Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Larry Crabb
Read between
May 1, 2017 - February 22, 2018
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we prepare to walk the always narrowing road to always deepening life by becoming aware of what it is we want to kill and how it is we long to live.
But the desire to live for God and to die to sin, though alive in our regenerate souls, often remains only weakly felt if felt at all.
Only those who become aware of a compelling desire to know God at any cost to their pride and comfort and who discern within themselves a hatred for whatever obscures the reality of His loving presence will find themselves on the narrow road to life.
you will experience no sustaining power to walk the narrow road into relational life until you discover your desire to love Me as your only source of real life and until you perceive that you do hate all that comes between us and are therefore willing to turn away from all of it.
The Threefold Cost of Discipleship
Cost 1: Hate Everyone but Jesus
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26 ESV)
I depend on you for what I most need
Family and friends can meaningfully love us but they can never provide the life we need to love like Jesus.
Only when we reject everyone but Jesus as the ultimate source of living water for our thirsty souls will we be free to see others as opportunities to put Jesus on display, no matter how they relate to us.
Cost 2: Deny Yourself and Carry Your Cross
Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:27 ESV)
“If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” (9:23 ESV)
“LET HIM DENY HIMSELF”
As finite image-bearers we long to fill our empty souls with the satisfaction that comes only when we learn to relate to each other with divine love.
the satisfaction God gives His followers is never more than a taste, a very good taste to be sure, but only a taste of the banquet yet to come
Our choice then is this: wait for the complete satisfaction we trust is coming, or experience now what convincingly seems to be complete satisfaction.
Rom. 8:23
“BEAR HIS OWN CROSS
(Rom. 8:17 ESV)?
“rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet. 4:13 ESV)?
Relational suffering, the suffering of unrequited love
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me” (Luke 13:34).
Cost 3: Relinquish the Title to Everything
You Own
Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:33 ESV)
“Dear friends, I warn you as ‘temporary residents and foreigners’ to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against your very souls” (1 Pet. 2:11).
“I pray that they”—all His disciples—“will all be one, just as you and I are one” (John 17:21).
Relational sin
Relational holiness
