- Sermon - Mickey Anders

Text: Luke 14:25-33

Churches sometimes go to great lengths to get people to come to their church. Not long ago on a church called the Positive Impact Christian Church offered a door prize of $1,000. All the local newspapers reported this unusual approach to evangelism. However, the preacher was deeply disappointed when only thirty people showed up when he was anticipating hundreds. After all, he thought, who could resist the appeal of a $1,000 door prize for a lucky worshiper.

Contrast that experience with a newspaper ad that appeared in London in the 1800s which said, "Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success." Thousands of men lined up to volunteer because the ad was signed by Sir Ernest Shackleton preparing for his sea voyage seeking the Northwest Passage.

Which approach do we take in the church today? Do we make discipleship easy or challenging. Well, our text today leaves no doubt about the method Jesus took. Instead of giving something away, he demanded that his followers give everything up.

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus; and he turned and said to them some strong words about the requirements for being a disciple. These are hard sayings and demanding conditions.

Can you imagine any pastor trying to grow a church saying, "Come this Sunday and we'll tell you how hard it is to join our church"? "First, you've got to hate your family. Then, you must carry a cross like a condemned criminal. Along with that, we expect you to give up everything you have worked hard to have. Do these things and you can call yourself a member of our fellowship." Yet, that is the essence of what Jesus says discipleship requires. Discipleship is demanding.

First, Jesus says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26).

This is one of the many passages that lead me to the unavoidable conclusion that the Bible is NOT an easy book to understand. Everywhere it requires careful meditation, interpretation and application. There are far too many passages like this one with which we really have to wrestle.

What happens if you take the Bible literally? Some do. A friend told a painful story about her sister who became a Jehovah's Witness and, in obedience to this passage, she removed herself from almost all contact with the family. She would not recognize birthdays or Christmas holidays because of her religion. She would never set foot in another kind of church. She systematically withdrew herself from her family for the sake of her faith. Is that what we are supposed to do?

I believe those who use such passages to alienate themselves from their families are misusing the Bible. I believe it is obvious from the whole witness of Scripture that we are not literally to hate our families.

The most important rule for understanding what the Bible says is that we compare Scripture with Scripture. That is, when we come upon a hard-to-understand passage like this one, we ask ourselves what other similar passages of Scripture might help enlighten us.

We are suspended between blind obedience and Scriptural balance. Elsewhere in the Bible, we are not even given the luxury of hating our enemy. The Ten Commandments tell us to honor our fathers and mothers. Malachi 4:6 says, "He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse." How can Jesus command us in one place to hate those whom we love when elsewhere in the Bible we are commanded to love and honor them? Which one are we supposed to do?

Perhaps we can get some help by turning to the parallel gospel account in Matthew. There the gospel writer puts it this way: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me… (Matthew 10:37)

Matthew’s wording does not speak of “hating” father and mother and other loved ones, but of loving them more than our Lord. Thus, to “hate” in our text means “to love less than.” And if we studied the original meaning of the word used here, we find that it means "love less than."

Jesus is saying that in order to be His disciple men and women must love Christ more than their parents, more than their mate, more than their children, more than their sisters and brothers.

Notice that Jesus did not make it easy. He did not say, "Love your wife. Love your kids. Show up to work on time. Be nice to the neighbor next door. Go to synagogue. It is easy to be my disciple."

Jesus recognizes that sometimes allegiance to Christ results in separations within families. But Jesus never vacillates on the terms of his Lordship in our lives. Jesus calls all the shots. Jesus demands complete obedience.

The second requirement Jesus lays on his disciples is found in verses 27-32:

27Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.

I'm sure this demand also must have taken away the breath of some of the people among that crowd following Jesus. In all likelihood, some of them had witnessed the public shame and humiliation of a condemned criminal carrying his cross through the city streets to the place of execution.

We do well to remember the words of President Dwight Eisenhower when he addressed the troops on the evening of the D-Day operation in World War II: "There will be no victories at bargain basement prices!" He was right. There never are. And this is never more true than when we become disciples of Jesus, the Lord of the cross.

Jesus doesn't mince words when he places the demand on disciples. "Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple." But what does that mean? Should we take this verse literally too?

I called my mother once and she told me that she and my father had passed on the highway a man who was carrying a cross. It turned out that his name was Eddie Dickenson of Lamesa, Texas. He has taken this verse literally since 1986, walking more than 3,000 miles through Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida. With a wheel affixed to the foot of the cross, he witnesses to people along his way while his wife follows in their motor home. Eddie Dickenson is convinced that God called him to leave his job as a manager in an oil service company in Texas and hit the road with a cross.

The cross is not a pretty piece of jewelry to wear around your neck. It is not really a tool for witnessing. It is not even a burden to carry. The cross is a means of death! We proclaim the same message every time we baptize someone when we say, "We are buried with Christ in baptism and raised to walk in the newness of life." To come to Christ is to take up a cross, to die to ourselves and to live for Him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran confessing church pastor and a leader in the resistance movement against the Third Reich, wrote from a Nazi prison just before he went to the gallows for following Jesus, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him, 'Come and die!'"

Whatever "carrying the cross" may mean in your life, Jesus makes it clear that it represents the cost of discipleship. And our text stresses the importance of counting the cost.

Next, Jesus tells two stories to illustrate his point. The first is about the builder of a tower who begins the construction but is unable to finish. People ridicule him because he failed to count the cost. In the second story, a king goes off to war without adequately assessing his odds against the far greater force of the enemy.

Both the builder and the king committed themselves to a course of action without having counted the cost. Both the builder and the king discovered, after they committed themselves to a course of action, that they did not have the resources to complete what they had started. Both the builder and the king failed to finish, and ended in humiliation and shame. In both instances, the builder and the king should have sat down and reflected, rather than acting quickly.

Can you imagine a young man appearing before the football coach and saying, "I would like to play football. In fact, someday I think I would like to win the Heisman Trophy."

The coach responds, “Well, first your will have to shed those twenty extra pounds you bear. You will have to come out to the field every afternoon immediately after class and practice with the team until dark. You will have to be in the weight room working out every Saturday.” And the young man might respond, "But I heard that football was fun."

For everything there is a cost, and we need to count the cost before committing.

The third requirement Jesus lists is equally daunting. In verse 33, Jesus says, "So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions."

If we have adequately understood the real meaning of the cross in our lives, this possessions requirement is not so hard to understand. When a person effectively dies for Christ, possessions don't have much meaning. We often get into discussions about stewardship that lead to legalistic teachings about giving 10%. But stewardship is not a legalism matter; it's a Lordship matter. When Jesus is Lord, he owns all that we have and all that we are.

There are no discount days in discipleship. Every single day is demanding. Bonhoeffer knew that. So did Jim Elliot, a young missionary who in his journal wrote just a few years before he was murdered by a group of Ecuador's Huaorani Indians he set out to help and evangelize in 1956. Elliot writes, "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose

Our passage gives us hard words from Jesus, words with which we are all uncomfortable. One thing is sure - Jesus demands a costly discipleship. When we truly make Jesus Lord, we give him all that we have, all that we are, all our relationships, and even our own lives.

William Willimon tells the story about the time a recruiter from Teach America came to Duke. Teach America is an organization which recruits this nation’s best college and university students to go to teach in the most impossible teaching situations in our country.

This recruiter from Teach America looked out on a crowd of Duke students. She began by saying, “I don’t really know why I am here tonight. I can tell just by looking at you that you are probably uninterested in what I have to say. This is one of the best universities in America. You are all successful. That is why you are here, to become an even greater success on Madison Avenue, or Wall Street, or in Law School.

"And here I stand, trying to recruit some people for the most difficult job you will ever have in your life. I’m out looking for people who want to go into a burned out classroom in Watts and teach Biology. I’m looking for somebody to go into a little one-room school house in West Virginia and teach kids from six years to thirteen years old how to read. We had three teachers killed last year in their classrooms!

"And I can tell, just by looking at you, that none of you want to throw away your lives on anything like that. On the other hand, if by chance there is somebody here who may be interested, I’ve got these brochures and I am going to leave them down here and will be glad to speak to anybody who is interested. The meeting is over.”

With that, all of the students jumped up, crowded into the aisles, rushed down to the front and started fighting over her pamphlets. They were just dying to apply for Teach America.

People are hungry to give their lives to something more important than themselves. It is a fact of life, not only that everything costs us something, but that, in our better moments, we are even eager to pay the cost.

When Jesus saw the crowds casually following him, he said, "If you want to follow me, you must love everything less than me. You must be willing to die for this cause. And you may well have to give up everything you own in order to follow me." Our church issues that same invitation today. Who is willing to count the cost, and join us in costly discipleship?