I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine.

I don’t want enough of Him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want the warmth of the womb, not a new birth.

I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

-Wilbur Rees, “$3.00 Worth of God”

Do I REALLY want all that God has to offer? Do you?

Justification is the means whereby we appropriate the saving act of God in the past, and sanctification the promise of God’s activity in the present and future. Justification secured our entrance into fellowship and communion with Christ through the unique and final event of His death, and sanctification keeps us in that fellowship in Christ. Justification is primarily concerned with the relation between man and the law of God, sanctification with the Christian’s separation from the world until the second coming of Christ. Justification makes the individual a member of the Church whereas sanctification preserves the Church with all its members. Justification enables the believer to break away from his sinful past; sanctification enables him to abide in Christ, to persevere in faith and to grow in love. We may perhaps think of justification and sanctification bearing the same relation to each other as creation and preservation. Justification is the new creation of the new man, and sanctification his preservation until the day of Jesus Christ.

I could not have said it any better my self!

I have been guilty of that. Not so much with my mom and dad, but with Jesus. In times when I was overcome with self-consciousness and drowning in insecurity I did not turn my back on the Lord, but I did follow at a distance. Enough of a distance that you would not have associated me with Him.

I am not the first disciple to have done that. Matthew 26:58 describes how Peter followed Jesus at a distance. That separation from Jesus allowed Peter to sit down with the guards who arrested Jesus, and later deny Jesus. The distance permitted Peter to avoid taking up the cross with Jesus.

Jesus calls His disciples to follow Him (Matthew 16:24). The disciple is to follow Jesus, not at a distance, but so close that he will be associated with Jesus in the eyes of the world. Close enough to take up the cross.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer