Choosing a path

It’s a season of new beginnings. It’s our first Sunday back to two services. Students are back in town. Calendars are filling up. It’s a season of choice-making, of setting priorities, of deciding what matters most.

Deuteronomy makes it sound so easy to choose a path in life. Love the Lord your God, walk in his ways, obey his commandments—and all will be well. God will bless you. Easy, right?

We’d like our lives and our faith to be so straightforward. One path leads to blessing. Another to ruin. It’s clear which is which. And all we have to do is pick the right one.

But in my experience, it doesn’t usually feel so simple. The right path isn’t always so easy to see. Do I forgive? Or protect myself? Do I give generously? Or save for the future? Do I speak up for what’s right? Or stay quiet to keep the peace? Choices like this don’t come with signposts. There’s no neon arrow pointing to “life” in one direction and “death” in the other. More often, the signals are murky. Hard to read. Complicated. Uncertain.

But uncertainty doesn’t get us off the hook. We still have to choose.

Sure, there are some guidelines we can follow. We can ask: Does this choice align with Jesus’s teaching about love, justice, and mercy? Does it serve the vulnerable? Or the powerful? Does it build up? Or tear down? We can pray for wisdom and we can pay attention to how the Spirit moves in our hearts. But the most important decisions we make are almost never straightforward.

And that’s where Jesus meets us today. He doesn’t pretend discipleship is simple or easy. In fact, he makes it sound impossibly hard. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” These are strong words. Words that are hard to hear. Words that it’s so very tempting to ignore.

Jesus says, count the cost before you choose to follow him. Like a builder who makes sure he has the budget to finish a tower. Like a king who does a full inventory of his forces before marching to war. Jesus says that discipleship isn’t a hobby. It’s not a casual add-on to a busy life. It’s not something we do for an hour on a Sunday morning and then forget about. Discipleship calls us to put God above every other loyalty. And Jesus wants us to know that from the start.

The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it starkly: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

If that sounds like a truth too hard to bear, we should remember this: God’s love comes first. Unconditional. Unshakable. There are no prerequisites, no requirements, no hurdles to clear. That love is the starting point. It’s the gift that steadies us when the road gets rough. It’s what gives us the strength to keep walking, even when discipleship feels costly. We don’t earn God’s love by choosing well. We choose well because we’re already loved.

But even setting discipleship aside, life is hard. Loved ones get sick. Jobs vanish. News headlines make us dread what might come tomorrow. Money runs short. These things weigh on us. They drain us of energy. They make us feel unsettled, fragile, uncertain about the future.

And then Jesus tells us that following him will cost us even more. If we choose to stand with the vulnerable and to speak for the voiceless, might we face real risk? The question lingers in the air.

And we’re supposed to call this good news?

It is good news, I think, but not because discipleship is easy. It’s good news because what Jesus promises is worth the cost. It’s good news because if we choose to follow Jesus, we’ll find a strength and a wholeness that will make it all worthwhile. We’ll be like those the psalm speaks of, “like trees planted by streams of water.” If we choose to follow Jesus, we too will have deep roots. We too will be sustained by living water.

The road Jesus asks us to walk is a road he walked himself. He gave up everything. Family ties, possessions, life itself. And he seemed to think it worth the cost.

As we make our to-do lists and prioritize the events on our calendars, we shouldn’t forget that the choice posed by Deuteronomy—the choice posed by Jesus—is always ours to make. It’s never an easy choice. The right path isn’t always clear. And even in those moments when the right path is clear, it’s seldom an easy path to walk. But Jesus calls us—each one of us—to choose life, to take up the cross, and to live. To live fully. Faithfully. Without regrets. And like trees planted by streams of water, to live in a way that will give us strength. Strength to face whatever comes.