The Cost of Discipleship
Matthew 8:18-22
What is the cost of discipleship? Jesus urged His followers to count the cost, but have any of us really taken the time to think about the cost of following Jesus, and have we settled in our hearts that we are willing to follow Him, no matter what the cost?
Martin Luther said, “A religion that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing, is worth nothing.”
"If you want to follow Jesus," remarked the activist priest Berigan, "you had better look good on wood."
The world has been a difficult and trying place for those who are serious about following Christ. Listen to the following statistics from the World Evangelical Encyclopedia:
• Since the death of Jesus Christ, 2000 years ago, 43 million Christians have become martyrs
• Over 50% of these were in the last century alone
• More than 200 million Christians face persecution each day, 60% of whom are children
• Every day over 300 people are killed for their faith in Jesus Christ.
Some of you may remember comedian Yakov Smirnoff. He said when he first came to the United States from Russia; he wasn’t prepared for the incredible variety of instant products available in American grocery stores. He says, "On my first shopping trip, I saw powdered milk--you just add water, and you get milk. Then I saw powdered orange juice--you just add water, and you get orange juice. And then I saw baby powder, and I thought to my self, what a country!"
Somewhere along the way we became convinced in this country that Christianity was ‘easy’. Just add water and ‘wala – instant Christianity”. All you had to do was go to Church once in awhile, say a few prayers, read your bible from time to time, and invite Jesus into your heart as your personal Savior, and you were good to go. You could go on living with your own goals and ambitions, you could make life the way you wanted it to be, you could do it “your way”, still get to heaven, and all would be good.
But is that what Jesus intended? What does it mean to be a follower of Christ? Is there a difference between a believer and a disciple? And if, as we have stated in our mission statement, our goal as a church is to “Make Disciples”, then what should be happening in the lives of those who attend Faith Alliance Church? Are we becoming ‘fully devoted followers of Christ’?
Theme: Jesus calls His followers to count the cost of discipleship!
There is a difference between those who follow Christ for fishes and loaves, and those who follow Christ with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. Jesus indicated this often in His teaching, but this morning I want us to look at Matthew 8:18-22. As we begin we will se first of all that:
1. There is a distinction between the crowd and the disciple.
Matthew 8:18-22
When Jesus noticed how large the crowd was growing, he instructed his disciples to cross to the other side of the lake.
Then one of the teachers of religious law said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you no matter where you go!"
But Jesus said, "Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have no home of my own, not even a place to lay my head."
Another of his disciples said, "Lord, first let me return home and bury my father."
But Jesus told him, "Follow me now! Let those who are spiritually dead care for their own dead."
Let’s start by taking a closer look at verse 18:
When Jesus noticed how large the crowd was growing, he instructed his disciples to cross to the other side of the lake.
Jesus has been ministering to the crowd near Capernaum. He had healed many diseases and driven out evil spirits. He had preached and taught the people, and so many of them followed Him that they were pressing against Him at the beach. Then Jesus gave His disciples an order: “We need to move to the other side of the Lake.”
Why would Jesus want to do this? Of course we know that He had come to seek and to save that which was lost, and that He had indicated often that He must keep moving from town to town to preach the Good News of the Kingdom of God.
But the way Matthew has worded verse 18 indicates that the motive for Jesus crossing to the other side was more than just wanted to reach the people on the other side. Matthew writes: “When Jesus noticed how large the crowd was growing, he instructed his disciples to cross to the other side of the lake.”
Jesus saw something in the crowd that was not right. Perhaps it had grown too large, but we know that Jesus preached and fed more than 15,000 people at a time when he fed the 5,000 men and their families. I think it is more likely that He observed in the crowd a desire to follow Christ solely based upon His miracles, and not out of desire to change. They were excited about what Jesus could do for them, but they did not have a heart to become ‘like Jesus’.
There is a difference between the crowd of believers we find in our country today (more than 40 million proclaim to be born again Christians) and those who are fully devoted disciples’ of Christ. Some of the differences I observe are these:
A. The crowd loved Jesus and sought Him for the help He could bring to their troubled lives. There was nothing wrong with that at first. Jesus loves people and He cares for their injuries and sorrows. He came as a healer and one He restored people to life. But the disciples had grown from following Jesus out of a hunger for His miracles to following Him out of a hunger for Him. They wanted more that just what Jesus could do for them. They wanted Jesus. It wasn’t the blessing, but the one giving the blessing that mattered most to them.
B. The crowd enjoyed listening to the teaching of Jesus, but the disciples wanted to think like Jesus and pray like Jesus and be like Jesus.
C. The crowd wanted a Savior to rescue them from all of their problems. The disciples longed for a King to rule over their lives.
D. The crowd received what they needed from Jesus and then went on with their lives, but the disciples gave up everything to be with Jesus and to join Him in His Work.
The simplest definition of a disciple is ‘student, or one who learns’. But it really means much more than that. A disciple is someone who follows a Master. It is someone whose life is shaped by the teaching of the Master. It is someone who becomes like the Master in every way, adopting the values, attitudes, actions, and principles of the Master teacher. In short, a disciple is molded and shaped into the Master’s image.
Chuck Swindoll gives this illustration:
Let’s pretend that you work for me. In fact, you are my executive assistant in a company that is growing rapidly. I’m the owner and I’m interested in expanding overseas. To pull this off, I make plans to travel abroad and stay there until a new branch office gets established. I make all the arrangements to take my family and move to Europe for six to eight months. And I leave you in charge of the busy stateside organization. I tell you that I will write you regularly and give you directions and instructions. I leave and you stay.
Months pass. A flow of letters are mailed from Europe and received by you at the national headquarters. I spell out all my expectations.
Finally, I return. Soon after my arrival, I drive down to the office and I am stunned. Grass and weeds have grown up high. A few windows along the street are broken. I walk into the Receptionist’s room. She is doing her nails, chewing gum and listening to her favorite disco station. I look around and notice the wastebaskets are overflowing. The carpet hasn’t been vacuumed for weeks, and nobody seems concerned that the owner has returned. I asked about your whereabouts and someone in the crowded lounge area points down the hall and yells, "I think he’s down there."
Disturbed, I move in that direction and bump into you as you are finishing a chess game with our sales manager. I ask you to step into my office, which has been temporarily turned into a television room for watching afternoon soap operas. "What in the world is going on?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, look at this place! Didn’t you get any of my letters?"
"Letters? Oh yes! Sure! I got every one of them. As a matter of fact, we have had a letter study every Friday since you left. We have even divided the personnel into small groups to discuss many of the things you wrote. Some of the things were really interesting. You will be pleased to know that a few of us have actually committed to memory some of your sentences and paragraphs. One or two memorized an entire letter. Great stuff in those letters."
"OK. You got my letters. You studied them and meditated on them; discussed and even memorized them. But what did you do about them?"
"Do? We didn’t do anything about them."
Jesus calls us out of the crowd and into discipleship, but in order to become a disciple we must ‘do something’. We must cross over with Jesus to the other side. We must step out of he crowd and get into the boat with Jesus. We must commit ourselves to Him, to travel where He travels, to do what He does, and to live with Him as the center of our lives day after day after day.
Have you made a decision to do that? Are you in the boat with the Lord, or are you satisfied when Jesus occasionally shows up to take care of a problem you’ve been facing? Where are you with Jesus today?
To further understand this call to commitment, Matthew talks about two people who approach Jesus with a desire to become His disciple. One asks Jesus for permission to follow Him. The other is asked by Jesus to follow. But both struggle with this call to commitment and the cost of discipleship. Let’s look at each on in our final two points.
2. To follow Jesus as a disciple means that I must sacrifice.
Look at the account of the scribe given in Matthew 8:19-20
Then one of the teachers of religious law said to him, "Teacher, I will follow you no matter where you go!"
But Jesus said, "Foxes have dens to live in, and birds have nests, but I, the Son of Man, have no home of my own, not even a place to lay my head."
We don’t know who this scribe is. We know nothing of his background, only that of all the other scribes and teachers that followed Jesus from time to time, this was one of the few who responded to Christ with a desire to become His disciple. Perhaps He had been a part of the crowd that had heard the Sermon on the Mount and had then seen Jesus do many miracles of healing in Capernaum. And now He wants to know more. He wants to become a disciple of Christ.
But Jesus doesn’t just welcome him with open arms. Instead, Jesus asks this scribe to count the cost. Following Jesus as a disciple comes at a cost. It involves sacrifice. No servant is above His Master. If Jesus was rejected and harassed and criticized and even killed, the followers of Christ should expect no better treatment.
Jesus had nothing. He gave up His home and His income. He had no furniture. He didn’t own a car. The only possessions He had in life where the clothes He wore and those would eventually be won in a gambling contest at the foot of the cross.
Jesus lived a life of service to others. He was pressed upon by crowds of people wanting help. He spent many sleepless nights in prayer. He depended upon God the Father for every physical need. Even the animals have a place to call their own, but Jesus had no home. His home was in heaven with His Father.
As followers of Christ, we too become sojourners, travelers and aliens living on a planet that is not our home. Our home is in heaven with God. We pass through this life and what we think we possess is really not ours. It belongs to the Lord, and we simply are stewards.
To be a disciple of Christ means you must be willing to sacrifice many of the pleasures of this world. You must be willing to suffer for the sake of Christ. You must be willing to die to self, and to live for others. You must daily take up your cross and follow Him.
Are you willing to pay the price?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the Christian who stood up to the Nazi’s and was killed in a concentration camp in 1945) put it this way:
“The cross is laid on every Christian. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death–we give over our lives to death. The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
We have changed in this country. We have given up the idea of sacrifice for Christ, and have replaced it with comfortable pews and easy services that don’t demand too much from us. But it has not always been that way:
Many churches years ago had mourner’s benches. Charles Allen in his book God’s Psychiatry said “Today we want God’s blessing without the pain of God’s purging. We want sermons on how to win friends, how to have peace of mind, how to forget our fears. But we must remember that Christ came to make men good rather than merely to make men feel good!”
To be a disciple of Jesus means that I enter into training to become like my King. He will discipline me and train me through many trials and difficulties. All of this is done out of love, not to harm me, but to make me stronger – to make me ready for the Kingdom.
James Packer in His book: “Your father loves you” gives this illustration from the world of the military:
“Thank you, sir! May I do another?”
Crouching on the ground, the recruit seemed barely touched by the sergeant’s rough treatment. He was doing push-ups; and a lot of them. Each time he pushed his struggling frame up, the sergeant would rest his boot on the small of the private’s back and down he would go again. Then his overseer would bark, “What do you like, soldier?” The recruit, prone and struggling to complete just one more cycle of lift, would shout out, “Thank you sir, may I do another?”
Although it was obvious that the recruit really wasn’t interested in doing another push-up, it was also certain that he knew exactly what he was doing. It was the sergeant’s expectation that the recruit would ask, so the soldier made it his will to meet that expectation. He had been drilled to believe that the pain and the effort would be worth it in the end. The sergeant had guaranteed him that when he was through with his “style” of training, the recruit would be fit for duty and able to deal with anything the enemy might hand out.
We, as witnesses to that scene, would probably see the sergeant’s actions as mean-spirited and unmotivating. Watching that recruit go up and down, always asking for more would put our minds in a spin. There is no logic to this kind of behavior. Wouldn’t the carrot and the stick be more motivating than pain and punishment? “It certainly isn’t the way that we would be motivated anyway!” Nevertheless, this tried and true regime has been used for centuries in training recruits, because it works.
When a soldier is in a war-time situation there often isn’t opportunity to think things through. Following orders at that critical juncture is all that matters; even when those orders mean harsh, even death-defying tasks. There needs to be an action/reaction instinct in a soldier. Since it can’t be the “fright/flight” which is innate in every person, the trainer needs to reshape the reaction to fit the action. And there’s only one way to do that--drill!
Much in the same way that this sergeant was helping the recruit to become a soldier, our heavenly Father will take us through a regiment of discipline to become like Jesus. But are we really willing to pay the price? Are we willing to sacrifice everything in order to follow Jesus? Are we willing to get in the boat, even though their may be storms brewing out on the Lake?
The final illustration comes from one of the disciples that Jesus challenged to cross over. Some speculate that this disciple was Thomas, or perhaps Philip. Would they be willing to pay the price and follow Jesus, no matter what the cost? In the parallel Gospel in Luke 9 we see that Jesus first approached this disciple and asked him to follow. But the disciple had an excuse.
3. When Jesus calls we must not hesitate.
Matthew 8:21-22
Another of his disciples said, "Lord, first let me return home and bury my father."
But Jesus told him, "Follow me now! Let those who are spiritually dead care for their own dead."
At first glance this appears to be cruel on the part of Jesus, but we must remember that in Eastern cultures, the dead were buried within the first 24 hours. What is most likely happening here is not that this man’s father had died. Certainly Jesus could have waited a few hours or a day.
The phrase used by this man was a common Near Eastern figure of speech that referred to a son’s responsibility to help his father in the family business until the father died and the inheritance was distributed. Obviously such a commitment could involve a long period of time, thirty or forty years or more if the father was relatively young.
The expression is still used in parts of the Middle East today. A few years ago a missionary asked a rich young Turkish man to go with him on a trip to Europe, during which time the missionary hoped to disciple the man. When the young man replied that he must bury his father, the missionary offered his sympathy and expressed surprise that the father had died. The man explained, however, that his father was alive and healthy and that the expression “bury my father” simply meant staying at home and fulfilling his family responsibilities until his father died and he received his share of the inheritance.
This guy in our story wanted to be sure to be around for the reading of the will. He said, “I trust you Jesus, but I want to hedge my bets with my inheritance.”
The response given by Jesus indicates that when He calls us to follow, He expects us to obey without delay. The word: “follow me” is in the present imperative. Jesus is literally saying: “Today, this hour, I want you to follow me and become my disciple.”
The call of Jesus comes before any call of this world. Our obedience to Him must take priority over our obedience to any other obligation or duty we may feel we have. Jesus does not want us to neglect our families, but our families are never to pull us away from following the Lord. When there is a conflict, Jesus must always come first! So much so that at another point in time Jesus indicated that our love for our families must look like hatred in comparison to our love for our Lord.
Are you putting Jesus first? Are you paying the price to follow Him, or are you looking for any and all kinds of excuses to avoid obeying Him? Even if those excuses appear to be noble and full of good intentions, if they are keeping us from following Christ –then they are wrong!
We need more of the attitude of the young boy who ran the mile for his school in a high school competition.
The command came, "On your mark, get set," and then the pistol cracked and the race was on. A fine athlete sprang to the lead, and when the race was over he had broken the state record. Only a few other runners even finished the race. Many dropped out when they saw they could not win. As the field crew was bringing out the hurdles for the next race, one of the judges yelled, "Get those hurdles out of the way. This race is not over. Look!" And around the turn came a runner, panting, & staggering. The crowd stood in silent disbelief as he made his way over the last hundred yards, and literally fell across the finish line, grinding his face into the cinder track.
One of the judges ran to the boy, turned him over on his back, took his handkerchief and wiped the blood from his face. "Son, why didn’t you drop out? What are you doing in the mile race anyway?" Between gasps, the boy explained that his school had a good miler who had gotten sick just a few days before. The coach had promised to have a man in every event, and so he had asked the boy to run the mile. "Well son, why didn’t you just drop out when you saw that you had lost?" The boy answered, "Judge, they didn’t send me here to quit. They didn’t send me here to win. They sent me here to run this mile, & I ran it!"
That is the heart of a disciple. That boy did exactly what his coach had asked him to do, regardless of the cost and whether or not anyone else was doing it. Sometimes this commitment to follow can come at a great cost.
In Pakistan eighteen-year-old Mohan Shazad grew up making bricks for less than a dollar a day. To free himself from that near-slavery, he began selling Christian literature to the brick kiln workers.
“Late last September as Mohan was riding his bike home from a day of selling literature, two men whose faces were covered with black scarves jumped out of a sugar cane field onto the road. Mohan abruptly stopped his bicycle to avoid a collision. One of the assailants pointed a pistol at Mohan. The other wielded an axe. They demanded Mohan stop distributing the Christian literature. When he refused, one of the attackers swung the axe at Mohan, slicing into his flesh and severing his left arm. The assailants fled as Mohan lay on the road bleeding, writhing in pain.
“Help arrived, and Mohan was taken to a nearby hospital. There was little the inexperienced and ill-equipped doctors could do to reattach his left arm.” There followed months of inadequate medical care, infection, hospitalization, and then some help from a Christian ministry to get the medical care he needed.
“Mohan told us he plans to resume his Christian literature distribution activities and will find a way to continue the work God has called him to do. ‘I have lost my one arm; even if they cut (off) my other body parts, I am ready for that. I will carry on with my work even if death is the result. Building the Lord’s kingdom is the mission of my life.”
Contrast this attitude with the attitude of the disciple who wanted to stick around home until his father had passed and he had received his inheritance. Which one was worthy to be called a disciple of the Lord?
Will you follow Jesus? Will you count the cost, step out of the crowd and get into the boat with Him?
Let me close with this illustration from Fred Craddock:
"We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a $l, 000 bill and laying it on the table-- ’Here’s my life, Lord. I’m giving it all.’
But the reality for most of us is that he sends us to the bank and has us cash in the $l, 000 for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here and 50 cents there. We listen to the neighbor kid’s troubles instead of saying, ’Get lost.’ We go to a committee meeting instead of doing what we want to do. We give a cup of water to a shaky old man in a nursing home instead of hanging out with our friends.
Usually giving our life to Christ isn’t glorious. It’s done in all those little acts of love, 25 cents at a time. It would be easy to go out in a flash of glory; it’s harder to live the Christian life little by little over the long haul."
Are you willing to begin today? Let’s pray.
