Jesus never softened His terms for discipleship when a crowd was listening. He consistently said the same thing — forsake all, take up your cross, follow Me. It would be easy to explain this away as hyperbole, as Eastern exaggeration meant to make a rhetorical point. But the people who read it most carefully and took it most seriously have generally concluded otherwise. There is a cost to following Jesus that cannot be negotiated down to a comfortable minimum. What we are asked to forsake will be different for each of us — but we are each asked to forsake something real, something that would otherwise compete with Jesus for first place.

Francis Chan was one of the most recognizable names in American evangelical Christianity in the 2000s. He had founded Cornerstone Community Church in Simi Valley, California in 1994, growing it to six thousand members. His book Crazy Love became a bestseller, selling nearly two million copies. His speaking schedule was full. His ministry was thriving. And then he began to feel that the very success of what he had built was competing with the mission it was supposed to serve. He stepped down from Cornerstone in 2010, took no salary, donated his book royalties — over two million dollars — to organizations fighting sex trafficking, and moved his family to San Francisco to start house churches of fifteen to twenty people each. Nine years later, in 2019, he felt called again — this time to Hong Kong, the poorest district of the city, where his late mother had once done ministry in the 1950s. He moved his entire extended family — daughters, sons-in-law, grandchildren — to Sham Shui Po, one of Hong Kong's most impoverished neighborhoods, to plant churches among the ultra-poor. "I want to fish in a pond where no one is fishing," he said. Their visas were eventually denied in 2021 and they were forced to leave — but three house churches were already planted and meeting. Chan said that when the visa was denied, his whole family was "at perfect peace at a time when most people would be freaked out." That peace is not the peace of someone who has lost everything. It is the peace of someone who has forsaken all and found that what remained was more than enough.

Prayer: Lord Jesus, show us what we are holding that we need to forsake. Give us the courage not to negotiate Your call down to something more manageable. And grant us the peace that comes only to those who have stopped clinging. Amen.