Script, Pastor Frank Johnson ! “Counting the Cost of Following Jesus” (:25-35)

Take a first look.

I. Five young men were murdered while trying to serve the “Auca” Indians of Ecuador back in 1956. Those they had gone to serve were the ones who murdered them. A major question asked by many following that grim incident was this: “Was it worth it?” Did they live and die in vain? Was the cost of their discipleship too steep? One year after those five men were killed, their wives (and a sister) came together to make a statement. Elizabeth Elliot spoke for all of them when she said, “We have proved beyond any doubt that [God] means what He says—His grace is sufficient, nothing can separate us from the love of . We pray that if any, anywhere, are fearing that the cost of discipleship is too great, that they may be given to glimpse that treasure in heaven promised to all who forsake.”1

II. Was the cost too high to keep those women from finding comfort in their grief? No, it wasn’t. Was the cost too high to keep them from going into the tribe themselves to carry on where their husbands (and brother, in the case of Rachel Saint) had barely begun? No, it wasn’t. Is it too high for us to pay? How will we answer this question today?

Take a closer look at Luke 14:25-35.

Insights:

I. FOLLOWING JESUS REQUIRES A COST REGARDING ALL OUR PRIMARY RELATIONSHIPS.

1. Is Jesus asking His followers to “hate” in the usual sense of this word? The simple answer to this question is simply, “Of course not.” The One Who commanded us, “Love your enemies,” has not contradicted His own teaching in this context. He is using a figure of speech that we call hyperbole (a word itself that we have stolen from Greek). Hyperbole is overstatement, intentional exaggeration meant to give added emphasis to the point being made. It also has shock effect, especially in the saying before us. Luke tells us that “large crowds” were traveling along with Jesus. Perhaps Jesus discerned that they were mindlessly pursuing the latest religious fad, trying to get a personal glimpse of this itinerant rabbi. With characteristic directness, Jesus turned to the crowd and “put it to them.” To “hate” here has been compared to giving a student a failing grade, or compared to rejecting a candidate for a job.2 It is not meant to express the human emotion of wishing harm to come to someone who appears to have hurt us, cherishing resentment toward a perceived enemy. In the way Jesus used the term here, it means rather to “choose against.” It is a matter of comparison. Compared to our love and devotion to Jesus Christ, all other human claims for affection or allegiance pale. They might even be perceived as actual hatred. When the choice must be made between one and the other, Christ is always and without question chosen first.

2. Following Jesus has a cost regarding our families. Jesus begins with the immediate family: father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters. Our allegiance to our families should pale in comparison to our love for Christ. If this is not so, Jesus says, we “cannot be [his] disciples.”

A—If it came down to choosing Christ before the members of our immediate family, what would we do?

1 News release following the incident. 2 See C. S. Lewis’s treatment of this passage in his book The Four Loves.

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I—Some of the first members of the Colville Valley Baptist Church when it was founded back in 1970 by my father were a mother and her three children, two daughters and a son. Her husband was not interested in the things of God. My father met him and tried to reach him, but he was not willing to respond. That young mother continued to attend faithfully. She had a very gentle servant-spirit. She became the little mission’s secretary and treasurer. Many prayers were offered for her husband. He made his choice, however, not to seek the Lord. In time, this began to wear away on his wife’s resolve to be faithful to the Lord. He would often hassle her for her faithful attendance at church. At some point in time, she made a fateful decision. She agreed to take weekend trips with him regularly and he offered to attend a morning worship service with her on at least some occasions. I am not sure if or for how long he kept his side of the bargain, if at all. I do know that in time, the weekends away eroded that sensitive mother’s heart. She began to attend irregularly and eventually stopped attending at all. The compromise with her husband about the two or three hours a week that she gave to seeking the Lord proved fatal to her Christian growth. She remained a morally upright person, but she lost her spiritual edge. In effect, she moved from putting Christ first in her affections and placed her marriage there. According to Jesus, not only did she lose, but so did he and so did her children. She lost the potential of her growth and her contribution to the kingdom of God. He lost the example of a growing Christian right in his home. Her children lost the influence of the church.

3. Following Jesus has a cost regarding ourselves. The calling is clear: “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my .” The challenge here is to put Jesus in the place of self. To “carry the cross” surely resonated in the minds of Jesus’ hearers. Undoubtedly, these people had seen men “carry their cross.” It was a one-way trip to certain death. This is surely another jarring image, a hyperbole in the physical sense, that surely pressed Jesus’ point home. To follow Jesus meant to die to a way of life that does not have Him at the center.

A—How do we need to allow Jesus to rise to prominence in our own hearts today?

I—I remind you of one slice of the story of Jim Elliot, one of the five men who were martyred by the Aucas of Ecuador in 1956. Jim was a very bright student. His parents saw a highly successful future for him. He was always the top of his class academically. He was brimming with personality. He had the potential for greatness in business or in education. When he informed his parents that he wanted to be a missionary to the tribal peoples of the world, being used by God in reaching a people-group that had never heard the message, they were disappointed, at least at first. They saw this career decision as a waste of his superior potential. I wonder if they felt this even more when the report reached them that he had been killed within the first weeks of making contact with the tribal group in the jungles of Ecuador? Could they have asked, “Why did such a bright light have to be extinguished in such a dark place? Why couldn’t he have been used by God in a large church in America, or in a college or seminary where he could shape the coming generations of Christian leaders? Why was he snuffed out in the jungle with so little fruit to show for his efforts? The answer lies in something that Jim Elliot had made clear prior to going out in Christ’s name. What if they were killed by the so-called “savages” they were trying to convert to Christ? The answer was that these men had died before they left the country. They had already released their selfish grasp on possessions, on family, on life itself. They had placed all of that in the hands of God. They were ready to follow Christ anywhere no matter what the immediate outcome would be. The lives of those five men have been called five “seeds” that God planted in the soil of the jungle that eventually led to the salvation of many of even those who had killed them. Unless we have died to our own self-interest, we will not even be willing to become inconvenienced for the cause of Christ, not to mention we will not have the character or conviction for martyrdom. If we have not died to ourselves, we will take offense easily, our “feelings will be on our sleeves,” as the saying goes, and we will have no ability to extend grace to others. Worse, we will not be willing to admit error ourselves and seek the forgiveness of others. If we have not died to ourselves, we will become angry easily

Page 2 of 4 at irritations and sudden changes to our plans. We will continue to maintain the illusion that we should somehow be able to control our own schedule, and we will not be able to submit our plans and our days to Christ. “Anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

II. FOLLOWING JESUS REQUIRES COUNTING THE COST BEFORE ENTERING THE LIFE.

1. Counting the cost of following Jesus is like preparing to Build a tower. Jesus’ first to make his point is about building a tower. He appeals to logic and to pride in this parable. The logic goes like this: will the builder have enough money to complete the tower once he has begun? This is just the simple logic of planning. The second appeal is to human pride: if the foundation is laid and the tower is never completed, the builder will invite mockery. This parable confronts the free choice of every person. Here is the application:

A—Are we willing to pay the “cost of discipleship”? Are we willing to make Christ first in our lives, above all else, including our own comfort and convenience?

I—Commentator Leon Morris quotes R. J. Harris, who states clearly: “Discipleship is not periodic volunteer work on one’s own terms and at one’s convenience.”3 This is why some great missionaries have made such an impact on their potential admirers. Henry Stanley was the journalist who searched in central Africa until he found Livingstone. Stanley was driven by an insatiable curiosity. When he found Livingstone, Stanley did more than admire him. Livingstone’s life moved him to Christ. In Stanley’s words, “For months after we met I found myself listening to him, wondering at the old man carrying out the words, ‘Leave all and follow Me.’ But little by little, seeing his piety, his gentleness, his zeal, his earnestness I was converted by him, although he had not tried to do it.”4 What an impact genuine discipleship can have on the watching world! Are we willing to pay the price?

2. Counting the cost of following Jesus is like preparing to wage war. The second parable changes the terms a bit of what it means to follow Jesus. In this case of waging war, the king is trying to decide whether to defend his country against an invading force twice the size of his army. The issue is similar but different from the terms in the first parable. In the parable of the tower-builder, the free choice of the builder is emphasized. Here, there is still free choice, but the choice is forced. The king has not chosen for his kingdom to be invaded. A. M. Hunter, in his modern classic on Interpreting the , draws the distinction well: “In the first parable Jesus says, ‘Sit down and reckon whether you can afford to follow me.’ In the second He says, ‘Sit down and reckon whether you can afford to refuse my demands.’”5 Jesus has launched a counter-invasion into the world of Adam and Eve. It is an assault on sin and death, and He intends to “set the captives free” (Isaiah 61:1ff.).

3. The requirement of following Jesus is giving our all. Jesus spells out what He means again, just in case anyone got lost in the parables. The demand of following Jesus is to release our ownership of all we possess into Jesus’s possession. We then become managers (“stewards” was the older word) of what essentially belongs to Him.

A—Jesus doesn't remain passive in this matter of human salvation. In a coming section of Luke's gospel, we will see that “the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.” He is waging war against the self-centered approach to human life. Jesus seeks to liberate us from clinging to temporary control of what can’t last. He wants us instead to grasp firmly what lasts forever.

3 Leon Morris, Luke, revised edition, TNTC, p. 258. 4 Henry Stanley, on David Livingstone. "William Carey," Christian History, Issue 36. 5 Quoted in Morris, Luke, TNTC, p. 259.

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I—It is only as we follow Him fully that His promise of joy and fulfillment becomes real for us. Consider this analogy. “On June 6, 1981, Doug Whitt and his bride, Sylvia, were escorted to their hotel’s fancy bridal suite in the wee hours of the morning. In the suite they saw a sofa, chairs, and table, but where was the bed? Then they discovered the sofa was a hide-a-bed, with a lumpy mattress and sagging springs. They spent a fitful night and woke up in the morning with sore backs. “The new husband went to the hotel desk and gave the management a tongue-lashing. ‘Did you open the door in the room?’ asked the clerk. Doug went back to the room. He opened the door they had thought was a closet. There, complete with fruit baskets and chocolates, was a beautiful bedroom!” Cynthia Thomas, who told this story in an edition of Leadership journal a few years ago, draws the moral: “Opening all the doors in a honeymoon suite is like obeying all the words of Jesus. Discipleship is the door to happiness.”6

III. FOLLOWING JESUS REQUIRES BEING SALT.

1. We can either be good salt that changes its context.

2. Or, we can be worthless salt that has no effect. This illustration would not have much meaning in our present context. We know that the chemical composition of true salt, sodium chloride, does not breakdown over time. In other words, it cannot become “unsalty.” But the salt in common use in the first century was far from pure. It was possible for the true sodium chloride to become leached out of their seasoning salt, so that what was left was … nothing. The taste of salt was gone and so was its seasoning or preserving power. With this background, the saying has much more meaning.

A—If we allow ourselves to develop mixed motives, the temporary priorities of the heart to subtly take center stage, our discipleship will become worthless as far as the kingdom of God is concerned.

I—The great Scottish pastor of the 19th century Andrew Murray made the calling of discipleship clear: “The true pupil, say of some great musician or painter, yields his master a wholehearted and unhesitating submission. In practicing his scales or mixing the colors, in the slow and patient study of the elements of his art, he knows that it is wisdom simply and fully to obey. “It is this wholehearted surrender to His guidance, this implicit submission to His authority, which Christ asks. We come to Him asking Him to teach us the lost art of obeying God as He did. … The only way of learning to do a thing is to do it. The only way of learning obedience from Christ is to give up your will to Him and to make the doing of His will the one desire and delight of your heart.”7

Take it home (applications).

I. ARE WE TRULY CHRIST’S DISCIPLES? Have we submitted ourselves to the Master Artist in the craft of human life? Have we counted and paid the cost of truly following Him? Have we yielded ourselves to His invasion of our souls?

II. WHAT DIFFERENCE ARE WE MAKING IN GOD’S WORLD AT PRESENT? Are we preserving and adding the seasoning of the Eternal to our neighborhoods, our classrooms, our families, our circles of friendship and acquaintance?

6 Cynthia Thomas, Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Leadership, Vol. 15, no. 1. 7 Andrew Murray in With Christ in the School of Obedience. Today, Vol. 30, no. 13.

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