Everyone Loves a Good Deal
I would wager that most of the men and women who read my emails are people who love a good deal. You love a good bargain, a good sale, you guys are the shoppers that don’t forget to also check the clearance rack before you go to check-out, and when you see that “You saved $xx.xx” on the bottom of your receipt, you get that small glow of satisfaction of a job well done.
After I wrote my newsletter last week, I was hit with a quadruple whammy of heartbreak. This is my second January in a row that has been marked by death, though I pray that it will be my last. The Lord was good and faithful through it, in some special ways too, as he always is. But nevertheless, I’ve been pondering over the lessons God has been trying to teach me through this season.
Namely, there is a cost and there is a price to be paid if you want to fully appreciate the value of something. And I want to go into two directions with this thought, because I believe there are two lessons here, both of them interwoven.
You will never know the full value of something
until you have paid full price for it.
Look back in your mind’s eye through your closet, what was the last expensive thing you bought that you paid full price for? No discounts, no sales, full price. When you brought it to the counter to pay for it, your heart rate picked up a touch as you saw the amount flash on the screen and you swiped your card through the card reader, all the while quietly telling yourself, “it’s worth it, it’s worth it,” as the money was taken out of your account.
I can imagine that you didn’t immediately bring that item home and throw it on the back floor of your closet, never to be looked at again. You took it gingerly out of the bag, and you treated it with care, because you know the full value of what you bought.
Lesson 1 - The Cost of Discipleship
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.
Matthew 13:44–46, ESV
There are two pericopes in the book of Matthew that get preached on frequently, they are very well known to us. But what some of us don’t know is that there’s actually two ways to interpret this passage.
The first is this: true Christian discipleship has to cost you something.
Jesus tells us to pick up our crosses to follow him, he tells us that if we want to save our lives, we have to lose our lives for his sake. (Matt 16:24-26). The Bible is replete with many of these verses along this theme. We cannot understand the value of the Kingdom without paying something for it.
And we pay in a few ways, it runs the gamut. We pay with the crucifixion of our flesh, putting to death our fleshly desires in pursuit of spiritual ones. We pay with self-control instead of self-gratification. We sometimes pay with public humiliation, looking like a fool. We pay with trials and suffering. We pay with “why Lord?”s, and the special among us will also pay with their very own lives.
But we know and understand that God doesn’t waste our tears, and that while this world will suffer meaninglessly because of their own rebellion—the children of God will never suffer meaninglessly. God will use trials and suffering for his own glory, to shape us and mold us, and in the end to reward us with our own holy crowns of glory.
Every time we pay the price for something in the Kingdom, the end product is our own sanctification and consecration—just another piece of ourselves that we break off and give to the Lord, as he completes his good works in us.
“Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more” (Luke 12:48, ESV). I believe that to those of us whom God has entrusted with much, God will come one day and ask us to count the price and decide whether he is enough.
Dear reader, he is enough.
But he’s also doing this because there’s more coming for us, and he wants to strengthen us so that we can withstand the greater weight of responsibility and burden that he will entrust us with.
There were these ridiculous reels floating through my Instagram a while back of people shaking their fiddle leaf fig trees. The videos got pretty creative as happens with the internet, but the original intent behind this idea is that these trees actually need wind and stress to grow stronger and more resilient. Otherwise they stay spindly and weak.
“The Lord knows how to educate you up to such a point that you can endure in years to come what you could not endure today; just as today He may make you to stand firm under a burden, which, ten years ago, would have crushed you into the dust.” (1)
Charles Spurgeon
If the Kingdom of God is that fine pearl that we have discovered, are we willing to pay the full price for our pursuit of it? Is the pearl worth the cost? And not just a one-time price, it’s a price we have to pay over and over again until God takes us home to glory.
John Wimber has a great quote, “I don’t know how many times you have to buy this pearl, but my suspicion is that you have to pay the payments for the rest of your life. After all, it is a pearl of great price. Worth everything you have.”
Yes. Yes it is.
This is a lesson I’m learning now, and will learn again, but each time I know that 2 Corinthians 3:18 comes true, I am being transformed into his image of glory from one degree to another. Up and up and up.
Lesson 2
And this brings me to the second direction that my thought process went to this past week. And that’s the second interpretation of Matthew 13. We read the verse and we think that the man who found the field is us, we think that the merchant who found the pearl represents us.
But what if he’s actually somebody else?
What if this man is Jesus Christ, who found the treasure of us? What if that pearl was us, and Jesus Christ went and sold all that HE had to purchase that pearl of great price?
Because that price was great indeed. Jesus did not use a discount, he didn’t get it on clearance, he didn’t buy it the easy way. He purchased us with great, immeasurable cost. He purchased us with his own life, his own blood, at great price to himself so that he could have relationship with us.
And this brings me to my last point,
we will never fully understand the full value of our salvation, our reconciliation with God, because we never had to pay full price for it.
Jesus was the one who paid full price, so that we would never have to. We will never have to taste the wrath of God, the final judgement, or the final death, because Jesus Christ tasted and endured it for us, so that we could accept his immeasurable gift for the wonderful, unimaginable price of…free.
Footnotes & Commentary
(1) This quote was taken from JHP’s fantastic devotional, on page 66.
I can’t write this post without giving credit where credit is due, and that’s to John Wimber’s sermon titled “the Cost of Commitment” on the “Pearl of Great Price” that I listened to a few years back. It’s stuck with me ever since, but unfortunately Vineyard’s put it behind a paywall. Nevertheless, if you want to pay up for it, I would recommend it.
One of the things that stuck with me was actually a comment I saw on the Youtube link (the link been taken down since then), a man wrote that him and his wife were there in the audience the day that Wimber preached that sermon. And Wimber did an altar call, but many people did not respond, because this was a hard sermon. The Kingdom of God is costly. But him and his wife did answer, Wimber prayed over them, and in the year following they proceeded to lose their house, their livelihoods, and basically had their whole world overturned. But this man testified that it was best decision him and his wife had ever made, because they saw the fruit of the Kingdom that came as a result, and that in the end made it all worth it. May we count the costs dear friends, and consider them loss for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ.
Amen!
