No matter how far you have come in your walk with God and how much of your life you have surrendered to Him, there is always more that you can give and there is always more that God will ask of you.
He does not ask until you are ready, until you have the spiritual capacity to give the thing He wants, although you may not know at the time that you are ready and may think God asks too much of you. Job thought that when he lost everything near and dear to him. Mary and Martha thought that when Lazarus died. Abram probably thought that when God asked for Isaac.
Each of us who wishes to be a disciple of Jesus Christ must come to that place of confrontation and final surrender. Until we do, we cannot truly know that God is everything, and that God is enough. This is what Jesus means when He declares that the price of discipleship is death, taking up a cross and following Him! He warns that we should consider the cost before we begin the journey.
Who would think it a good idea to make such a choice; losing everything that is real and tangible and comforting, for something that cannot be seen or touched? It makes sense only if there is a hidden reality at work, and it is this: when the Spirit of the Living God resides in you through Jesus Christ, you know it. You may not be able to explain it to others, or even to yourself, but it is something real and inexpressibly wonderful and you yearn for more even as you abide more in Him.
It is the taste, the touch, the echo of eternal life – like news from a country you have never visited, or the smell of a flower you have never seen, in the poetic words of C.S. Lewis. It is the ultimate test of the reality of God in you, and your trust in Him. It is the faith and trust of Abram in the goodness of God when he prepared to sacrifice Isaac, who was a gift from God that he valued more than anything else in this life.
But if you are merely a religious follower of God, you will be repelled and angered by the thought of such a loss, or that God would ask it of you. Religious people are happy to work for God and even to make sacrifices in their service to God, but it is always on their terms, in their strength, to their credit. They are horrified when God comes to them and says, in effect, “I’m not interested in what you can do for me; I care about what you are willing to surrender of your deepest self to me. I want you to give me the thing most precious to you because it is most precious to me: Yourself.”
The transaction is doubly intimidating because God desires to have your true self, stripped of everything else, empty-handed, and vulnerable. There’s a saying that putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that it is a pig, and God wants us without the lipstick!