A large crowd was following Jesus. He turned around and said to them, “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple. And if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.

Luke 14: 25-27

This evening we sat with some friends, one of which is a self-described spiritual person. She openly talks about the mixture of spiritual lines of thinking she embraces, but is being a spiritual person enough?

In the passage above, Jesus is addressing the large crowds following him and challenging them with what it costs to be a disciple. Following Jesus means that He is not just near the top of your priority list, He sits alone at the top. When He states that “if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple,” it’s a serious statement requiring total commitment.

In Biblical Christianity, Jesus can’t be lumped together with other religions or religious people even though many are attempting to do that very thing today. According to my computer’s dictionary, the term syncretism is “the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.”

“Attempted amalgamation” just doesn’t hold up. Some will bolt at the idea of Jesus’ claim of exclusivity. Faithful believers of other religions will ultimately refuse Jesus’ challenge.

I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ quote –

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him [that is, Christ]: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse…. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

C.S. Lewis – Mere Chrstiantiy