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Jesus! “Counting the Cost of Following Jesus” (Luke 14:25-35)

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Jesus! “Counting the Cost of Following Jesus” (Luke 14:25-35) Script, Pastor Frank Johnson Jesus! “Counting the Cost of Following Jesus” (Luke 14:25-35) 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 Christ. 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. Page 1 of 4 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 disciple.” 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 gospel 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 parable 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.
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