When I turned 30, my wife took me skydiving. It wasn’t a surprise, but I was just as excited and nervous about it as we drove to Fayetteville, NC to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. It was an incredible rush and I highly recommend it! Consider this your warning, you will want to do it again…and again.
Because it wasn’t a surprise, I had plenty of time to think about what I was about to do. I had time to run through every scenario. Now you have to understand that when I look at a lamp, I don’t see just a lamp. I see the wire, the filament in the light bulb, the contacts, the switch, how the electricity completes its circuit, all the parts that make up a lamp. When I ride a roller coaster I think about the track, the chains, the linkages, the moving parts that make the coaster work…needless to say there was some serious thought given to jumping out of a plane tethered to a guy wearing a parachute with a carabiner and harness. I counted the cost.
I loved sky diving…and I think I could get addicted to it if I had the time and money to put into it. It is a rush to fall through the clouds, and experience the stillness when your chute opens and you float to the ground. The risk was high, but the reward was great!
There is a passage in Luke 14, where Jesus finds himself being followed by a large crowd. The people loved the miracles, the free food, and the run ins with the religious elite. He was a rock star. So what Jesus says to this crowd had to have been a bit of a shock. He tells them that in order to truly follow him they would have to carry a cross. As he so frequently did, Jesus used an object that people would be able to relate to in order to drive home a point. The problem is the object was an instrument of death. Not a quick and painless death, but a humiliating, grueling, and painful death. Can you imagine being in that crowd? You would have probably been there when Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. You would have seen him free a woman from a disability she had suffered with for 18 years. You would have heard his teachings and seen him challenge the Pharisees. Now, after all of that, he was challenging you…getting to the heart of the matter, your heart, and he was saying that you don’t follow him for blessings; for feel good messages or food. No, in order to follow him you have to take a risk. You have to die to yourself, which is the greatest risk of all.
I wonder sometimes if we haven’t made following Christ safe and in so doing, we take away the true power of the Gospel. We want Jesus’ things, but don’t necessary want to really follow him. Because of this, people aren’t drawn to the wonder of following Jesus because his follower’s lives don’t look any different than theirs. We are all living to make ourselves more comfortable tomorrow than we are today. What if we stopped managing risk and started risking everything for the Gospel? Its not gambling, that is done when you don’t know what the outcome will be, rather its investing. We know the promises of God and His word, we just have to trust in them! It won’t be easy, it won’t be comfortable, but Jesus is worth it.
In his book, Forgotten God, Francis Chan shares a story about a group of believers who were captured and imprisoned by terrorists. Needless to say this wasn’t pleasant, but as the group drew near to God they began to count their sufferings as blessings…arguing at one point as to who would be killed for Christ first. They were eventually freed, but they had experienced God in a way that only those who suffer for Christ, who risk it all for Him, can know. Chan writes that he was surprised when the prisoners shared how they would like to be back in captivity because they hadn’t been able to fellowship with God like they had when they were in their prison cell. His presence was all they desired. Not his blessings, just Him. I believe that if we believed this, if we sought this, we would be willing to take any risk for Christ and in so doing, “shine like stars in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.” Our crosses would become blessings because we would experience Jesus in a way like never before.
There is great risk in following Jesus. He calls us to come and die. He calls us to lay down our rights. He calls us to live for eternity. As Chan said, “Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.” Our lives should be so dramatically different that the world can’t help but take notice. They do notice when someone lives radically for Christ, when someone takes risks for His kingdom based on their faith in who Jesus is. Sometimes they applaud, most of they time they mock, but they always notice. In the risk of following Christ, there is the greatest reward of all…intimate fellowship with the savior.
Skydiving gives you an addicting rush, the risk is well worth it. An intimate walk with the creator of the universe is worth, well…everything.
