capacity

capacity- the legal ability to engage in certain acts.

we'll get back to that eventually, but to start with i would like to turn your attention to Luke 14:25-26. this passage was pointed out to me tonight at our sunday night worship service, and hopefully i can do it justice.

in this passage we find a crowd gathered around jesus, and him saying something rather troubling. jesus tells all those around him that they cannot follow him unless they "hate" everyone they hold dear, including their own life. i know that it isn't just me that is bothered by jesus telling that us that. what does that mean? how could jesus say that about the ones i love? now when luke wrote "hate", jesus didn't literally mean hate. it was just a rabbinic and semetic saying of the jews...kind of like us saying we want to kill someone when we are mad at them. we are just exagerating to get the point accross, because we don't really want to "kill" them. aside from that i think there is more to this passage than what we read on surface level.

to start with lets look at the phrase "if anyone comes to me." the original greek is "ei tis erketai pros mei" which is translated literally as "if any come towards me". the word "pros" is the same word used in john's gospel to describe the "word's" relationship with "God", only in john it is translated "with" ("the word was 'with' God"). so if we want to contemporize what jesus is really saying we could say, "if anyone wants to be with me (or go where i go) then you must hate everything dear to you in comparison to how you feel about me or he cannot be my disciple." and that word "cannot" brings me to my next point.

the word "cannot" is the greek verb "dunamai" which is literally translate "he is not able". most of the time when we read this verse we associate the word "cannot" with desire. we read ths verse like it says, "he doesn't really want to be my disciple", but in all actuallity we should read it, "he is not capable of being my disciple." desire is to want to do something, and capacity is to have the "legal ability" to do something. there is a huge difference there! what jesus says at the end of verse 26 has nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with capacity!

what jesus is telling us in this verse is that if we want to be with him and go where he goes, then everything we love here must fail in comparision to how much we love christ, otherwise...we are completely incapable of being his disciple. we all have things that we need to drop, leave behind, and never look back at, because if we don't then it hinders our compacity to even be a disciple of christ. following christ is not cheap, it's not easy, and it doesn't fix everything in your life. what following christ is, is costly, tough, hard, but, most importantly, it is everything we have wanted and more.

so what's hindering your capacity?...