Luke 18:22-25; Luke 14:25-27, 33

Luke 18
22When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
23When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. 24Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

Luke 14
25Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. 27And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

33 So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.

On first thought the concept stated above seems unrealistic, that only one person in a million would ever follow this advice to "forsake all" for Jesus and that those are the Billy Grahams and Mother Teresas of the world.

First let me say I think that this means we are to "forsake all" that stands in the way of our relationship with God, not "forsake all" for the sake of doing so to prove we are Christians. For the rich ruler, that happened to be his possessions (Luke 18). For someone else it might be a family relationship that is somehow competing against God for our loyalties (Luke 14). Even the desire to preserve our own earthly lives might be something that could supersede our allegiance to Him. The point of these kinds of passages is not to let anything do that, and I believe that if we as Christians do let that happen, God will allow whatever it is to fail us until we put Him first. But I believe anyone who reads the rich ruler passage in Luke 18 and says it commands all Christians to sell all of their possessions and give to the poor is not reading it correctly. As an extra note to further prove this point-- just one chapter later in Luke 19, in the well known story of Zacchaeous the tax collector, Jesus says "salvation has come to this house" after Zaccheous said he would give half of his possessions to the poor. I am not thinking that half should be the standard rather than all, just that Jesus' direction to the rich ruler was not meant to be a one size fits all command to everyone.

But aside from all that, the concept of "forsaking all" is not really as unnatural to us as you might think. Men and woman all the time give up their houses, their families, their kids, for the false promise of happiness in some other relationship. People will forsake all to continue an alcoholic lifestyle or a workaholic lifestyle or to stay in an abusive relationship. We are able to do it, maybe we are even built to do it, but it just gets misplaced in cases like these. And if we can do it (and some might claim can't avoid not doing it) for something that we innately know leads to a dead end, how much more can we do it for something we innately know is real?