Luke 14:33 claims those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.
The God Who made the universe and all it contains…The God Who sustains the universe and everything in it…The God Who is larger than the universe…this God compressed Himself into a human being so that He could communicate His love to us in a way we would understand through both His words and His deeds.
This is the story of God Christianity and the Bible tells.
God as Maker has decided what He wants from His Creation: that is His prerogative after all. What does He want from us?
Our first love and devotion to Him and to His glory on earth as it is in heaven. How can we do this?
By loving nothing more than Him and by making our first priority His will and His ways every minute of our waking hours. This is why God is recorded as saying unless we give up everything we cannot be His disciples.
Unless we are His disciples we cannot be sure we will ever rise from the dead and live with God forever among all those who also loved Him and were His disciples.
Making God and His will our first love and priority does not mean having a religious vocation. None of the original twelve disciples were from the religious class. Nearly all of the friends of God while He lived on earth were people with secular jobs and lives. Only after He left the earth as the resurrected God did He recruit a formerly vocationally religious guy to be one of His chief communicators.
Nevertheless God has called everyone to love Him first and love Him most. How can we do this practically?
It doesn’t mean sell everything and give it to the poor unless we fully surrender ourselves to love and service of Him. Not all of the poor love and serve God.
If we would give up everything of lesser importance than God we would demonstrate such commitment through the priorities of our behavior.
We would wake-up and begin our day with God in prayer and listening to Him through the Scripture. We would then go about our day seeking to perfectly obey all of His commands which are nearly always expressed through words and deeds of kindness and service to others.
A surrendered life to God is mundane; it is daily being with Him and then helping others experience Him through our actions.
God does not demand perfection in us. He is not expecting us to measure up. He never thought that we could live the Christian life nor does He expect that we could actually meet His holy standards. If God thought that we could, God would not have come to earth die for us. But Christ did.
Jenny,
Thanks for the comment. you are absolutely right when it comes to earning our way into heaven, impossible, cant be done, God has done all we need through His work in Jesus our Savior. But once we submit ourselves to His payment we are no longer our own, but have been purchased to become a holy people as He is holy, to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, required to be found faithful upon His return being about the Master’s business having no greater love in our hearts or attitude than God.
coach Mike