The Cost of non-Discipleship

The story about the tower-builder, told by Jesus and recorded by Luke, is given a perceptive reading by Andy Crouch in an article called Learning from Fools, over at a newly-discovered (by me) site called Culture Makers. The parable is usually used by preachers to urge their congregations to "consider the cost of discipleship." That never rang true to me (not to say, mind you, that discipleship is a costless matter), and neither does it to Crouch.

Make no mistake. The tower builder and the king are not models of discipleship. When does Jesus ever speak of discipleship as if it were a construction project, carefully calculated and accounted for, or a war, in which we marshal our own forces and find them adequate for the battle? Biblical faith is the abandonment of our tower building, the surrender of our ambitions to foolishly fight our way to security. These two men are at risk of becoming fools in the full biblical sense—blinded by their prosperity and power to the most basic form of common sense, not to mention the ultimate reality of their dependence on God.

Crouch's reading is quietly brilliant. I can't help another lengthy excerpt:

So Jesus invites the crowds following him to sit down and count the cost—not of discipleship, but of non-discipleship. Non-discipleship means believing that we will be able to complete our insane Babel of self-provision; non-discipleship means blindly rushing into battle as enemies of God, having vastly overestimated our ability to prevail. Discipleship is the process of soberly counting our assets and coming to terms with their insufficiency to carry us through a life lived apart from God. It is not discipleship, in the end, that is costly—it is folly.

This is really a fine article and though I have quoted it rather extensively, it should be read from start to finish. Biblical encouragement at its best.