Pentecost 16 September
16, 2007
“Following Jesus Costs __________”
Luke 14:25-33
25
Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said, “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. 27 And anyone who does not carry his cross
and follow me cannot be my disciple.
28
Suppose one of you wants to build a tower.
Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough
money to complete it? 29 For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it,
everyone who sees it will ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This fellow began to build
and was not able to finish.’”
31
“Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider
whether he is able, with ten thousand men, to oppose the one coming against him
with twenty thousand? 32 If he is not
able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and
will ask for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything
he has cannot be my disciple.”
You may have noticed that the
sermon theme for today has a blank in it.
It’s the first time in five-plus years of preaching that has happened to
me. How do you fill in the blank? One way is like this:
“Following Jesus costs…nothing.
Free forgiveness, with no strings attached, coming directly from God’s
heart to your doorstep in Christ. To
follow Jesus costs nothing.
But there is another way to
fill in the blank. Following Jesus
costs…everything. God does not
put up with divided loyalties. He wants
you to put him first in every moment, with every thought and in every
situation. And it has always been that
way. When God gave man his first breath
in
Centuries later, when God
gave His Ten Commandments, the command to hold an undivided loyalty for God was
exactly the same. When God repeated this
command, he did not mess around. He did
not beat around the bush. He did not
sugarcoat anything. The first
commandment is clear and blunt. “You
shall have no other gods.” When the LORD
thundered those words from
When our Lord Jesus walked
the earth, God still had not changed his mind one inch. He still commanded, “You shall have no other
gods.” Jesus knew how dangerous divided
loyalty was. To shake the
people loose from lukewarm love that broke the first commandment, Jesus had strong,
even shocking, words for them.
Listen to what Jesus says about how to deal with divided loyalties in Luke 14. (read text)
Jesus lays it on the table
that being a follower of his is not a cushy job but instead a demanding
occupation. As you listen to those
verses, do you think he’s trying to talk you out of it? Do you think he’s trying to get you to quit
being a Christian? Imagine that you’re
pondering taking a new position, and your boss-to-be begins listing all the new
responsibilities you’ll have, as well as all the hardships you’ll face and the
fires you’ll need to douse. Then he tells
you, “Now if you take this new job, understand that your life will no longer be
your own. You are expected to set
everything else aside, for this job will cost you everything.” Usually talk like that makes you think, “Do I
really want this job?”
With words like these, though,
Jesus isn’t trying to make you think twice about whether or not you want to be
his follower. As people who already
trust in him as their Savior, he is assuming that you want to. What he is saying is that he doesn’t want to
lose you. He doesn’t want anything to
get in the way between you and him. To
follow Jesus costs everything. Having
heard Jesus’ words, let’s ask ourselves the question…
How can I be a Christian if
that costs everything?
Let’s go back the crowd
following Jesus and analyze the people who heard these words for the first time. There was a large crowd following Jesus; many
were apparently following for the wrong reasons. Perhaps they were curious and wanted to see a
miracle show. Perhaps they wanted to be
on the winning team when Jesus overrode the Romans. Perhaps there was some other personal benefit
they had in mind. Jesus knew that many
of them were following him with a shallow commitment. He knew that when the going would get tough,
their allegiance to Him would grow cold.
Half-hearted commitment simply would not cut the mustard. So he told them these tough words to get them
to think deeply about their loyalties.
To be a Christian means you are loyal to Christ before being loyal to
anything else.
That brings us to this
difficult part about hating family members.
It seems to be absolutely opposite of God’s clear command, “Love your
neighbor, even your enemies.” And it is
the opposite. Hate is the opposite of
love. Maybe it will help you understand
this difficult phrase if you can see that what Jesus says here is nothing more
than another way to clarify the First Commandment, “You shall have no other
gods.” Jesus is talking about
loyalty. You love your family because
they are your family, and that is what God wants when he says to love others
deeply. But when being loyal to your
family causes you to pull away from Jesus, then a good thing is
becoming a bad thing.
When the blatantly sinful
family member begins to influence you more than you are influencing them, it is
time to change your loyalty. When the
subtly sinful family member gets you to sleep in Sunday morning more than you
get them to wake up and worship, it is time to change your loyalty. In that scenario, it’s not that you stop
loving your relative, because that is what God wants. And it’s not that you stop praying for your
relative to know God’s truth and be saved through Christ – for God wants that
too. However, as you love them, at the
same time you hate them for pulling on you to separate from Jesus. You simply will not allow separation from
Jesus to happen. You might reach a point
where you need to tell your loved one, “I don’t want to choose between you and
my Savior. I’d love for you to listen to
Him and have both of you. But if you
continue to refuse, I’m loyal to him first, and not to you.”
And that doesn’t apply only
to other people. You are to even hate the
thing you love the most - your very own life - when you pull yourself away from
Christ. In summary, what Jesus says is,
“Be loyal to me at all times!”
Hopefully that is an adequate
explanation for a difficult verse…but even if it is an adequate explanation
that doesn’t make following it any easier.
To bring this point home even further, Jesus applies two stories about
counting the cost before you take the plunge.
Everybody knows you don’t build a five million dollar home with five
dollars to your name. That would be
stupid. Everybody knows you don’t fight
a war when you are outnumbered 2 to 1. That
would be suicide. It is important to
count the cost before you get started.
The teaching that following
Jesus costs everything is difficult because it requires us to count the cost. That teaching requires me to do things I
don’t like to do. I don’t like to say,
“No!” I don’t like to confront a
difficult situation. I don’t like to
love Jesus with all my heart…
How can half-hearted, vile
people like us be acceptable by a holy God who accepts nothing less than
perfection? When we are confronted with
our divided loyalties, it never feels better to hear that following Jesus costs
NOTHING. Jesus came to seek and to save
divided hearts like ours, hearts that were apt to stray. We are saved not by what we have done, but by
what He has done. Jesus was tortured to
death here so that we could live torture-free in heaven.
Yet never forget that following
Jesus also costs…EVERYTHING. Do not let
anything get in the way between you and your Savior. Do not place your loyalties anywhere other
than with Him. Hate even your own heart
and mind if you begin to say, “I am my own boss!”
Following Jesus costs
nothing. Following Jesus costs
everything. Our Savior has made both of
them possible. Amen.