A Great Work for God
For many enthusiastic Christians, I think this is perhaps the most indigestible of all the Lord’s teachings, and following it is, to a certain kind of person, actually faithless and un-Christian:
“For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him. . . . Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?” (Luke 14:28–31)
This came to mind after I received what was perhaps the final, dying solicitation from a Christian school that has been bothering me with them for years, and whose history is a sad chronicle of an ambitious march toward greatness: which, however, can’t be managed if you make one stupid, expensive, executive decision after another, all accompanied by loud peals of assurance to donors that the school is doing a wonderful, divinely certified work in building the kingdom of God with none other than the Holy Spirit at the helm—with the strong suggestion that if we didn’t “pray earnestly” for its ministry (i.e., send money) to augment its ever-increasing influence for Christ throughout the world, and the pile of questionable degrees it offered, that the God who needed the favor would not be pleased.
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S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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