Counting the Cost

On Total Devotion and Abounding Love: A Reflection on 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13 & Luke 14:25-3

These passages speak the same truth from opposite directions: Paul reveals love’s overflow as the fruit of costly discipleship; the Lord reveals costly discipleship as the pathway to love’s fullness.

The Lord turns to the crowds following Him and speaks words designed to separate genuine disciples from admirers: “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.” This is not literal hatred. It is the brutal honesty required to see where family bonds have become chains, where love has curdled into enmeshment, where loyalty to clan overrides loyalty to truth. The inner work demanded here is terrifying. Facing the truth that family may have wounded, that allegiance to them might be keeping one small, that genuine love for them requires first becoming free of them. This is the work of acknowledging that the people who shaped also trapped, and choosing liberation even when it feels like betrayal.

The Lord demands calculation before building, assessment before battle. This is the movement from naive enthusiasm to mature commitment. Feelings fluctuate. Childhood wounds surface. Initial fervor fades. Discipleship means choosing the path again after feeling everything—the rage, the disappointment, the exhaustion—and deciding from wholeness rather than suppression. Not bypassing what must be felt, but integrating it and choosing anyway.

Paul prays that love may “increase and abound” among the Thessalonians. This abundance is not cheap sentiment. It is the fruit of having already counted the cost and paid it. Paul knows what he asks. He has been beaten, shipwrecked, rejected by his own people. The love he prays for is tested love, refined love, love that emerges after everything that is not love has been burned away. He prays night and day “exceedingly” that he might “perfect what is lacking” in their faith. Even genuine faith that produces joy remains incomplete. The measure is abundance, not adequacy.

The Lord’s call to carry the cross is not metaphor. It is participation in the universe’s central pattern: death and resurrection, descent and ascent, kenosis and theosis. The cosmos itself undergoes transfiguration through this pattern. Human beings join it by living it personally. When Paul prays for hearts to be “established blameless in holiness,” he asks for cosmic participation—for lives to become aligned with reality’s deepest structure, which is self-giving love. Holiness is not moral achievement. It is reality-conformity. The universe runs on sacrificial love. To be holy is to be woven into that fabric.

The Lord reveals divine love as demanding, not indulgent. God does not want admirers or fans. He wants partners, co-creators, sons and daughters mature enough to share divine life. The call to hate father and mother reveals God’s absolute respect for human freedom: He will not share those He calls with anyone or anything. Not because He is jealous in a petty sense, but because divided loyalty produces divided persons, and He calls toward wholeness.

Paul’s prayer reveals the same truth from the opposite direction. God’s goal is love’s abundance, hearts established in holiness, readiness for Christ’s return. But this abundance comes through the narrow gate the Lord describes. Divine love does not bypass cost. It transfigures cost, makes it redemptive, shows that what appeared as loss was actually purification.

The Lord stands in the tradition of prophets who demanded Israel choose between YHWH and Baal, between covenant faithfulness and cultural conformity. The call to radical discipleship echoes Elijah’s challenge: “How long will you go limping between two opinions?” It recovers the ancient either-or: no one can serve two masters. Paul’s prayer echoes the Temple’s purpose—establishing a people holy to the Lord, set apart, fit for divine presence. What the First Temple represented architecturally (heaven and earth united in one location), Paul prays will be realized personally (heaven and earth united in human hearts made blameless).

The Lord shows the cost. Paul shows the fruit. Together they reveal the pattern: love’s abundance cannot be obtained without counting the cost. Blamelessness in holiness cannot coexist with divided loyalties. The cross one carries—facing what has been denied, integrating what has been rejected, choosing truth over comfort, loving freely rather than from compulsion—is the pathway to the abundance Paul prays for.

Salt that loses its saltiness is discipleship that refuses the difficult work. It wants love’s fruit without the cross’s cost, seeks abundance without sacrifice, desires holiness without facing what is unholy. Such discipleship is worthless precisely because it is counterfeit, performance without transformation. Salt that remains salt—lives that have genuinely counted the cost, faced what needed facing, chosen freely from wholeness rather than compulsion—these become the preserving, flavoring presence Paul envisions. Love abounding. Hearts established. Holiness that is real because it has been tested.

Both passages pose the same question: Will one face the actual cost, or settle for pretending? Will the inner work of becoming free be undertaken, or will unexamined loyalties continue to control? Will discipleship’s genuine requirements be counted and chosen anyway, or will religious enthusiasm be performed while avoiding transformation?

The promise stands on the other side of that cost: love’s abundance, hearts that can actually bear divine presence, lives that participate in what the universe is already doing—dying to rise, descending to ascend, losing life to find it.