dying to ourselves, to our own desires and agendas, and by the Holy Spirit, living anew with the will of God first and foremost in our lives, so that the life of Christ may be revealed in us.

PRAYER: Dear Heavenly Father, Thank You for your wonderful gift of salvation. I pray that the life of Christ will be revealed in me and that in everything I do, He will be seen as Lord of my life.

TO REFLECT UPON: Is there anything holding me back from completely surrendering my life to Christ?