For which of you, wishing to build a farm building, does not first sit down and calculate the cost [to see] whether he has sufficient means to finish it? – Luke 14:28, Amplified Bible (AMP)

Jesus Christ used the illustration of Luke 14:28-30 in the context of counting the cost of becoming His disciple. The illustration of Luke 14:28-30 is also a great guide for helping us understand how best to spend our time as His disciple.

The older we get and the more responsibility we take on, the easier it is to become bogged down with tasks that distract us from God’s work. Some people, when faced with overwhelming to-do lists, actually fall into a state of inaction. They freeze up and do nothing because they are faced with so much to do that they can’t decide what to do next.

A great way to combat this paralysis of analysis is to list out everything you have to do and then count the cost of doing, or not doing, the various items on your list.  Although the process of “counting the cost” can be handled in many different ways, an easy way to do this is to ask this question:

What would hurt the most – both short term and long term – if I didn’t do it today? 

Make sure you take into consideration both the short term and the long term consequences of inaction. It is very easy to ignore the long term effects of delaying important matters by always attributing priority to the urgent things. Many times, the urgent things aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of both life and of Eternity. For those little, but urgent, matters, there will be a sting when you don’t meet the immediate deadline, but the sting is more or less akin to a mosquito bite. However, if you let the less time-sensitive, but more important, matters of life go by the wayside, the sting that comes – when it comes – will feel more like a crocodile bite ripping your arm off than a mosquito bite making you itch.

Building a life is like building a house. There is cost, and that cost is what economists like to call “opportunity cost.” Each moment of time you spend doing one thing, you miss the opportunity to spend that time doing something else. If you don’t count the cost of how you spend your time for Christ, then you’ll wake up one day realizing you spent way too much time buying mosquito repellant and not nearly enough time hiring the crocodile hunter!

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