the Cost

This is an excerpt from A.W Tozer's Success and the Christian: The Cost of Spiritual Maturity. I encourage you all to meditate on these truths:

I want to tell you that it costs to know Jesus Christ... It costs, and most people won't pay the price for it at all. That's why most Christians are common. They won't go on because for Christ's sake, they have surrendered evil things - that is, things that are injurious and things that are unclean and grossly sinful; but they are unwilling to surrender "good things."

There are certain things we won't do and for Christ's sake we have surrendered those evil things. But this is the mark of a common Christian and the man who's never gone beyond that is a mediocre Christian...

As a little child will take his teddy bear to bed with him, so we grownups have our "teddy bears" too. We have what to God must look like teddy bears and dolls. We hang on to them. A baby, of course, has a right to that... But the point I'm making is that we oldsters, we mature people, people even in their teens, when we still insist upon hanging on to things, we will worship them. Whatever you hang on to, you worship because it gets between you and God, whether it be property or family or reputation or security or your life itself. Jesus taught that we couldn't even hang on to our life itself...

Any external treasure that touches your heart is a curse. [Apostle] Paul said, "I give that up so I might go on to deeply enriched and increasing intimacy and vast expanses of knowledge of the One who is intimate and illimitable in His beauty and I go on to know Him. And that I might know Him, I give all this up." He never allowed anything to touch his heart. (pp.19-21, emphasis mine)