Dare to Be a Disciple – Luke 141:26-33
In 3 Sundays, on June 8, we will be having a baptism service. I wanted to talk about what that means, so that if any of you are interested in being baptized, you might have a clear idea of what it’s all about.
Let me ask...who is baptism for? Who is it that gets baptised?
Matthew 28
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
So baptism is for disciples, people who have come to Jesus, repented of their sins, believed that He died for their sins and received Jesus as Lord.
When we become a Christian, we become a follower of Jesus Christ.
And the way that we follow Jesus, for our whole lives, is as students of Him, learning to be like Him, growing in the knowledge of God.
‘Student’ is the more common english word for disciple. But there’s more than just being a student of Jesus to following Jesus.
So the command of Jesus, given in Matthew 28, is for people who are disciples to become makers of disciples: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations”. And an important part of being a disciple is obedience.
We are genuine students when we follow the teaching of the teacher, in this case, Jesus.
For much of my life I was a student of music teachers. They would teach me how to play an instrument, and I would go home and completely ignore everything they taught me and ‘do it my way’.
That’s how I became proficient on my instruments. Is that what it means to be a student?
No, a student learns from his teacher. Often a teacher is a master of whatever he or she is teaching.
So much so that they deserve to be called a ‘master’. I grew in my abilities on various instruments in direct proportion to how much I listened and learned and applied what I was learning.
I was very eager to learn how to play - I was a serious student. So I learned. I practiced. I threw myself into music studies.
I tried to mimic my teachers, to copy how they played and more so...how they thought about music.
Do we grow in the knowledge of God by coming to church only? Do we grow in holiness, in being like Jesus, by putting on our Sunday best and showing up week after week? Nope. There is much, much more to it.
Today’s passage is intense. It needs to be unpacked for sure, but we need to be careful to not dismiss it, because I believe there is much to mine about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. I thought we would look at verse by verse in an expositional study.
26 “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.
The first thing that Jesus speaks of here is that it is necessary for a disciple to go through a reorienting of our loves.
He uses strong language, obviously; it’s not often that Jesus uses language like this, so when He does, he should pay attention.
And while we obviously run into trouble if we take it too literally, we need to take it seriously to not lose the force of what He is saying.
My response when I first read this was: “Whaaat? Whaaaaaat?!?”
I won’t go through all the various responses we can have to a text like this, particularly when you’re, as I was, not yet familiar with the rest of Scripture, but I will say that Jesus challenges his students here to realign their affections, and their priorities in terms of even family love and devotion.
I see this as Jesus expanding on something He said a few chapters earlier in the book of Luke, when He was being tested by the pharisees who asked Him about what the greatest commandment was.
He answered, "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'"
We hear that a lot in church, and anything you hear a lot can lead to not really listening to what is being said.
This commandment asks of us something that, if we don’t examine our heart pretty regularly, we can find ourselves falling very much short of.
What it asks of us to do is to continually examine and then when necessary re-order our loves, because very quickly and without knowing it, we can begin to love something other than God more than God. God doesn’t want our sentiment,
He doesn’t want our acknowledgement that He is God, only. He wants, He actually demands (it’s a commandment and not a suggestion after all) our complete and whole-hearted love and attention.
By way of contrast, and it is a big contrast, Jesus wants our love for God to so comparatively outstrip and outlast our love for all other things that by comparison to how much we love and give ourselves to God, it would look as if, by comparison, we ‘hate’ those closest to us.
Why does Jesus speak of our closest family relationships here? Why doesn’t he talk about our best friends or something inanimate that we love - like food or sleep or the sunset?
Well, it sure drives home the point that God wants our first affection, He wants to be our first love. He wants there to be no rival in our lives for our greatest love.
The amazing thing, of course, is that when we give our highest attention and highest love to God, God being God, this actually increases our capacity for loving those closest to us.
Love is the one thing that the more you give, the more you have.
My brother once said that he was concerned, when his wife Karen became pregnant for a second time, about having a second child because he worried that since he was so profoundly in love with his first child, Kyra, he might not have enough love left for another child. This was a real concern for him.
He discovered, of course, that when his son Rylan was born, he had more than enough love for him.
My brother was an amazing father to his children. God wants us to love Him with abandon, with absolute devotion and commitment.
If we do that, we can be disciples of Jesus who have a capacity to love others that is far greater than if we did not love God first.
If we allow something that is less than God to be the primary object of our deepest love and devotion, we will actually shortchange those around us - our families, our closest friends.
Is it possible for a person to attend church, to believe that attending church is what makes them a Christian? Of course it is. Once, someone was talking to a great scholar about a younger man.
He said, "So and so tells me that he was one of year students." The teacher answered devastatingly, "He may have attended my lectures, but he was not one of my students."
Jesus is first. To follow Jesus means to follow Jesus, not anyone or anything else.
A disciple is a learner, and the primary teacher in life is Jesus.
This total loyalty is crucial. In this verse Jesus means that no love in life can compare with the love we must bear to him.
Julian of Norwich, an English disciple who lived between AD 1342-1416 wrote this prayer: “God of goodness, give me yourself, for you are sufficient for me. To be worthy of You, I cannot ask for anything less. If I were to ask less, I should always be in want, for in You alone do I have all”.
In verse 27, Jesus says: “27 And whoever does not bear his cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple”.
We’re talking about what a disciple is, what it means to be a disciple. Here Jesus points out that bearing the cross and coming after Jesus is essential for a disciple.
Learning from Jesus, being a student of His, means to some extent experiencing the rejection that Jesus experienced, and so bearing the cross he bore.
As a young Christian in an agnostic household, when I first told my family that I had chosen to follow Jesus, to be a disciple of His, my family was very alarmed.
They thought I’d crossed into some very dark and dangerous territory. My mom’s first response was: “Don’t tell me you’re going to one of those people who goes around blessing everybody!”
My dad and brother and sisters were equally alarmed, perhaps even more so.
As they pretty aggressively tried to convince me of the error of becoming a Christian, I experienced a certain persecution, a certain rejection because of what I had come to believe.
It’s interesting to note that my brother, while on a quest to learn all he could about the Christian faith and its critics in part to turn me away from being a Christian, himself became a Christian.
God is funny that way. Genuine pursuit of God always leads to finding God.
The choice to follow Jesus must include the willingness to bear our cross, whatever form it may come in.
It is not easy to put God first. A lot of Biblical views on things are not the popular, politically correct ones in our society. You know what I mean.
You have to be careful in polite company or that polite company may turn vicious if you speak about issues from a genuinely biblical point-of-view. That also is our cross.
If we’re not willing to bear the challenges that come our way as a result of a very deep and close connection with Jesus, we WILL fall away from Him.
That’s why Jesus doesn’t mince words. If we don’t bear our cross, we can’t - we won’t be - a true disciple, a student of Jesus - a Christian.
We begin to see here that being a disciple goes beyond simply ‘accepting Jesus into our heart”. Discipleship begins to feel a lot like allegiance.
Not only is Jesus our teacher, but our first and strongest and most dominant allegiance is to Him and Him alone.
That’s why Jesus begins to talk about counting the cost of being a disciple in the next verses. He wants us to think it through.
28 For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— 29 lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, 30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’?
We begin to see here how Jesus wants us to follow Him, for sure, but He wants us to count the cost of following Him BEFORE we call ourselves His followers.
And He uses a very practical illustration - 2 of them - to show the wisdom of counting the cost of following Him and the folly of not counting the cost of following Him.
In the first illustration, Jesus talks about the building of what is most likely a vineyard watch tower. Vineyards were often equipped with towers from which watch was kept against thieves who might steal the harvest.
If the tower project is going to work out, it needs to be planned - carefully - or after he’s started the project and discovers he is not able to complete it, not only has he wasted his time and that of others, in the building of it, but he becomes a source of derision.
“The guy started building something and didn’t finish it!”
Most likely the partly-finished shell of a tower would cast its incomplete shadow over the land. So Jesus asks, ‘who doesn’t sit down and think about what they are about to do? How sad to begin something and not finish it.
There’s a tower, sort of, in Argyle Scotland. It’s a weird thing, called "M'Caig's Folly". [Show photo] McCaig's intention was to provide a lasting monument to his family.
McCaig was an admirer of Roman and Greek architecture, and had planned for an elaborate structure, based on the Colosseum in Rome.
His plans allowed for a museum and art gallery with a central tower to be incorporated.
Inside the central tower he planned to commission statues of himself, his siblings and their parents.
His death brought an end to construction with only the outer walls completed. M’Caig’s folly. The failure, the incomplete structure, can be seen by everyone. It stands as a monument to “not thinking it through”.
Jesus wants us to reflect on the cost of following Him.
I came to Jesus initially because I was profoundly moved by the story of His willing sacrifice of His life for me, in order to restore me to God, to bring me into relationship with God.
But I had a lot of baggage. I’ve already told you of my family’s complete non-support of my decision. Their derision and hostility to my new-found faith.
I also had a lot of questions and doubts, coming from being an atheist. So I basically spent a good 2 years really closely examining the Christian faith, learning all that I could about it, but also learning the popular arguments against it.
After doing that for 2 years, and really counting the cost of devoting my life to Jesus Christ, I recommitted my life to Jesus wholeheartedly and with a lot more understanding of what I was doing. And I have never, ever looked back.
2 years was probably longer than average, but again, I had a lot of baggage to deal.
31 Or what king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace.
The second illustration that Jesus uses is different. In the first one, all of the options and decisions lay with the builder.
He had to decide if he possessed the means (the commitment, the determination, the passion) to get the job done. The success or failure, in a sense, depended on him alone.
When Jesus is talking about the king, he’s looking at if from another angle.
The king has to first sit down (notice in both cases the people sit down - meaning that they stop to ponder, to consider - they don’t run whole hog into the situation without a lot of thought).
The king first needs to sit down and consider if the resources he has - in this case 10,000 soldiers, is enough to enter into battle against a foe with twice the resources.
Or should he make peace - even submitting to ‘conditions of peace’ which is a lot like ‘terms of surrender’.
The truth is, everywhere in life we’re called upon to count the cost. When I’m marrying a couple, I always say: "Marriage is not to be entered upon lightly or unadvisedly, but thoughtfully, reverently, and in the fear of God."
A man and woman must count the cost.
33 So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.
Jesus is saying, Consider ahead of time whether or not you are willing to become his follower. It will take everything you have and more.
Discipleship will figure in every future decision of your life. The will of God will be first in your priority from now on.
So...Jesus wants us to be His disciples, His TRUE disciples who will have Him as their first love beyond all other loves.
Who will re-order their loves, not just once, frankly. I find I have to do this on nearly a daily basis - to examine my heart and see if God is truly still my first love.
When my honest answer is ‘no’, and sometimes it might be - I need to repent and to realign my affections, to re-order my loves, so that God is truly my first love.
Always, always, when I do this, I end up treating my wife BETTER, my children BETTER, this church that I love and this mission that I love BETTER.
Discipleship is a call to complete surrender to God, complete love to God, complete service to God, complete offering of our lives to God. Do you see how that’s different from simply attending church?
If this seems too much, if you’re surprised to find that Jesus says these things, if you’re not comfortable listening to me speak this way;
If you are daunted, intimidated, by the high demands of Christ, you need to remember that you are - we are - not left to fulfil them alone.
He who calls us to the steep road, to the narrow road, will walk with us every step of the way and be there at the end to meet us.
He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. (Philippians 1:6)
Amen? Amen.
So discipleship is a life of love and of obedience to Jesus Christ.
That is what we’re called to. And disciples are called to be baptised. I would encourage you, if you want to explore baptism itself in more detail, to meet with us today at 5:15 PM, after the congregational meeting at 4:40 PM today.
