We have been looking at what it means to be a follower of Jesus. What does it mean to be a disciple? For last few week we looked at Jesus’ call to follow Him. The call to be a disciple of Jesus, to follow Him is not for the faint hearted.
Mark 8:34 And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.
Jesus' call to take up our cross can be found in several places in the Gospels and Jesus said it more than once. Jesus' call is for total commitment, even to the point of death.
There are those who get excited and jump up and say to Jesus “I will follow you anywhere”
Luke 9:57 As they were going along the road, someone said to Him, “I will follow You wherever You go.”
But Jesus said:
Luke 9:58 And Jesus said to him, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.”
Are we willing to give up the necessities of life to follow Jesus? Many make false starts, then fall away.
Today we will look at our commitment to following Jesus, we must do so with our eyes wide open, we must “Count the Cost.” Are we will truly willing to follow Jesus through thick and thin? Are we willing to endure suffering and being without? Do we truly count the cost?
Luke 14:25–33
Opening Ill: In May 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin with 138 officers and men, two three-masted ship with newly fitted steam engines, set sail from England to find the Northwest passage across northern Canada, a route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans through the Arctic. They had a 3 year food supply along with 1,200 volume book library, an hand organ, China place settings, Sterling silver flatware with ornate Victorian design with the crest of the individual officer’s families and the officer’s initials on them. They carries no special clothing for living on the ice in the arctic, just the uniforms of Her Majesty’s Navy.
The two ship left amidst much glory and fanfare. Two months later a British whaling ship met the two ships in Lancaster Sound, in north Canada. The whalers reported back in England the spirits of the men and officer where quite high. The whalers were the last Europeans to see them.
It was many years later, the fate of the expedition was revealed. In fact the two ships that were abandoned in 1848, after being stuck in ice, were only found recently in 2014 and 2016. Later it was reported that some Inuit Eskimos has chanced across a few survivors at one point as they were making their way over land pulling an pushing a small boat across the ice.
For over twenty years, search parties recovered the remains from all over the frozen sea. From one group of frozen bodies was found place settings of sterling silver flatware engraved with the officers’ initials and family crests. Sir John Franklin and 138 men perished because they underestimated the requirements of Arctic exploration. They ignorantly imagined a pleasure cruise amidst the comforts of their English officers’ clubs. They exchanged necessities for luxuries, and their ignorance led to their death.[1]
They failed to adequately “count the cost.”
As I reviewed with you last week, we need to remember that in these verses, starting in Luke 9, Jesus is slowly traveling to Jerusalem. Betrayal, rejection, suffering, and death waits for Jesus there.
Luke 14:25a Now large crowds were going along with Him …
In fact from our passage it sounds like Jesus want to pare down the crowds, to talk people out of following Him. Jesus proceeds and tells the crowd to examine their resolve to continue to follow Him. Most the crowd were disciples in name only. Many were spiritual thrill seekers. They loved the sermons and the loved seeing the miracles. They love multiplication of loaves and fishes. It all was great until it came time where it will cost them something. Jesus proceeds to tell what it takes to be His disciple.
1. We must love Jesus supremely.
2. We must carry our cross.
3. We must renounce all of our possessions.
Let’s look at loving Jesus supremely
Luke 14:25–26 Now large crowds were going along with 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.
Jesus here uses what called a hyperbole, an obvious exaggeration to make a point, as He often does. Jesus was also using a Semitic idiom. To love one person more than another in the OT is saying to love one and to hate the other. We must love Jesus Christ supremely, more than anything or anyone else. In a greater context we see that Jesus calls for us to love others.
Matthew 22:37–39 And He said to him, “ ‘YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’
Funny thing about our love for Christ, the more we love him, the more we’ll love our father and mother, brother, sister, wife and children, and even ourselves. Matthew records Jesus saying this a little more gentler way:
Matthew 10:37 “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.
We must love Jesus supremely, more than family, more than possession, more than wealth or power, more than ourselves. Then there is sacrifice. We must be willing to give it all up for Him.
Luke 14:27 Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.
We read the very same thing a few weeks ago from Mark 8:34 and even here in Luke, Jesus said basically the same thing in Luke 9:23. To put this into context, we must remember that Jesus is on His way to Jerusalem and that very week He arrives, He will be hanging on a Roman cross. What does it mean to carry our cross in this context? Let’s review for a moment what we said two weeks ago:
Often we talk about a particular burden and we will call it our cross to bear. We miss the meaning of this text by saying that. The audience of that day knew what carrying one’s cross meant. The convicted criminal, in an act of total humiliation, carried his cross publicly to the place of execution.. It was a very public admission of guilt and acknowledgment of the rightness of the Roman government.
To carry our cross daily, means to identify with Christ in shame and suffering and surrender will. It means death to self every day. Death to our plans, our ambitions and a demonstration of an open willingness to serve Him in any way He directs, even to the point of death. Carrying our cross shows that we love Him more than we love ourselves. Carrying our cross is not something force upon us, but something we freely choose to do. We ought to be willing to pay all we have for Him because He paid His all for us.
Let’s look at our last verse of our focal passage:
Luke 14:33 So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.
This is perhaps one of the more unpopular verses in the Bible. There are no halfway followers. This did not say we must take a vow of poverty, but it does say we cannot be so attached to any of our possessions that it hinders our following of Jesus. Jesus proceeds this with a couple of examples:
Luke 14:28–30 28 For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’
There is one thing the world hates more than a Christian; They have utter contempt for a half-hearted, un-committed Christian. Many so-called “Christians” avoid cross bearing by living nominal lives, they only want to get their feet wet – they won’t jump in.
Luke 14:31–32 Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.
Look at the king – as he goes to war it’s all or nothing.
But both parables emphasize the necessity of careful calculation—to “sit down,” take some time, and compute it all out. This was where the Franklin expedition went awry. The upside was that their failure to calculate the cost paved the way for the success of future expeditions. In the following decade no less than thirty ships set out looking for traces of the Franklin expedition, all with increasingly careful calculations of what it would take to succeed. Ultimately they mapped the Arctic, found the Northwest Passage, and developed a technology that conquered the Arctic.[2]
An alternate interpretation of these passages about the builder and the king going to war; they are analogies NOT of us – but of God. He sit down and count the cost – with us being in question. Campbell Morgan a great theologian of the last century said He is the One who must “count the cost” to see whether we are the kind of material He can use to build the church and battle the enemy. He cannot get the job done with half-hearted followers who will not pay the price. [3]
Can God expect a full commitment from us? Let’s be careful how we answer that. Remember Peter? He said he would go to the death before he denied Jesus 3 times.
I’ve officiated at a few weddings as I counseled with the bride and groom. I did not say – you only need to put a partial effort into it. I did not say – marriage is only when you felt like it. I did not say – it will work only when the mood strikes you. I did not say – only when you had that loving feeling. Both the husband and the wife must give their all to each other to make the marriage.
As we watch football, what would we think of the coach who said: “Play hard only if you feel like it." Coach doesn’t expect any less than 150% from the players. The coach doesn’t care if a player just isn’t in the mood, the coach doesn’t care if the player is having a bad day.
Another way of looking at this is in terms of preparation. Are willing to pay the price of preparation. Get the required training, do the Bible study, spend the time in prayer required to do the work, to fulfill the tasks that Jesus lays out for you to do. Are we willing to prepare ourselves? Like building a tower, we see if we have what it takes, and what we are lacking, do we work to obtain it?
I’ve told you before about my call into the ministry. God’s call to me was to completely change my profession. From the time I first heard the call in February of 1990 until I because a full time pastor, here at Rosemont, took 20 years. From February 1990 to March 2010. In fact I did not graduated from seminary until later that same year.
What is God calling for you to do? Are you willing to commit all you have to do to accomplish the tasks laid before you? Are you willing to make whatever preparations it takes?
Look at the verses the completes this 14th chapter of Luke.
Luke 14:34–35 “Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned? 35 It is useless either for the soil or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”
This reads very similar to what we read in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:13. A half hearted Christian is like salt that has lost its flavor. A disciple who gives up in midstream because the going is too tough or is ill prepared is like salt which has lost its taste and is unfit for seasoning food or even for use on the ground; it cannot be made useful again.[4]
Jesus did not need the crowd, who were mostly disciples in name only, Jesus called for those who would commit all to him.
[1] R. Kent Hughes, Luke: That You May Know the Truth, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998), 124. Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin%27s_lost_expedition
[2] Ibid, 128.
[3] Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 1 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 232.
[4] I. Howard Marshall, “Luke,” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1005.
