The summation of that principle was found in our last study
in chapter 14, vs. 16-24 in which Jesus presented a parable which likened the
kingdom of God to a great dinner banquet.
And if you will remember, the thrust of this story was that the invited
guests found themselves preoccupied with their own commitments on the day of
the feast, and so the master invited the lame, blind and crippled, the people
of the streets to come in and enjoy his hospitality. But he said about those first invitees, “none of those men
who were invited shall taste of my dinner.’”
The moral of the story was that those that were initially
invited valued their own agenda more than the invitation to the great
banquet. They valued their
possessions more than the kingdom, they valued their work more than the kingdom
and they valued their relationships more than the kingdom. And Jesus is saying that because of
their priorities, they were disqualified from entering the kingdom of God. So
contrary to the popular idea that the kingdom of God is a great big open door
and all you have to do to enter is believe in God, Jesus uses one example after
another to divide, to subtract, and to reveal that only a few are really going
to be accepted into the kingdom of God.
And what Jesus makes clear here is that true discipleship is synonymous
with the kingdom of God. You can’t
be in the kingdom and not a disciple.
It is the same thing.
Now after saying all that, Jesus leaves the Pharisee’s house
where He had been eating dinner and He begins traveling again towards
Jerusalem. And it says in vs. 25
that great crowds are following Him. Now for most
Christians, that would be perceived as a good thing, would it not? I mean, there can be no greater
testimony to a work of God than to see a great crowd, or so we’re led to
believe.
But Jesus consistently goes against the Christian church
planter stereotype here. He
obviously didn’t read the best selling book “The Purpose Driven Church.” But all jesting aside, Jesus is not
interested in building a great church simply on the basis of numbers. Without question, He was the greatest
evangelist, the greatest preacher, the greatest shepherd that ever lived. If anyone should have been filling a
football stadium every weekend He should have. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be interested in that. Jesus isn’t interested in building a
big church - He is interested in building disciples.
He knows that most of the people following Him were not
committed enough to become disciples.
In fact, they weren’t really interested in becoming disciples. They were following Him because for the
moment He was a popular figure. He
was a novelty. There was
occasionally free food that miraculously appeared. There were people that were being healed, even dead people
raised from the grave. He was by
far the greatest thing to happen in their community in their life times. Jesus was a sensation. And people poured out of the towns to
see Him.
But Jesus isn’t interested in popularity. He knows that popularity is a fickle
thing. The crowd that swelled
after Him today would be calling for
His crucifixion tomorrow.
We see the same thing in our society today. What’s wildly popular today is old hat tomorrow. My daughter and I were having one of
our frequent talks about fashion just the other day and I said virtually the
same thing. I warned her not to be
a slave of fashion. By the time
you get your wardrobe fashionable, the fashion has changed and you are out of
style again. I can’t wait for some
of our current fashions to change.
Unfortunately, they just keep recycling themselves again every few
years. I think I’ve lived through
at least 3 separate 60’s revivals.
It’s starting to feel like groundhog day.
So Jesus isn’t interested in furthering His own popularity.
If He lived on earth in our day I seriously doubt that He would have a facebook
page with thousands of friends. But
He is interested in making disciples. However, He isn’t interested in fair
weather disciples, He wants a total commitment. He isn’t interested in
superficial followers but He wants them to know what it will cost them. This is
not a call to come to Christ so that you can have your best life now. This is not a call to come to Christ so
that all your problems can be solved, or so that you can be successful, or so
that you can realize your full potential, or even to come to Christ to get out
of hell. To borrow a quote from
John McArthur, Jesus is not calling for a makeover; He's calling for a
takeover. He is calling to become sovereign Lord, divine dictator, ruler,
controller and king of your life. Never did Jesus call for a short, easy prayer
to receive eternal life. Never did He call on people to make an emotional
decision induced by some pleadings by someone or some music or some moving
environment. Never did Jesus offer an easy believism or an easy way to Heaven.
What Jesus is saying in these verses is that becoming a
disciple of Christ requires a complete capitulation and real discipleship has a
real cost involved. And He is
warning them that unless they are willing to pay the price, they will never be
His disciples. You know, I’m going to go against my wife’s advice here and make
a statement regarding the cost of true discipleship. And that is that I will predict that there are some who are
sitting here today that will no longer be here three or four months from
now. There undoubtedly are some
here today who want to be in the kingdom, may even think they are disciples of
Jesus Christ, and yet they have never fully surrendered, they have never fully
counted the cost. And one day they
will find themselves in a position where they have to choose between a
relationship or a complete commitment to Christ, and they will choose the
relationship to have first place.
Or one day they will find themselves facing a choice between their
career or their allegiance to Christ first, and they will choose the
career. Or maybe one day they will
face the choice between riches and possessions or between putting Christ first,
and they will choose what Jesus calls mammon, the riches of the world.
Please understand, I don’t want to see people leave our
church. I’m not encouraging
someone to fall away. But I am
warning you that it regularly happens and that history shows that most people
fall away because they are not really, truly committed to put Christ first in
their lives, no matter what the cost.
The landscape of modern Christianity is littered with half started,
desolate houses of those people that abandoned their commitment to Christ for
the sake of the things of the world.
And so as Jesus concludes His message He gives them three
costs to discipleship. Three separate times Jesus says you cannot be my
disciple unless you bear the cost. The first cost is the cost of relationships. He turns around to the crowd that is
following Him and says in vs. 26, “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his
own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and
even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.”
Now I believe that Jesus says this in just this way in order
to be deliberately confrontational.
He deliberately wants to be shocking. There is no other way to understand this statement. This is not a soft spoken, music
playing in the background sort of emotional appeal to come to Jesus. This is an extreme challenge to their
motivation to follow Christ.
Now how are we to understand this statement? Are we really
supposed to hate our family members?
Doesn’t the Bible tell husbands to love their wives as their own
selves? Didn’t Jesus tell us to
love our neighbors? Doesn’t the
Bible teach us to even love our enemies?
So how do we reconcile this statement with what we know to be true in
other scriptures?
Well, we understand scripture by comparing it with
scripture. And so if those other
statements are true, then we must recognize that Jesus isn’t telling us to hate
our families. But rather it is a
Hebrew idiom. It’s a way of saying
that my love for Christ is so great, that my love for my wife is like hate in
comparison. That is what it
means. He is speaking of the kind
of love required in the great commandment, which says you shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your
strength. When you love God
like that, then everything else is subjugated to that love. The love of a wife is nothing in
comparison. The love of a
boyfriend or girlfriend is nothing in comparison.
That’s why when I give marriage counseling I always use a
triangle for illustration. And I
point out that their allegiance to God must be first, at the top, their love for God must be
paramount. And if that is right,
then their love for each other will be right. If you will be a disciple of Jesus Christ, then you must
subjugate every familial relationship to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He must have preeminence. He will not settle for second place in
your life.
Not only are we to put Christ ahead of our relationships,
but we must put Him even above our own lives. And so in vs. 27
Jesus says that not only are we to hate our family relationships, but that we
must even hate our own lives. And
that principle is fleshed out in vs. 27; “Whoever does not carry his own cross
and come after Me cannot be My disciple.”
I think there is enough of Walter Mitty in most of us that
we can imagine ourselves in some dire circumstance where we would be told to
deny Christ or die. And if you’re
like me, you can imagine sacrificing your life as a martyr for Christ, if it
came to that. But if you are like
me, then secretly you are relieved to think that the likelihood of that
happening is slim to none living
in America in this day and age.
Though how much longer we can take that for granted is a matter of some
concern.
But I think what Jesus was referring to in vs. 27 is not so
much a martyr’s death, though many of His disciples would indeed suffer that
fate in the near future. But what
is of a more immediate concern is that we are willing to sacrifice our lives in
the sense of our day to day lives.
Our priorities. Our goals, our dreams, our ambitions for the sake of
knowing Jesus. He isn’t calling
for some morbid, suicidal notion on our part, He isn’t calling for the kind of
fanaticism that the terrorists practice where they blow themselves up in the name of God.
What Jesus means is that you consider your life; your will and your ambition and your
desire and your purposes as minor, insignificant, unimportant compared to your
desire to do what honors your Lord. You’re not just adding Jesus as another
ingredient to your personal recipe for success. But you live your life in such a way that each day begins
with the assessment that what I do today is for the glory of God. My will is not important, but His will
be done in my life.
And there is yet a third cost of discipleship outlined in
vs. 33; “So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his
own possessions.” Now how are we
to understand this? Are we really
supposed to give up everything and live on the street? Are we not supposed to have cars or
houses? We have to be careful not to take the teeth out of what Jesus is
saying, and yet at the same time carefully figure out how this is to be done
practically. God may indeed call
you to give up all your possessions.
That may be part of your discipleship. That may be the refining fire which God uses to purge away
the impurities and make you useful to Him. I can speak to that reality personally.
There was a time in my life when God took everything I owned away. I’m still coming to grips with the
difficulty of that sometimes. Especially us men are oftentimes
defined by what kind of job we do, what kind of house we live in and what kind
of car we drive. They say the only
difference between men and boys is the price of their toys. Men like their toys. And I liked mine. Furthermore, I viewed them as some sort
of proof of God’s blessing on my life.
I even thought they were a testimony for God, sort of an example that I
could offer others that would induce them to become disciples as well.
But God had other plans. He wanted me to become a true disciple. And to do that He first took away
everything I counted on, everything I defined myself by. He had to break me before He could
remake me. So I can attest to the
fact that Christ does in fact many times demands of His disciples that they
give it all up. But that is my
story. It may not be the way God
deals with you. However I will
tell you what it means for all of
us.
What it means is this. You become a steward of everything
and an owner of nothing. You give everything to God and He gives back to you
what He wants you to use for Him. Everything
that I have belongs to Christ and I become just a caretaker of His stuff. It’s not my money, it is given to me to
use for His glory. It’s not my
house or my car, it’s loaned me by God to use for His glory. You are a steward. And it’s required of stewards that they
are found faithful and that they use it for the purposes of the kingdom of
God.
Being a disciple means coming to the point where I hate, or
despise any possession that comes between me and the Lord. That like Paul we can say, “More than
that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and
count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.” Phil. 3:8
Now in Jesus’ preaching, He always presents only two
possible choices or two possible outcomes for our lives. Going back to what I said was the key
to this message in chapter 13, Jesus said you were either in the kingdom or you
were outside the door of the kingdom.
There is no middle ground.
There is no neutral corner.
Jesus said elsewhere that you are either for Me or against Me. There is not a spiritual no man’s land. And the scary thing is that He makes it
clear in both chapter 13 and 14 that there will be many who think that they are
for God and yet they are not. They
think that they are in the kingdom and yet they are not. In 13:25 Jesus says they will bang on
the door saying, “Lord, open up to us!’ then He will answer and say to you, ‘I
do not know where you are from.’ Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank
in Your presence, and You taught in our streets’; and He will say, ‘I tell you,
I do not know where you are from; DEPART FROM ME, ALL YOU EVILDOERS.’ Only two outcomes, you are either in or
you’re out.
And so in our text Jesus illustrates again this terrible
tragedy of thinking you are a disciple, thinking that you are a follower of
Christ, but in fact finding yourself outside of the kingdom. And He illustrates this by means of two
short parables that are closely related.
They are both speaking of the outcome of a life lived without full capitulation
to Christ as Lord. Of a person
that thought that they could hang on to some of the affectations of the world,
that they could have their cake and eat it too. But at the end of their life, at the completion, find that though
they had gained the world, they had lost their own soul.
Jesus says in vs.28, “For which one of you, when he wants to
build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has
enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able
to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to
build and was not able to finish.’
Notice three times the idea of finishing or completing is
mentioned in this parable. The
principle is simply this; it’s
possible to have good intentions to follow the Lord, but it is also possible to
fall short, to not persevere unto the end. To not be able to finish. It’s possible to have a reverence for God, to go to church now and then, to even
pray and worship God, and yet fall short in your commitment to true
discipleship. To one day
find yourself at the end of your life and yet not be found in the kingdom of
God.
This has been the warning that Christ has been giving all
along in this sermon. That narrow
is the gate and few there be that find it. That not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the
kingdom of God, but they that do the will of God. That God looks at the heart, and examines our motives and
God will not accept our hypocrisy.
That God will not accept second place in our lives. God demands first place.
Oh ladies and gentlemen, this is why I rail against a soft, easy
believism, come as you are-stay as you are style of Christianity that is being
taught in so many churches today.
I don’t want to see people with good intentions misled into thinking
that the way of the cross doesn’t demand that you also carry your cross. That you must die to self and die to
the world. I hate to see people
duped into thinking that you can add God into your life and improve your life
and that is somehow Christianity.
I can assure you that by Christ’s standard, that is not
discipleship. Discipleship has a
cost and if you don’t consider that at the outset, then the tragedy is that at
the end of your life you won’t be counted as a disciple. Jesus will say, I never knew you. What a tragedy to sell short the gospel
and peddle a form of religion that only serves to make you the popular
church. I have given up on being
popular. I just want to make
disciples.
There is a solution to this dilemma though, thank God. Jesus gives the second parable to
illustrate the solution. Vs. 31;
“Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first
sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to
encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the
other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.”
Listen, the solution for this king was to surrender. He asks for terms of peace. And that is exactly our solution. We were told by the devil and this
world that our life would be fulfilling, it would be fun, exciting and
rewarding. But we failed to
realize that their was a judgment coming against us. That there would be a day when every thought, every word,
every action and even the secrets of our heart would be judged by the Almighty
God.
There is only one possible solution; to raise the white flag
and surrender. To say I give up my
priorities, I give up my life of pleasure, my life of self fulfillment and I
will do whatever it is you ask of me.
I surrender all. Every
relationship, every possession, every career decision is subjected to the
Lordship of Christ. That is how we
have peace with God. When we
submit by faith to Christ we have peace with God because He paid the price of
our penalty that we might be reconciled to God. Christ is our peace.
Listen to how Colossians explains that peace found in Christ.
Col 1:13 says, that Christ has rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us
to the kingdom of His beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness
of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible
and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things
have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold
together. He is also head of the
body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that
He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure
for all the fullness to dwell in Him,
and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross;
through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
Listen folks, is it not proper that such a One as Christ
demands our all? Demands every
allegiance. He who gave up all the
glories of heaven to become crucified for us, should He not deserve our
complete allegiance? Thank God
that He has provided a way that we can have peace with God. It is the only way that we might be
found in Him complete when the day of judgment comes. That we might stand boldly before the throne on that day, holy
and blameless and without reproach because of His sacrifice for us. That is our solution if we are willing
to accept it. If we are willing to
recognize that in our own efforts we fall short, and ask for forgiveness and
reconciliation.
Jesus gives us one final warning in regards to the cost of
discipleship. It is related to the
cost of possessions found in vs.33, “So then, none of you can be My disciple
who does not give up all his own possessions. Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become
tasteless, with what will it be seasoned? It is useless either for the soil or
for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
First of all note that the principle of salt is related to
the principle of possessions by the word therefore. It ties them together.
Now in Matthew 5:13 Jesus
says almost the same thing concerning salt, except that He prefaces it by
saying that “you are the salt of the earth.” In the next verse He says that “you are the light of the
earth.” So we can understand then
that this is a reference to those who would be disciples. But the warning is that defilement from
the world makes the salt worthless.
Salt in those days was highly prized as a preservative. It was also used as a means of payment,
especially for soldiers. That is
where the expression “worth your salt” comes from. It meant worth your pay. But the primary purpose of salt was as a preservative
against corruption in a arid or Mediterranean climate before the days of refrigeration. And the warning is simply that a
true disciple cannot be corrupted by possessions or any of the things that once
contaminated them.
Peter said virtually the same thing in 2Pet. 2:20, “For if,
after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the
Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are
overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to
have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from
the holy commandment handed on to them. It has happened to them according to
the true proverb, “A DOG RETURNS TO ITS OWN VOMIT,” and, “A sow, after washing,
returns to wallowing in the mire.”
He isn’t talking about losing your salvation here. But he is talking about a person that
comes to a point of hearing the call to discipleship, maybe having the good
intention of becoming a disciple, maybe even making a profession of being a
disciple, and yet because they did not fully consider the cost of discipleship
they fell back into the contamination of sin. And the last state becomes worse than the first. There are going to be degrees of
punishment in hell. I don’t know
exactly how it will work. But
Jesus said in Luke 12:47, “And that slave who knew his master’s will and did
not get ready or act in accord with his will, will receive many lashes, but the
one who did not know it, and committed deeds worthy of a flogging, will receive
but few. From everyone who has been given much, much will be required; and to
whom they entrusted much, of him they will ask all the more.”
Listen, Christ is calling all of us to a true, committed
discipleship. The call is as wide
as the ocean, it goes out to everyone.
But the way of entry is very narrow and there will only be a few that
are willing to give up everything to enter it. I hope and pray that all of you here today have made peace
with God. That you have counted
the cost and realized that you cannot come into the kingdom of God on your own
merit. That the only way to enter
is by way of the narrow door, who is Jesus Christ. Call on Him today while there is still time and make peace
with God.
If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear. Let him take action. The call is to you, to everyone who
will take up his cross and follow Christ.
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