A few years ago, I sat across from a young man whom I had been discipling for several months. He was sincere. He came to church. He asked good questions. He wanted to grow. And we had reached an important place for every authentic discipleship relationship: We were no longer talking about Christianity in general; we were talking about him.
A sinful pattern in his life had come into the light, and I had to decide whether I loved him enough to name it. He also had to decide whether he trusted Christ enough to receive my message. The moment felt awkward and the room got quiet, and for me, it was the perfect encapsulation of the cost of discipleship for both of us.
If you’ve ever tried to walk closely with another person in faith, you know the feeling. The relationship starts well. There is energy in it, even joy. But somewhere along the way, it becomes more challenging and more inconvenient than expected. You may wonder whether you are doing it right or whether you have the capacity to keep doing it at all.
Those questions are good. The American church tends to present discipleship as one of the most rewarding things Christians can do with their lives, and it is. But I sense we’ve been less forthcoming about the cross-shaped cost at the center of it all.
In the mid-1700s, Jonathan Edwards wrote that since the Fall, the human soul has shrunk into “a little space … closely shut up within itself.” Other theologians have named the same reality in a Latin phrase incurvatus in se, which means “turned in on oneself.” We can feel it in our own bodies when we’re tired or afraid. The shoulders round, the chest closes, and our whole posture folds inward.
Spiritually, the phrase names something deeper than selfishness. It describes a soul that has lost its outward orientation, one that has stopped looking up toward God and out toward neighbor and has begun to orbit itself.
A soul cannot uncurve itself. It can behave well. It can show up, keep its commitments, and read its Bible for 40 years without ever coming undone. But the capacity to be a disciple maker—to develop a deep relationship with another person; to pray for him or her when tired, busy, or otherwise preoccupied; and to tell the truth when honesty might end the relationship—cannot come from trying harder. That type of endurance can only come from Christ.
This fact about the soul is what makes discipleship hard in a way that ordinary work is not. Hard work asks for more effort, but the process of discipleship asks for a different nature. And for disciple makers, the slow discovery that we don’t innately possess what’s required to do the job is the first step in doing it well.
As I noted earlier, there are two kinds of cost in discipleship.
The cost for the person doing the discipling usually begins with inconvenience and the ordinary friction of being available, like a text that arrives when you were about to rest and a meeting that requires preparation when you are already spent. At first the relationship can feel energizing. There is joy in being useful and a good, clean satisfaction that can come from being trusted.
But over time, discipleship creates its own challenges. People don’t grow on our schedules. They confess the same sins again. They avoid the conversations they most need to have. They ask for wisdom and then seem to ignore it. And the disciple maker must decide whether he or she is willing to love when the relationship is no longer flattering or convenient for the schedule.
This is the point in which a quiet kind of danger emerges. As Christians, we can begin discipleship as an act of love but slowly let it become a verdict on our own usefulness. A disciple’s growth can feel like validation while failure can feel like shame. Disciple makers can then subtly shift from gardeners who tend to what God is already doing to manufacturers trying to produce specific outcomes on specific timelines.
The cost for the disciple is different. Many people want mentors; fewer want disciple makers. Mentoring can feel like affirmation with occasional advice. Discipleship includes real encouragement, but its focus is spiritual formation, which means something will need to be confronted and changed.
To be discipled well is to become the kind of person who can hear the truth. Proverbs says, “Wounds from a friend can be trusted” (27:6). That sentence is almost impossible to believe in a society trained to treat every correction as violence and every affirmation as love. But Scripture’s view of Christian discipleship works only if kingdom siblings lovingly call out sin and don’t see rebukes as an attack on personal dignity.
The biblical image for this work—gardening—is older than the church. In the beginning, God placed a human being, Adam, in a garden “to work it and take care of it” (Gen. 2:15). Paul then directly used gardening as a metaphor for discipleship in the Epistles (1 Cor. 3:6–7), showing us how we can sustain the work over the long haul.
We can’t produce repentance, manufacture hunger for Scripture, or create spiritual life in other people. We can only prepare soil; hold the trellis open; and water with prayer, Scripture, and honest, patient conversation. When we do that and stay close enough, we might notice the small signs of grace. All of that requires real work without crossing the line into acting like a messiah.
If the person grows, we give thanks rather than take credit. If the person struggles, we grieve without trying to control the problem as if we are God. If the person walks away, we lament without believing the kingdom depended on our competence. The labor, the hours, and the tears may still be ours. But the life belongs to God.
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This reorientation does not remove the cost of discipleship, but it does relocate it. The curved-in soul cannot sustain what discipleship requires. But the strange and beautiful thing is that the curved-in soul is exactly what the Spirit has been uncurving since Pentecost.
The capacity to walk with another person over time—and to receive correction without spending three days constructing a case against the person who gave it—is not a feat of willpower. It is the fruit of a Spirit who was already at work before we were born and who will still be at work long after we die.
This is why duty alone can’t sustain the cost of discipleship. Duty may get us to meet with a disciple and to keep our commitment. But duty without love eventually curdles into resentment, and sacrifice without joy becomes scorekeeping.
The real engine of this work has to be the love of God, which “compels us” (2 Cor. 5:14). His love has already set us free. Therefore, we give ourselves because he gave himself, and we move toward others because he moved toward us first.
What does this look like on a normal day? If you want to disciple someone, expect to be inconvenienced. Expect to pray more than you thought you would. Expect to prepare when you’d rather improvise. Expect to say hard things in a trembling voice. Expect to find impatience and pride and the urge to control rising in yourself. Expect the work to expose your own need for grace at least as much as it exposes the disciple’s.
But also expect joy. Expect someone to read Scripture and realize, maybe for the first time, that God is speaking to him or her. Expect to hear a confession that took years to say out loud. Expect small resurrections, and expect to find that Christ was already present in the work before you arrived.
If you want to be discipled, expect to be loved too much to be merely affirmed. Expect someone to ask better questions than you are accustomed to answering. Expect encouragement and correction. Expect patience and not indulgence. Expect to learn that the parts of you most resistant to being known may be the places most in need of grace.
The church doesn’t need a romantic vision of discipleship; it needs a cruciform one. At the center of our faith is a Savior who “loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). He entered time, walked at three miles an hour, and bore with slow and confused disciples. He corrected, wept, prayed, and stayed. He also gave his life.
Christ’s example shows when discipleship begins to cost us, we’ve stepped closer to the way of Jesus. We plant, we water, we prune, we wait—and God gives the growth.
Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.
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