Scripture
On his journey to Jerusalem from Galilee, Jesus often engaged in controversy with the Jewish leadership, most often the Pharisees (cf. Luke 11:37-54; 13:31-14:24). But now in Luke 14:25, Jesus returns to address the crowds. In doing so, he clarified what is involved in following him. That is, Jesus stated in clear, bold, and very startling terms the cost of discipleship.
Let’s read about the cost of discipleship in Luke 14:25-35:
25 Now great crowds accompanied him, and he turned and said to them, 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. 27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. 28 For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a 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.’ 31 Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
34 “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? 35 It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 14:25-35)
Introduction
We live in a culture that has substituted the true gospel with a consumer-friendly counterfeit gospel. John MacArthur articulates it this way in his book titled, Hard to Believe:
The first role of successful merchandising is to give consumers what they want. If they want bigger burgers, make their burgers bigger. Designer bottled water in six fruit flavors? Done. Minivans with ten cup holders? Give them twenty. You’ve got to keep the customer satisfied. You’ve got to modify your product and your message to meet their needs if you want to build a market and get ahead of the competition.
Today this same consumer mind-set has invaded Christianity. The church service is too long, you say? We’ll shorten it (one pastor guarantees his sermons will never last more than seven minutes!). Too formal? Wear your sweatsuit. Too boring? Wait’ll you hear our band!
And if the message is too confrontational, or too judgmental, or too exclusive, scary, unbelievable, hard to understand, or too much anything else for your taste, churches everywhere are eager to adjust that message to make you more comfortable. This new version of Christianity makes you a partner on the team, a design consultant on church life, and does away with old-fashioned authority, guilt trips, accountability, and moral absolutes.
One suburban church sent out a mailer recently, promising an “informal, relaxed, casual atmosphere,” “great music from our band,” and that those who come will, “believe it or not, even have fun.” That’s all great if you’re a coffee house. But anyone who claims to be calling people to the gospel of Jesus with those as his priorities is calling them to a lie.
It’s Christianity for consumers: Christianity Lite, the redirection, watering down, and misinterpretation of the biblical gospel in an attempt to make it more palatable and popular. It tastes great going down and settles light. It seems to salve your feelings and scratch your itch; it’s custom-tailored to your preferences. But that lightness will never fill you up with the true, saving gospel of Jesus Christ, because it is designed by man and not God, and it is hollow and worthless. In fact, it’s worse than worthless, because people who hear the message of Christianity Lite think they’re hearing the gospel – think they’re being rescued from eternal judgment – when, in fact, they’re being tragically misled.
In contrast to the consumer-friendly counterfeit gospel of today, Jesus actually made it clear that following him would not be easy. He was up-front about what was involved in following him. He did not want disillusioned disciples. And so he clarified the cost of discipleship.
Lesson
The analysis of following Jesus in Luke 14:25-35 shows us what is involved in following Jesus.
Let’s use the following outline:
1. To Follow Jesus You Must Hate Your Family (14:25-26)
2. To Follow Jesus You Must Carry Your Cross (14:27)
3. To Follow Jesus You Must Count the Cost (14:28-35)
I. To Follow Jesus You Must Hate Your Family (14:25-26)
First, to follow Jesus you must hate your family.
Jesus had presumably finished dining at the home of the ruler of the Pharisees and he was on the road again. Now great crowds accompanied him (14:25a). Twelve of them were his apostles and many others wanted to be his disciples. Disciples were people who literally followed a teacher and put his teaching into practice in their lives. They did so because they valued his teaching and his ministry.
But Jesus was aware that the people following him had all kinds of motives for doing so. Some wanted to see him perform miracles. Others thought that perhaps his claims to being the Christ meant that he was going to overthrow the Roman government and restore the Jewish kingdom. Others were just along for the ride, so to speak, because in the presence of Jesus there was always something interesting happening.
Jesus knew that his mission was to seek and to save the lost (cf. Luke 19:10). That is, he had come to reconcile sinful men and women with a holy God. And although the act of being reconciled to God was received as a gift of God’s grace, the result of that reconciliation would require a life-long commitment. In fact, this life-long commitment involved three separate criteria, the first of which is: to follow Jesus you must hate your family. This is how Jesus expressed it in verse 26 when he turned and said to them, “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.”
Does this statement startle you? Does Jesus really say that to follow him you must hate your family? Yes, Jesus clearly did say that. But what does it mean?
Let us remember that Jesus affirmed our biblical duty to love God (Matthew 22:37), our neighbor (Matthew 22:39), and even our enemies (Luke 6:27). In a very real sense, Jesus taught and embodied the message of love.
So, what did Jesus mean when he said that to follow him you must hate your family? R. C. Sproul says, “We must remember however that Jesus was an oriental teacher, and used figures of speech in order to communicate emphasis. On more than one occasion, he made use of hyperbole, that literary form that we identify as an intentional exaggeration in order to communicate a crucial point.” Jesus was talking about a comparative degree of affection.
A notable example of this comes from the book of Genesis, where Jacob is said to have “loved Rachel more than Leah” (Genesis 29:30). Yet, in the very next verse the Scripture says that “Leah was hated” (Genesis 29:31). It was not that Jacob loved Rachel and hated Leah, but rather that his love for Rachel was so great that his love for Leah seemed like hatred in comparison.
So, Jesus was teaching that your love for your family must pale in comparison to your love for him. Love for Jesus must be your supreme and ultimate loyalty.
To follow Jesus in the first few centuries after his death meant to be ostracized from one’s family. So, it was a hard choice. It still is a hard choice for people in some parts of the world. To follow Jesus means to be cut off from one’s family.
When Texas pastor Jim Denison was in college, he served as a summer missionary in East Malaysia. While there he attended a small church. At one of the church’s worship services, a teenage girl came forward to announce her decision to follow Jesus and be baptized.
During the service, Denison noticed some worn-out luggage leaning against the wall of the church building. He asked the pastor about it. The pastor pointed to the girl who had just been baptized and told Denison, “Her father said that if she was baptized as a Christian she could never go home again. So she brought her luggage.”
Do you love Jesus more than your family? Is Jesus your supreme and ultimate loyalty?
II. To Follow Jesus You Must Carry Your Cross (14:27)
Second, to follow Jesus you must carry your cross.
Jesus said to the great crowds accompanying him, “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (14:27). They would have immediately understood what Jesus meant because they were so familiar with the Roman form of execution by crucifixion. They knew that a person carrying his own cross meant rejection, humiliation, and suffering.
Jesus knew that he was going to die by crucifixion. And although he had been telling the disciples that he would be killed, they had a hard time believing that he would be killed. Jesus was walking the way of the cross, and he made it clear that anyone who wanted to follow him would also have to walk the way of rejection, humiliation, and suffering. This was especially true of Jesus’ first disciples. Almost every one of them died a martyr’s death.
But this is also true for disciples today. To follow Jesus means that you are willing to experience rejection, humiliation, and suffering for Jesus’ sake.
Sometimes I hear people say, “Oh, that is just my cross to bear.” They are usually referring to some difficulty or burden that is pressing in on them. But, it is important to clarify that not all of our burdens are crosses in the biblical sense, and to speak like this is to dilute what it really means to carry our cross. New Testament scholar Norval Geldenhuys is emphatic on this point:
The general idea that these words of Jesus about “bearing the cross” refer to passive submission to all kinds of afflictions, like disappointments, pain, sickness and grief that come upon man in this life, is totally wrong. The people to whom Jesus spoke those words fully realized that He meant thereby that whosoever desires to follow Him must be willing to hate his own life (verse 26) and even to be crucified by the Roman authorities for the sake of his fidelity to Him.
In other words, to carry your cross refers to a particular kind of suffering. It is not just any kind of trial or difficulty or burden. It is in fact the suffering you endure because you are a follower of Jesus Christ. Geldenhuys goes on to explain that to carry your cross “means the acceptance of all sacrifice, suffering, persecution, etc., experienced in the wholehearted following of Jesus, and not just ordinary suffering.”
So, when your classmates laugh at you, or your colleagues disrespect you, or your family disowns you because of Jesus, you are carrying your cross. Whenever you experience hardship or difficulty because of your service to Jesus, you are carrying your cross. And when you experience humiliation, rejection, and suffering because of your faith in Jesus, you are carrying your cross.
III. To Follow Jesus You Must Count the Cost (14:28-35)
And third, to follow Jesus you must count the cost.
In order to help his followers count the cost, Jesus gave two examples from daily life. His first example was from construction, in verses 28-30, “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ ” It is foolish to begin building something and not complete it because there are insufficient funds. Do you remember the “road to nowhere” in Alaska?
Jesus’ second example was from war, in verses 31-32, “Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.” Like the previous example, Jesus urges his followers to count the cost. But there is a twist in this example. The weaker king recognizes the superiority of the stronger king, who may very well represent God himself. In this instance, not submitting to the stronger king – God – is utterly foolish.
Jesus calls his followers to count the cost carefully before following him. What Jesus requires is nothing less than the total surrender of all that we have and are in order to follow him. “So therefore,” he said in verse 33, “any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.”
This is the third time in this pericope that Jesus has said that you cannot be his disciple unless you fulfill a certain criteria. You must hate your family, carry your cross, and count the cost. To state it another way, to follow Jesus you must love him supremely, be willing to experience humiliation, rejection, and suffering, and renounce your right to all that you have.
Jesus may allow you to keep some of what you have in order to use it for his glory. But, when you become a follower of Jesus, you recognize that you are now merely a steward of the resources that he has entrusted into your care. They are no longer yours; they are his, and he is simply allowing you to use them for his glory. Norval Geldenhuys says that a follower of Jesus
must relinquish all his possessions – not merely money and material things, but also his dear ones and everything that his heart clings to, yea, even his own life, his own desires, plans, ideals and interests. This does not mean that he must sell all his possessions or give away all his money or desert his dear ones and become a hermit or beggar or wanderer, but it means that he must give Christ full control over his whole life with everything that he is and all that he possesses, and that under His guidance and in His service he should deal with his possessions in the manner that is best.
To follow Jesus you must count the cost. But remember that Jesus also counted the cost. He counted the cost of his own obedience. Jesus knew that he would experience humiliation, rejection, and suffering when he went to the cross. He knew that his Father would forsake him by pouring out his wrath for your sin. But, Jesus determined that he would bear the awful, crushing load for your salvation.
Jesus concluded his teaching in this section by pointing out that it is worthless being anything less than a wholehearted follower of Jesus. He said in verses 34-35, “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
Conclusion
Therefore, having analyzed following Jesus as set forth in Luke 14:25-35, you should surrender all to follow Jesus.
Judson Van De Venter wrote these words:
For some time, I had struggled between developing my talents in the field of art and going into full-time evangelistic work. At last the pivotal hour of my life came, and I surrendered all. A new day was ushered into my life, I became an evangelist and discovered down deep in my soul a talent hitherto unknown to me. God had hidden a song in my heart, and touching a tender chord, He caused me to sing.
After making his decision to devote his life to Christian service, Van De Venter ministered with much blessing in extensive evangelistic work both at home and abroad. Billy Graham is one of many who claim that Judson Van De Venter had greatly influenced his life and ministry.
Here is the hymn Judson Van De Venter wrote:
All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give; may I ever love and trust him, in his presence daily live.
All to Jesus I surrender, humbly at his feet I bow; worldly pleasures all forsaken, take me, Jesus, take me now.
All to Jesus I surrender, make me, Savior, wholly thine; may the Holy Spirit fill me, may I know thy pow’r divine.
All to Jesus I surrender, Lord, I give myself to thee; fill me with thy love and power; let thy blessing fall on me.
Chorus: I surrender all, I surrender all, all to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.
Surrendering your all to Jesus does not mean that you will necessarily be called into vocational Christian ministry.
What it does mean is that you will live your entire life, moment by moment and day by day, following Jesus by loving him supremely, willingly experiencing humiliation, rejection, and suffering, and renouncing your right to all that you have.
Make a commitment to do so today and every day. Amen.
