Counting the Cost (Revisited)

Today's Scripture

Romans 8:17-18 — "And if children, then heirs — heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us."

1 Peter 4:12-13 — "Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice insofar as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed."

Luke 14:28 — "For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?"

The Big Idea

God is not interested in making you a nicer version of yourself. He intends to make you perfect — fully remade, blazing with his own life — and that kind of construction project hurts. Today Lewis tells the truth most sales pitches for Christianity leave out: the transformation costs everything. But the One doing the work has already paid more than he asks, and he will not quit halfway.

Reflection

Hatched or go bad

Lewis takes his title from Jesus' own warning. Luke 14:28 — "For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?" Jesus actively discouraged fans who signed up without reading the terms. So Lewis spells the terms out, with an image you will never unsee:

"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Notice what the image rules out: staying put. An egg has no neutral setting. Leave it alone long enough and it does not remain a nice, ordinary egg — it rots. Lewis is demolishing the most popular plan in the world: be decent, stay comfortable, change nothing. There is no such option. Every one of us is in motion, either toward life or toward decay.

This is uncomfortable news for a certain kind of churchgoer — the one who made peace with God years ago and has been coasting ever since. Faith that stops growing does not hold steady, any more than an unhatched egg holds steady. Something is always happening under the shell.

And from inside the shell, hatching looks like catastrophe. Everything familiar — the smooth walls, the warmth, the safety — cracks. The chick cannot see the sky it was made for. It only knows its world is breaking. If your life is cracking open right now, today's chapter was written for you.

He meant what he said

Why must the process go so deep? Because of what God is actually building. Jesus said something in the Sermon on the Mount that most of us quietly file under "exaggeration": Matthew 5:48 — "You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Lewis refuses to file it away:

"The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Read that carefully. The command is not a bar you must somehow jump; it is a blueprint God himself intends to complete. Lewis imagines Christ stating his terms plainly:

"'Make no mistake,' He says, 'if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that.'" — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

This explains so much of the Christian life that otherwise feels confusing. You came to God about one problem — the anger, maybe, or the fear. He fixed the leak you asked about, and then started tearing out walls you considered perfectly fine. As a boy, Lewis says, he often hid a toothache from his mother. Not because she could not help — but because he knew that if he went to her for the aspirin, she would also take him to the dentist in the morning. The dentist would not stop at the one aching tooth; he would start poking at all of them. God is like that dentist. Give him an inch and he takes the whole mouth — because he loves you too much to settle for patchwork.

When the drilling comes, it has a voice. Lewis wrote elsewhere:

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." — C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Pain is not proof that God has abandoned the project. Often it is the sound of the project continuing. 1 Peter 4:12-13 says exactly this: "do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you." Fire, in Peter's image, is not the wrecking ball. It is the refinery.

The grammar of the gospel: death, then life

Still, let us not soften it. The cost is real, and the Bible's word for it is death. Matthew 16:24-25 — "If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who wrote those words into a book and then sealed them with his life in a Nazi prison camp — compressed the call into one sentence:

"When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

That sounds like the worst recruiting slogan ever written. But look at the strange arithmetic Jesus builds into it: lose your life and you will find it. Death, in God's hands, is never the last move; it is the planting. John 12:24 — "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." A seed in a jar stays safe and stays alone. A seed in the dark, split open underground, becomes a harvest.

The old saints knew this rhythm by heart. Samuel Rutherford, a Scottish pastor writing from exile in the 1600s, told a suffering friend:

"Grace grows best in winter." — Samuel Rutherford, Letters of Samuel Rutherford

And A.W. Tozer, three centuries later, said the same thing with a harder edge:

"It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply." — A.W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous

These are not men celebrating pain. They are men who noticed, across centuries, that the deepest people they knew had all been broken open somewhere — and that God had planted something in the crack. Hebrews 12:11 gives the principle: "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it." For the moment... but later. The whole Christian life is learning to live inside that sentence.

What the suffering is for

Here is where Lewis lifts the curtain. The cost is enormous — but look at what is being built:

"If we let Him — for we can prevent Him, if we choose — He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine... The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

The feeblest and filthiest. Not the promising candidates — us, remade until we shine with God's own joy. Paul did the math in Romans 8:17-18: we are "heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." Glorified is the Bible's word for the finished version of you — the creature so radiant that, as Lewis said yesterday, you would be tempted to worship it. Paul does not say the sufferings are small. He says the glory is so large the comparison collapses. 2 Corinthians 4:17 — "For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison."

And notice the one-word foundation under all of it: with him. Suffer with him. Glorified with him. The gospel is not that God shouts instructions down into our pain from a safe distance. He counted the cost of our rescue — and the cost was a cross. Jesus is the grain of wheat who fell into the earth and died so the harvest could include you. He was broken open so that your breaking could become a hatching. That is why Philippians 1:6 can make its promise without flinching: "he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ." The builder does not abandon a house he has already paid for with his blood.

Lewis gathers the whole book into one closing summons:

"Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Hatched or go bad. Planted or alone. Dying daily — into a life that cannot die.

Going Deeper

Take the hardest thing in your life right now and write two short sentences about it. First: "What this is costing me is ______." Be specific; God is not offended by honesty. Second: "What God might be growing through it is ______." You may have to leave the second blank — that is allowed. Then pray Philippians 1:6 over both sentences: "He who began a good work in me will bring it to completion." Keep the paper. Winters end, and Rutherford was right about what grows in them.