For every promise there is a price to pay. ~ Jim Rohn
The bible has a lot to say about promises. They called them vows back then but the seriousness of it wasn’t diminished. In fact, to have anything come out of your mouth was considered a vow. We aren’t so careful with words these days, we speak a lot of them that we don’t really mean but does it change the fact that what we say has meaning, whether we mean it or not?
We were made in the image of God and everything he says happens and IS. So therefore, the speech we carry IS.
Luke 14:28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it– 29 lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, 30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ 31 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?
In this passage of scripture it’s talking about a discipleship of ministry but here is where we find ourselves. Have you counted the price you’re going to have to pay to live out the life you’re creating? Many of us bought homes in the last 10 years. We thought we had it all planned out and then the economy tanked. Did we think, “Can we pay this price for the next 30 years? Can we pay more to get out of debt sooner?” No, most of us didn’t count the cost of the economy.
So for today chew on this. Have you counted the price you’ll have to pay to live out the life you are creating?
Pastor Susan 
One of the things that drives me crazy is how often this seems to go haywire… both financially and in general life “costs” of consequences of various actions.
Sometimes it feels like counting the cost and finding your resources to be enough to cover almost feels like an open challenge for anything and everything to go wrong to make sure that your count is as far off as it can be… no matter how many “what ifs” you thought you had covered.
For most responsible people, it’s probably not so much that they didn’t count the cost… its that they counted the cost… took into account reasonable variation… moved forward with wiggle room to spare… and then life laughed at their idea of reasonable with shifts in their lives that couldn’t have been even guessed at back at the counting stage.
It’s hard to predict exactly how bad the future bad times may be… but if you waited until you were secure enough to have no risk even in the worst possible scenarios, nothing would ever get built. Nobody could afford to buy a house if all income stopped suddenly, so nobody would in case it ever did.
Suppose it depends on the person and the circumstances as to whether you take that to be God wanting to make sure you remember how dependent you are on him and not what you think you can have and can handle… or whether you take it as an attack to thwart the good that would be done by your “tower” being built…. or whether you take it as a sign that you shouldn’t have even been building it…. but no matter which way you take it, it’s still very frustrating and can drive you bonkers pretty fast.
Still a needed step in the process…. and foolish to completely skip over blindly as some people do… but very annoying how often things can so easily mess up even the best of preparation and predictions.
As I’m reading this today I so hear you! I had been saving for a very long time to get tile installed on my floor. My allergies are going crazy, and having two dogs is a continual vacuum experience, and I could go on and on. Then Friday my air conditioner goes out. I had just had it serviced last month, as I do each year, and everything looked good. When they came by to quote the new unit, they discovered I am under-insulated, which explains the high energy bills and they recommend a split unit since we have a two-story home. So the tile goes out the window, the air conditioner becomes the priority equal to the insulation.
I guess I just never know what God has in store for me. I know that this expense is over 2k more than I had saved up for. Fortunately, I have a job, and other than food and utilities, insurance, and mortgage, I don’t have any other bills so I’ll buckle down and get this paid off, but that puts me back to square one on the carpet problem and doesn’t solve the allergy problem.
This problem seems petty when people are losing their houses, or don’t have houses at all. I realize that. So you’re right, even when we count the cost, there are unexpected life issues that trip us up. I heard Deepak Chopra say once that when we figure out that life is just life, then nothing ever goes wrong. I guess we all face those things often in our lives.
No one can foresee all the possibilities or count the cost of the unknowable. The best we can do is recognize the probability of financial ups and downs, diseases and old age. Ecclesiastes says that troubled times come like a storm in Summer.
At the same time we should be aware of these things so that our plans are as solid as we can make them. But it’s a tough call for time and chance develop out of a multitude of choices which are not all ours to make. A person has a life plan and genetics dictates a heart attack or the work environment, unbeknownst to us, gives us cancer. I think most of the discoveries about environmental effects on air have been because of diseases which killed thousands. What we call “commonsense” may be (and most likely is) flawed because we lack either the information or understanding or both at the same time to correctly apply sensible actions to our situations. Sure there are things which we can see clearly delineated in our world like overindulgence in any substance either kills us or makes us brain-dead, and there are clear indications that those who don’t work won’t survive too well.
But sometimes the best laid plans go bad because someone unconnected to us made a bad decision which had devastating ripple effects. That’s hard to predict.
On the other hand, that last truth is no excuse to make bad decisions or throw caution to the wind. (Just thought I’d add that in there…)
Agree. Since 2002 our finance guy at church has been preaching, “GET DEBT FREE”. He kept telling us the economy was heading for disaster but all we could see were our houses increasing in value and more and more people moving in. Well when it happened, he was like Noah, sitting in his home, debt free, money in the bank, and ready to wait out what was coming. Some in the church heard him and sat the same, while others ignored and lost what they had. Sometimes, the word is clear but we’re not always listening.