You’re Gonna Lose Everything

I know people who, if they come to Christ, will lose everything. They have whole groups of friends that will disband. They will have to start all over again. I know people who will lose their jobs when they come to Christ. Not because they would be fired, but because their chosen occupation will not be allowed by a renewed mind. Some will lose all the pride and ego that they’ve wrapped up in being against Christ and His people. They will lose all their street cred for deconverting, all their snarky comments, all their deeply nuanced values. Coming to Christ will be painful. For some, coming to Christ means they’re going to lose everything.

I had a man in a hospital bed ask me after a week of intensive gospel conversations, “If I come to Christ, will I have to leave her?” By “her” he meant the woman with whom he had been in an immoral relationship for years. I told him, “You don’t need to leave her before you come to Christ, but if you come to Christ, you will lose her.” He was going to have to lose something precious to him in order to have Christ. I didn’t want to deceive him. Christ calls all of His disciples to this kind of sacrifice: losing your life to find it.

“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 10:39). This is the call of Christ and the reality for every person. Pursue life apart from Christ and you will lose your life. But if you lay it all down, you will find life indeed. And this is the turning point for us. As we call others to follow Christ at the expense of everything else, we are calling them not to poverty, but to unsearchable riches: Yes, you’re gonna lose it all, but you have everything to gain.

You will lose friends, but you will gain Christ as your friend. You will lose lovers, but you will gain God who loves you with a perfect love. You may lose jobs, and status, and followers, but you will find real life and joy and peace. And guess what? You will lose your sin and your powerlessness against it. You will gain forgiveness and adoption, and redemption, and eternal life! Best of all, you’ll gain a hope of eternity with the One whom your soul will now love. Forever with the God who saves. Oh you will lose it all, but you will gain a greater treasure than you could ever imagine.

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We need to be honest when we share the gospel. We need to tell people that they’ve got to lose it all in order to have Christ. But as we know, to leave the world is to gain entrance to the friendship of God. And we, like Paul, gladly suffer the loss of all things. “Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ” (Phil 3:9).

Jacob Crouch 2024