Shouldn't we have taken hold if it in a different way,  built something else, been somewhere else, done something else? What  a tragic waste it'll be. If we say 'to live is Christ' and Christ  isn't alive, are we not the walking dead along with him? (Philippians 1.21)

  
We wind up stood next to Paul who says - 'If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.' (1 Corinthians  15.19).

 

He's got a point too: costly and risky business.

I ask myself, have I been weaned to think not of my life but my after- life in making this choice that Jesus gives us?

 

Do I depreciate this life, sit back and wait for the next?   Then, as the voice of his church, are we underplaying the impact on this lifetime that Jesus has for those who meet him, especially when many live as if it's the only one they have, and are rightly and desperately concerned with where it's going, not where they might go afterward? It's intriguing and troubling to ask myself once in a while - if I wasn't a Christian today, would I have the courage to become one?

Whenever I'm engaging in the disciple-making Jesus calls us to, do I  appreciate what I'm asking people to do, and am I in the place where the choice is still even that real for me? The choice shapes the 40, 50, 60 years that might remain for us.

 

I'm realising that sometimes, subconsciously, I've taken something like Pascal's Wager as my comfort blanket. I say 'Well, if it all falls flat, I've played it safe, I've survived this life' or perhaps 'I've had a community, and I've done some good'.

But God forgive me for being so haphazard about my own life! That's not the life 'to the full' that Jesus beckons us with (John 10.10) - that's Christian  
hibernation.

 

Without abandoning the hope of eternal life on God's New Earth, I find myself asking God to 'let me know my end, and what is  the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is.' (Psalm 39.4)

I don't only want to appreciate those to whom this choice appears costly and risky, to whom this life matters - I want to be one of  them.

 

Here stands this human generation, we cannot but further history, but where to? Those who were recently at Transmission were called to ask - 'What must I see built in my lifetime?'. As a 21-year-old man living with a dream, a cost, a risk, a confusion, a trust, I am  beginning to take the next 40 years of my life seriously.

 

Some of us are younger, some older, but the question can be the same. Is it to  
be the Kingdom or my little empire?

 

The choice is a rudder that will steer the whole ship around, that must wreak havoc left, right and centre in my life - and there shall be no repeating it. It's the  
choice to say 'He must increase, but I must decrease' (John 3.30) and  
those words mean more than I yet know.

This too is a wager, costly and risky. I am catching glimpses of the  
possibility of a life in which, if Jesus fails us, we fail  spectacularly - in which all my pockets are already empty, having  bought-up the Pearl (Matthew 13.40). We are choosing 'to lose, that [we]  might one day win the great "Well done" of faithful sons and  daughters' as The Vision has it.

 

What if Jesus doesn't come through,  and we wind up feeling like the first disciples, watching the Master exhale and die? This choice we make and remake daily not on  probability, but on trusting the One who has gatecrashed our lives  
with intent.

 

These are exciting times. We wager our lives, but do not  forget the awesome things Jesus has begun to do and teach among us,  nor the great cloud of witnesses across generations who have known  the same faithfulness of God that we, when we live this way, put  ourselves desperately in need of knowing."