The Wrong Question

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At some point, most of us have done the math on faith.

Maybe it happened early — sitting in a church pew as a kid, listening to a list of things you were supposed to stop doing. Maybe it happened later, after a season of life that left you quietly disillusioned, wondering if the whole thing was worth the effort you'd put into it. Or maybe it's happening right now, somewhere in the back of your mind, as you weigh what it would actually cost you to go all in — to be the kind of person who brings their whole self, not just their Sunday morning self, to God and to the people around them.

The question almost always sounds the same: What do I get out of this?

It's a fair question. It's an honest question. And in almost every other area of life, it's exactly the right question to ask. We are wired, especially in our culture, to weigh cost against benefit, investment against return. We do it with our money, our time, our relationships, our careers. It makes sense that we'd do it with our faith too.

But here's what's worth sitting with: Jesus never seemed bothered by the question. In fact, he answered it directly.

Let’s take a moment to read Mark 10:28-30:

Then Peter spoke up, “We have left everything to follow you!”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life.

REFLECT

When Peter — never one to hold back — essentially looked at Jesus and said, "We've given up everything for you. So what do we get?" Jesus didn't scold him for asking. He didn't call the question selfish or small. He answered it. Honestly, generously, and with a kind of math that didn't quite add up by normal standards.

You'll receive a hundredfold, Jesus said. Houses, family, fields. Now, in this age. Not just later. Not just in some distant, post-death reward. Now.

And then, almost as an aside, he added: with persecutions.

Which is either the strangest fine print in history, or it's one of the most honest things Jesus ever said. Because what he was describing wasn't a transaction — it wasn't a spiritual investment portfolio where you put in your devotion and get a comfortable return. What he was describing was a life so deeply woven into community, so rooted in the Kingdom, so given over to something bigger than yourself, that the very fabric of your existence is transformed. You gain a hundredfold — and it costs you everything. Both things are true at the same time.

That's the tension the early church lived inside of. Peter and John walked into the temple knowing full well what had happened to Jesus there. They knew the risks. They had done the math. And they went anyway — not because the cost was small, but because what they had experienced was so undeniably real that the cost no longer felt like the most important number in the equation. Devotion to the Kingdom will cost you everything, and what you get in return is the redemption of all things. That's not a bad trade. But it's also not the kind of trade you can fully appreciate from the outside. You have to taste it. You have to experience a community that actually lives this way — generously, sacrificially, together across difference — before the math starts to make sense.

And that's the thing about the wrong question. It's not wrong because it's selfish. It's wrong because it's too small. "What do I get out of this?" assumes that what's being offered is a product, a service, a transaction you can evaluate from a safe distance. But the Kingdom of God isn't a product. It's a way of life. And the only way to know whether it's worth it is to step into it — to bring your whole self, hold it loosely, and find out what happens when you stop asking what you get and start asking what you could become.

Peter found out. So did the woman at the well, who walked into town carrying a life she wasn't proud of and left telling everyone she met about a man who knew her whole story and stayed anyway. So did Zacchaeus, who climbed a tree just to catch a glimpse of Jesus and came down a completely different person. So did the man at the Beautiful Gate, who spent his whole life begging at the entrance to a temple he could never enter — until one ordinary afternoon he found himself walking and leaping and praising God through the very doors that had always been closed to him. None of them got what they expected. All of them got something far better.

The question was never really what do I get out of this? The better question — the one that opens everything up — is simply: what could we become together?

RESPOND

Take a moment to process what God might be leading you to do in light of what you read.

• Be honest with yourself: what has your internal "cost-benefit analysis" of faith looked like? What have you felt like you were giving up, and what have you felt like you were receiving in return?

• What would it look like in your daily life to shift from asking "what do I get out of this?" to asking "what could we become together?" What's one concrete thing that question would change for you?

REST

Take a moment to rest in God’s presence and consider one thing you can take away from your time reading, then close your devotional experience by praying:

Lord, forgive us for shrinking the Kingdom down to a transaction — for approaching you with a calculator instead of an open hand. Thank you for answering our honest questions with even more honesty, and for never promising us a life of comfort when you were offering us something so much better. Teach us to hold loosely the things we've been clutching tightly, and to trust that what we find on the other side of surrender is worth far more than what we gave up to get there. May we stop asking the wrong question long enough to discover what we could become together. Amen.