We were going through Luke 9:61-62 at church yesterday and in this passage, where Jesus is explaining the cost of following him, He finishes with this exchange: “Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” 62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

This is a really difficult passage to accept, because it seems so demanding. I believe the important message in the three exchanges is that since Jesus is Lord, we don’t dictate the terms of our following to Him, He dictates the terms to us. And that IS demanding. I’d like to follow Jesus….but on my own terms, when it’s convenient, and relatively comfortable for me. That, however, isn’t how it works, and if I’m not ready to accept that then I am not fit for service in the kingdom of God. Of course… NONE of us are. We all fall short of this in some way.

This makes me think of people who see hypocrisy in Christians. For example, we were at dinner a while back and we got into a discussion with the couple next to us, who were not believers, but they were from Tennessee- in the heart of the Bible belt. The woman had mentioned that most Christians don’t live up to their own standards. Now, I grant that we don’t live up to the standards of the Bible. Also, such standards, being part of the Bible, are well-known to others. Perhaps non-believers hear that we profess the Bible’s standards as good and something we should be aiming at, and therefore think that those are things WE set for ourselves. But those standards come from well outside of us. My standards would be much lower, if I were designing them. But since I’ve accepted Jesus, that means I’m at least trying to follow him, and that means accepting the Bible and its standards for human conduct as the thing we are striving for.  

Of course we’re going to fail, since the standard is so high. We can’t hit the target the Bible would have us aim at. It’s too elevated. We can hit it some of the time, but in general, we will fail.  

Contrast that with the standard a non-believer will have. What exactly IS that standard? A non-believer won’t have an exterior standard and those that set their own standards almost by definition can’t fail. When you set your own standards, whatever you do is what you were aiming at. Even if you did fail, who would know? It’s not like there is some external contract someone else can point at to hold you accountable. You basically can’t miss when you have your own standard.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t occasionally objectives that we’d like to live up to, but those can be considered no more than non-obligatory desires- things we like to see, but they aren’t binding on us.  

However, the amount of failed new years resolutions ought to speak to how everyone falls short of even self-prescribed goals.

At the end, I’m certain hypocrisy is basically written in to us. But it’s much more obvious on professing Christians.