My dear, one thing we have to become aware of in this life and become aware of very fast is that life comes with a cost.

You look at the beautiful medical doctor in the United States, maybe in New York, maybe he's in Hopkins Hospital, and he's earning $500,000 a year, or maybe he has his own specialist hospital, and he's earning $500,000 a year, $400,000 a year. To become such a person can't come for free. He had to have had sleepless nights in college, times when he had to forgo playing with his friends. A lot of things had to be lost along the way.

In life, we are always going to have to make a choice, and in making a choice, there's something we're going to have to abandon along the way. Life is sacrificial in nature; even if we leave God aside for a moment, life is sacrificial in nature.

If you say you want to be a doctor, you have to sacrifice being some other occupation—sacrifice being an engineer. Just like in high school, many of us in junior secondary school, when it was time to go to senior secondary school, you had to choose whether you were going to be a science student or an art student, or whatnot. And at that moment, art had to be sacrificed for science, and science had to be sacrificed for art, and so on and so forth.

As you go in life, choices are made, and when there are choices, there are sacrifices. When it's time to choose a job, if you get three offers, you have to choose one at the cost of the other two. When it's time to choose a spouse, you have to choose one. And under God, you have to keep choosing one. No matter the different options that come your way, life is all about choices, and for every choice you make, there will be a sacrifice.

How do we get to fall in love with this thing called sacrifice and cost? By understanding that what we call cost or what we call a cross is a means to an end; it's not a destination in itself, are you following me?

There are people who fall in love with pain and fall in love with sacrifice. They like to talk about, Oh my God, ah, I lost my job for Jesus. I was sick. I trekked. But pain is not what motivates a son of God. No. It's the promise of God that motivates us, and gives us strength even in the midst of the pain because we know what we are going to acquire. And when we consider the weight of what is in front of us, we consider the travails of the present moment as something very minute and inconsequential.

The Bible says for the joy that was set before Jesus Christ, he endured the cross. The cross is not something to be enjoyed. It's something to be endured because of what it will lead to and because of what we can gain. When you go to the gym and you squat and you run on the treadmill, it's not sweet. You understand? But what is sweet is long life and good health. When you are 50 years old and you can bounce and jog like a 25-year-old, oh my dear, now that's sweet. Gym is not sweet. But in a way, when we come to realize that there is no difference between the pain in the gym and the joy of health, pain, the cost. Let's just say we start to tolerate it a bit better.

Hallelujah. Jesus Christ said, "Anyone who is going to follow me, let him pick up his cross and come," meaning there is no following God without the laying down of something. He said, "Can one aim to build a tower without counting the cost? Won't he start the tower and end it along the way, and people will come and say, oh my God, look at this man with an uncompleted building?" Yes, the same is true in God. Are you following me?

Sometimes, because of some doctrines, people paint a picture as though suffering is the point of Christianity, and a lot of us, for lack of better words, in our walk with God, have suffered for nothing. You understand? We have suffered for nothing, and suffering for nothing can happen in many ways.

When we suffer, we go through a hard time, and in that hard time, some of us don't really remember God, you know. In that hard time, we didn't necessarily keep our faith. So, we went through hardship, and we can talk about it, but did the fruit of righteousness come out of you in that time? There's something called the waste of suffering.

Joseph suffered, but that suffering produced a righteousness that could never have been formed in him if he remained in his father's house. David suffered when he was on the run from Saul, but he didn't waste that suffering; oh, he used it as a stepping stone to the mount of Zion, and when he came out of that period, he came out as gold.

But you see, many of us suffer, but in our suffering, we curse God along the way; we curse people along the way; many things can happen. I'm not saying that's your case, but I'm just speaking in general that when we suffer for the kingdom and we suffer in obedience to God, there is always a harvest, always, always; either we don't know about the harvest or we don't value the harvest, but there's always a harvest, and it's the same with anything in life.

Whether you want to be president, it will cost you. Look at how Michelle Obama talked about the cost of being married to the president of the United States of America. It will cost you. Do you want to be an Olympian? To win a gold medal like Usain Bolt? Oh my God, oh my God, it will cost you.

This year, when Mark Zuckerberg's birthday came, he posted pictures of his journey through Facebook and how it was like—how he would live in a small hole until Facebook had 100 million subscribers. He had no friends at that time; he was weird; I'm sure many didn't believe in him. What are you doing in your bedroom? It cost him; it cost him; cost is part of life; it's not going anywhere, as a matter of fact.

What we need is the wisdom to spend in the right places. The issue is that sometimes we pay a price in a place that we're not meant to pay, and that's when bitterness comes. But you see this thing about paying a price, about cost; it is not going anywhere, not in God, not in the world; it's part of the fabric of life, and these are one of the things that we have to accept, just like our mortality, that this body one day is going to go to the dust is something we have to accept. When we accept it, we now find out how to navigate our way through something that we cannot do away with.