Title: The Love That Costs Everything
Intro: Hate? How do you hate the people who love you most?
Scripture: Luke 14:25-33
Reflection
Dear Friends,
You know, some of my earliest memories are of my grandmother sitting in her worn leather chair, that old family Bible spread across her lap like a map to somewhere sacred. Her voice had this way of wrapping around words, especially when she would read the Ten Commandments out loud. When she would get to “Honour your father and your mother,” I would think, “Well, of course.” Made perfect sense to me then. We honour the ones who gave us life, who held our hands when we were scared, and who told us stories when the world felt too big.
Years later, when I first really heard Jesus say, “Love one another as I have loved you,” my heart just said, “Yes.” Because what could be more right than that? Love is what makes getting up in the morning worth it. Love is what makes the hard days bearable. Love is the heartbeat underneath everything that matters.
But then I stumbled across these other words of Jesus, and they stopped me dead in my tracks: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”
Hate? How do you hate the people who love you most? How do you hate your own mama, the woman who stayed up all night when you had a fever? How do you hate your children, those little hearts running around outside your body? I will tell you, those words kept me up at night for weeks.
The Day Jesus Turned Around
Picture this with me. Jesus is walking toward Jerusalem, and there is this crowd following Him—maybe hundreds of people. They are excited, talking about the miracles they have seen and the words they have heard. Some are probably thinking this is their ticket to the good life, following this miracle worker. Maybe they are imagining front-row seats when He sets up His kingdom.
But Jesus knows something they do not. He knows where this road leads—to a cross, to suffering, to death. So He stops walking and turns around. I can almost see the dust settling around His feet as the crowd comes to a halt. And then He says those hard words, because He loves them too much to let them follow Him with false expectations.
He is not telling them to be cruel to their families. Jesus, who told us to love our enemies, would never ask us to hate the people we are supposed to love most. No, He is using the strongest language He can find to wake them up. He is saying, “Listen to me carefully. Following me is not a side hobby. It is not something you fit in around the edges of your regular life. It is going to cost you everything.”
Abraham’s Impossible Choice
You remember Abraham, do you not? God comes to him one day and says, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you.” Now, Abraham’s probably around seventy-five years old at this point. He has got a good life, with family around him and everything familiar and safe. But God says, “Leave it all.”
Can you imagine that conversation with his wife, Sarah? “Honey, pack everything we own. We are leaving.” “Where are we going?” “I do not know yet. God will show us.”
But Abraham went. Not because he hated his family, not because he wanted to hurt anyone. He went because he trusted God more than he trusted his own understanding. His love for God was bigger than his fear of the unknown.
That is what Jesus meant. Sometimes following Him means our love for Him has to be so complete, so all-consuming, that every other love looks small by comparison.
When the Nets Hit the Water
Or think about those fishermen—Peter and Andrew, James and John. They are out there doing what their fathers taught them, what their grandfathers probably taught their fathers. It is honest work, family work. And Jesus walks by and simply says, “Follow me.”
Matthew tells us they left their nets immediately. Can you picture that? The nets were probably still dripping with seawater, their father, Zebedee, standing there watching his boys walk away from everything they had ever known.
I do not think they were rejecting their father. I think they heard something in Jesus’ voice that told them this was the moment their whole lives had been pointing toward. This was the call they had been born to answer.
Paul’s Beautiful Mathematics
Then there is Paul. Now here is a man who had everything going for him. PhD from the best schools, connected to all the right people, respect, status, a future so bright he needed sunglasses. But then he meets Jesus on that Damascus road, and everything changes.
Later he writes these words that just break my heart: “I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.”
Garbage. Everything he had worked for, everything he had built his identity on—garbage compared to knowing Jesus. Now that is some mathematics the world does not understand.
The Freedom in Surrender
But here is what I have learnt, friends, and maybe you have learnt it too: when Jesus comes first, our love for others does not get smaller—it gets bigger. It gets cleaner. It gets free.
I remember talking to a man named David a few years back. He had come to faith when he was about fifty, and his family thought he had lost his mind. “You are wasting your Sundays,” they said. “You are throwing away everything we taught you.”
David told me, with tears running down his cheeks, “Father, I love my family more now than I ever did before. But I love Jesus more than all of them put together. And you know what? Because I love Jesus first, I do not expect my family to be perfect anymore. I do not need their approval to feel okay about myself. I can love them without demanding they love me back the same way. And that has made me free.”
That is the secret right there. When we love our spouse more than we love Jesus, our love can become possessive, jealous, and controlling. When we love our children more than we love Jesus, we might hold on too tight, trying to protect them from a world that is going to shape them whether we like it or not. But when Jesus is first, we can love without fear. We can honour our parents without being enslaved to their opinions. We can cherish our children while trusting that they belong to God even more than they belong to us.
The Cost Is Real
Now do not hear me wrong—Jesus does not sugarcoat this. He says it plain: “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” Following Him means dying to our own plans, our own ways of doing things. Sometimes it means your family does not understand you anymore. Sometimes it means choosing what is right over what is easy, choosing truth over comfort.
I think about a young woman I met named Maria. She grew up in a family with very different beliefs, and when she chose to follow Jesus, they cut her off completely. Would not speak to her, would not see her, and acted like she had died.
She said to me, “It was the hardest thing I have ever been through. But you know what? I found a new family. I have brothers and sisters all over the world now. And my earthly family—they are still in God’s hands. I pray for them every single day.”
That is what Jesus meant when He said, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” The family gets bigger, not smaller.
The Narrow Gate
Jesus tells us the gate is narrow and the road is hard. But He also promises that whoever loses their life for His sake will find it. And I have seen this happen, friends. I have watched people give up everything they thought mattered and discover a life so rich, so full, so overflowing that they wondered how they ever lived without it.
When we put Jesus above our parents, we learn how to honour them with love instead of fear. When we put Him above our spouse, we learn how to love without clinging. When we put Him above our children, we learn how to bless them without trying to control their every move. When we put Him above our own lives, we discover what it means to be truly alive.
The Great Reversal
See, here is the beautiful paradox: when we give everything to Jesus, we do not end up with less. We end up with more. So much more.
When Abraham left his country, God gave him a new one and made his descendants as numerous as the stars. When the disciples left their nets, Jesus made them fishers of men. When Paul counted everything as loss, he gained Christ and became the greatest missionary who ever lived.
The world says, “Hold on tight to what you have.” Jesus says, “Let go, and I will give you more than you can imagine.”
Coming Home
I want to close with this. These words of Jesus that sound so harsh—“hate father and mother”—they are not really about hate at all. They are about love. They are about a love so big, so wide, so deep, so eternal, that it swallows up every lesser love and makes it better.
They are the words that free us from making idols out of people who cannot carry that weight. They are the words that teach us that life is more than family, more than success, more than comfort. They are the words that call us into a love that can never be taken away.
So let us not run from these hard sayings. Let us let them do their work in us. Because Jesus is not asking for part of us—He is asking for all of us. He is asking us to love Him first, and through that love, to learn how to love everyone else the right way.
And friends, when we stand before Him at the end of all things, we are going to see that every cost was worth it. Every surrender was a gain. Every cross we carried was light compared to the glory that is coming. We are going to see that in losing our lives for His sake, we found them.
So hear the commandments again, not as contradictions but as harmony. Honour your father and your mother. Love one another as Christ has loved you. And love Jesus first—love Him so completely that all other loves find their proper place in Him.
Because when He is first, love is made whole. When He is first, life is made new. When He is first, everything else falls exactly where it belongs.
That is the love that costs everything. And friends, it is worth every penny.
May the heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all. Amen…
