The Cost of (Non) Discipleship

Everyone talks about the cost of following Jesus. Nobody talks about the cost of not following him. Both are real. Here's what I believe about sides actually look like

We talk a lot about the cost of Discipleship.
Jesus talked about it too. Deny yourself. take up your cross. Leave your nets. Sell what you have.Follow me.

The cost is real. Nobody who reads the Gospels honestly can pretend otherwise.
But there's what doesn't get said enough:
There is also a cost of non-discipleship.

Not following Jesus costs you something too. And if you're going to make an honest decision - Jesus actually wants you to make an honest decision - you need to know both sides.

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What following Jesus costs

Let's not be dishonest about this. Discipleship is costly.
It costs your comfort. following Jesus will take you places you wouldn't choose for yourself - into difficult relationships, uncomfortable conversation, inconvenient generoisty.

It costs your control, You don't get to be the ultimate authority of your own life anymore. Your money, your time, your ambitions - all of it gets submitted to someone else's direction.
It costs your reputation. In. some contexts, in some families, in some friend group - naming Jesus asLord will cost you something socially.

It costs your independence. The private, self-directed, self-constructed life has to go.
These are real costs. Jesus never pretended they weren't.

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What not following Jesus costs.

But not following him costs something too.

It costs you peace. The kind of deep, settled, unshakeable peace that Jesus described - "not as the world gives"- you can't fint it anywhere else. Not in achievement, not in relationships, not in money, not in the relentless pursuit of a life that feels meaningful. People spend entire lifetimes chasing it. Most of us never arrive.

It costs you reall freedom. We think not following Jesus means freedom - on one to answer to, no obligation, no rules. But that's not freedom. That's just a different master. Appetite is a master Fear is a master. The person who thinks they're free bird because they follow no one is usually the most enslaved person in the room.

It costs you formation. Without an apprenticeship under Jesus - without the friction of his teaching pressing against your actual life - you don't stop being shaped. You just get shaped by the culture instead. And the culture is not forming you into someone more loving, more patient, more generous, more whole. It's forming you into someone more anxious, more self-focused, more hollow.

It costs you community. Real, deep, convenat community - the kind where people know you fully ans stay anyway - is extraordinarily rara outside the body of Christ. Not impossible. But rare.

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You can weigh both

Jesus actually invites this. Before you build a tower, count the cost. Before you go to war, calculate whether you can win. He used these illustrations himself. He wanted people to think before they committed.
That's real love. Not pressure. Not guilt. Not manipulation.

So go on, compare them honestly. The cost of following. The cost of not following. Lay them both out and look at them.

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But here's what you'll find

The cost of discipleship is reall - but it produces something. The friction, the surrencer, the dying to self - these aren't pointless suffering. They're the process by which a human being becomes more fully human. More loving. More free. More alive.

Think about anything worth having. Real love costs. It requires vulnerability, commitment, showing up even when you don't feel like it. We know this. We accept it for human relationships. We spend years pursuing someone we want to spend our life with - and we don't resent the cost because we udnerstand what we're getting.

Good things cost. That's not a bug. That's the nature of value

The cost of non-discipleship produces nothing. The anxiety stays. The emptiness stays. The search for meaning continues, one season to the next, one relationship to the next - and the peace never quite arrives.

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As John Mark Comer puts it in Practicing the Way:

"So rather than ask, how much am I willing to surrender to Jesus? Ask yourself honestly - how joyful, peaceful and free do I want to be?

That's the real question.

Not how much will this cost me. But how much do I want what He's actually offering.

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The decision is yours

Jesus will not force you. He never has. But he does invite you - clearly, honestly, with full disclosure of what it requires.
You have free will. This is by design. Love that isn't freely chosen isn't love.

So choose. But choose with your eyes open. Count both costs. And then decide.