Sally’s asking, “How do you count the cost when you don’t know what’s coming in your life?” The answer is that Jesus requires, upfront, a commitment to the highest possible cost. I don’t want you to sign up naively and be surprised later when the cost is very high.” That’s the gist of the situation she’s pointing out, and that’s right. So, he says, “Be sure to count the cost before you sign up for discipleship with Jesus because it’s costly. “Authentic discipleship may exact from you the highest price relationally and the highest price physically.” It’s like going to war and realizing you don’t have enough soldiers to win the battle and defeat the enemy. Jesus is calling people to follow him in discipleship, and then he’s reminding them that it’s like building a tower that you don’t want to leave half-finished because you don’t have enough commitment or enough resources to finish it. That’s what I’m going to do - just remind ourselves of the situation. To give Jesus’s answer, let’s back up two verses and go forward three verses. The problem here is that the verses which Sally refers to, Luke 14:28–30, are sandwiched between the very verses that answer her question. Within the call to be his disciple how do we discern the cost and count that cost in each of our individual callings? Most significantly, how do we count the cost in advance when we do not know what cost will be exacted from us in the end?” “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for the podcast! Christ tells us to forsake everything to be his disciple right after saying this: ‘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? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.”’ That is Luke 14:28–30. Which of course raises the big question: How? How do we calculate the cost? A listener named Sally asks it. And Jesus warns us to count the cost first, before we follow him.
Welcome back to a new week on the Ask Pastor John podcast, answering your tough theological and ethical questions from the Bible. "Dollars & Chains: Hip-Hop's Long-Standing Relationship With Jewelry".
In an interview with Rolling Stone, West explains complications he had creating the revised Jesus piece by repeating a discussion he had with Jacob. West's personal Jesus piece created by Jacob cost $25,000, was the size of a man's palm and had clear diamonds for Jesus' crown of thorns, yellow and light-brown diamonds as Jesus' blond hair, aquamarines for blue eyes and small rubies for the tears of blood on his face. In 2004, Kanye West partnered with Jacob Arabo, a jeweler that outfitted many hip-hop artists with their jewelry. West wearing multiple Jesus pieces in 2009.