I am pretty suspicious of tenacious commitment. When I think of those totally sold out for their cause, it’s the bloke with the megaphone shouting about the flames of hell or the Avon rep who loves her products just a little too much that come to mind. Or even better it’s an episode of my guilty pleasure, ‘Tattoo fixers’, as yet another misplaced commitment has led to a Jedward monstrosity. And yes… someone actually had the faces of the Irish duo inked onto their body.

It can seem that committed followers of any philosophy or political cause are frankly loopy or at times that their commitment leads them to be too hard on themselves and others. “I am committed to the cause, why aren't you?” As a true lukewarm and cynical Brit, I am not often fully committed to anything, but even I was caught up in the build up to the Brexit vote and deeply saddened by the decision. In the days that followed the vote, I discovered that I found it completely acceptable to be outspoken in my judgement of those who voted to leave. I was committed to staying in and it didn’t make me a very nice person. Surely this cannot be the ‘all in’ commitment that Jesus wants for his followers?

Read Luke 9:57-62

The story of the three men eager to follow Jesus in Luke, often titled ‘the cost of discipleship’ is an awkward one. It isn’t likely to be one we preach on regularly or share with a group of young people who are about to follow God. Jesus makes it clear that with him there can be no ‘but first’, he has got to be our first priority. It’s not that those things are in themselves bad, hugging your mum goodbye isn’t a sin, but they are revealing that Jesus is not our first love. We get a hint of the reluctance to leave our stability and inheritance. That in fact we just haven’t got it. Jesus goes one further with the graphic image, ‘let the dead bury their own dead’, speaking not of corpses burying one another you’ll be relieved to hear, but of spiritual deadness. Put our jobs, our success, our ministries, our cosy families first and it reveals in you a spiritual deadness, says Jesus.

Following Jesus requires the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate commitment and so it’s not going to be an overnight job, there is a journey ahead for each of us. But how do we step out of our spiritual deadness? How do we wake up? In my experience you cannot drum up this ultimate commitment. You can’t even decide ‘From today God is going to come first.’

It is the deep change that comes slowly but surely from the experience of love from a source that is beyond anything we have ever known and that pursues us tenaciously. It is only when we are able to come to terms with Jesus’s absolute tenacious commitment to us, despite being in extreme physical, mental and spiritual torment, that we are able to in turn respond. It is there you are woken and transformed. You can’t guilt trip your conscience or lecture your soul to complete commitment, deciding again that you will start every day with a quiet time or adding yet another accountability partner to your line up. These are short lived spiritual life makeovers and self improvement binges.

You cannot summon up tenacious commitment, but we can choose to prioritise being in the presence of our tenacious pursuer.

The God we meet in Psalm 139 who searches us out, “if I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there.” The pages of the Bible are permeated with the seeking God, it is the overarching story of everything. As we seek to be more like Jesus, to walk and talk and love like him, we must spend time with him, study his behaviour closely and ask to be filled with his Spirit again. Even as we talk with those who think differently to us. As we are renewed by his love that knows no end and come to terms with his total commitment to us, from there, and only there, grows our own tenacious commitment.