Simple.Discipleship (Luke 14:25-27)
10/18/13
I want to introduce you to
someone. Someone I love and someone that
is always positive and uplifting and doesn’t expect anything of me. I would like to introduce you to my Jesus
(hold up talking Jesus doll).
“The
mountains and hills may crumble but my love for you will never end.” Thank you Jesus. In case you didn’t hear him, Jesus said “The
mountains and hills may crumble but my love for you will never end.” Lets see what else he has to say. “Your life matters so much to me.” Wow, I’m so glad my life matters to you. Isn’t that sweet? This is my Jesus and he never says anything I
don’t want to hear. Lets listen to one
more. “I knew about you before you were
even born.” Okay, anyone else saying
that and it would be creepy, but since Jesus said it it’s true and I am
thankful.
Would the real Jesus please stand up! Right.
I mean, c’mon. Jesus said some
wonderful things that give us hope and comfort in times when we need them. But Jesus also said some things that I don’t
want to hear. This Jesus doesn’t say
anything I don’t want to hear, but the real Jesus, when the real Jesus talked
about discipleship we said some things that just seem downright harsh.
This morning we are keeping Discipleship
simple and we are keeping it about what Jesus really said. Discipleship assumes that someone is doing the
discipling. Right…like a teacher student
relationship. You’ve got the disciple –
the one doing the discipling and you have the disciple – the one being taught,
being led, being discipled. Jesus is the
one who does the discipling and we are the ones trying to be like him and we do
that by being His disciple. To be his
disciple we are to be like him. Jesus
talked quite a bit about what it means to be his disciple.. That’s where I want to start. What does the one who we are trying to
emulate say about what it means to emulate him.
About what is means to be his disciple.
I thought I was going to share several
scriptures with you about Jesus talking about discipleship and share them with
you but I got to the verse we are looking at this morning and didn’t get much
farther.
So here it is…lets look at Luke 14
starting in verse 25. Jesus has just
been teaching in the house of a Pharisee and he actually heals a man on the
Sabbath and he’s challenged but then he gets out of it and continues to teach
on the Pharisees attitude of superiority.
The text when we get to verse 25 just says that large crowds were
traveling with Jesus. So he has left
from the Pharisees house and this message about discipleship is for everyone in
the crowd…it’s not for a select group of people…Jesus wants everyone to know
that to be his disciple this is one of the things that means. Starting in verse 25 (Read 25-26)
25 Large crowds
were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: 26 “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.
There are two things Jesus says about
being his disciple. The first one is
unless you hate your father and mother and even their own life…unless you do
that you cannot be my disciple. Let me
tell you up front what Jesus is not saying.
He is not literally saying we should hate our father and mother, that
would directly violate the 5th commandment and Jesus being a good Jew and Rabbi
– a jewish teach…he is not going teach something to his followers that would
violate the 5th Commandment nor any of the other commandments.
The idea here that Jesus is stressing is
where does your primary allegiance lie?
Is your allegiance first and foremost to Jesus…if so then that may cause
some tension within your family. Think
about the time this was written. In the
culture Jesus speaks you were either Jewish or Gentile. That’s it.
No other distinctions. A gentile
was simply someone not a Jew. Jesus
comes along and says all these strange things and does miracles and heals
people and starts a new movement…a new type of Judaism. So that the common categories of Jew or
Gentile now have been thrown off balance.
It’s not that simple anymore.
If you were a gentile and started
following Jesus, Jesus was a rabbi, does that mean you were now Jewish. If you were Jewish and you started believing
in Jesus…the Pharisees didn’t like him or believe in him, the Sadducess didn’t
like him or believe in him…this was a threat so you were isolated as a Jew if
you believed in Jesus.
Jesus gets right to the point with the
crowds. Where does allegiance lie? If I don’t come first, If I am not primary in
your life, if I am not the top priority, then you cannot be my disciple. That’s the point he’s making. He does it first by talking about something
people love…their families.
Over in Luke 9 we see something similar. In Luke 9 We see how personal relationships
can conflict with the call of discipleship.
There, Jesus asked someone to follow Him, but the man responds with this
excuse: "Lord, let me first go and bury my father." (Luke 9:59)
Right there, a conflict arises. If He is
truly Lord, then He is first, not us. This man was essentially saying,
"Lord, let me wait until my parents grow old and die. I don't want to
create any conflict. I'll follow You at a more convenient time."
Jesus answered: "Let the dead bury
their own dead, but you go and preach the kingdom of God." (Luke
9:60). It sounds harsh. Now just to be clear, when the man talks
about burying his father…it’s probably an ossuary that he’s talking about. Most likely the funeral already happened and
he had a time to grieve and what they did in this culture is wait until the
body was mostly bones, then bury those bones in a final resting place called an
ossuary. So Jesus isn’t being quite as
harsh as we think, but he is still making a bold and deliberate point with
dramatic flare that discipleship is about allegiance first and foremost to me. And if your allegiance isn’t first and
foremost to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit, then you cannot be His disciple.
He doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t just say unless you hate your
family…he says your own life.
Discipleship must involve dying to ourselves. In John 12:24 Jesus said it this way. We see it in Galataians 2:20 and 5:24. We see it in 1 Peter (2:24) and 2 Cor.
5:17. There is this idea throughout
scripture that to be a disciple of Jesus something in us must die. And I believe that something is our natural
tendency towards selfishness. So that
the opposite of selfishness is selflessness.
That as we grow in our faith and get to know Jesus we become more and
more like him and more and more others-centered instead of self-centered. When you are others-centered, when you are
selfless, selfishness in you has died.
Selfishness must die so that the Holy Spirit can replace it with
selflessness.
I don’t know a better place where
this is seen than in marriage. Billy Graham
said “Salvation is free but discipleship costs everything we have.” It reminds me of the difference between
falling in love and staying in love.
Anyone can fall in love, right.
It’s easy. You meet each other
and are physically attracted to one another.
You get to know each other and you share similar values and goals and
interests and all of a sudden you have fallen in love. The more time you spend together the more you
love the person. And it’s easy. It just happens from hanging out. Then you get married and it’s beautiful ceremony and for the first couple
of yeas those giddy feelings are still there and you couldn’t be happier.
At some point in marriage those
giddy feelings subside and that’s no longer the glue that holds your marriage together. The glue now, is that holy covenant, that
commitment you made to be together for better or worse. Often times what you used to love about your
spouse becomes annoying. You used to
love his high ethic. Now, you just wish
he would stop working so much and spend some time with you and children. You used to love the fact that he was so
masculine and manly and now you don’t understand why all he ever does is give
you solutions to your problems instead of trying to understand where you are
coming. Men: you used to love the fact
that she was so dependent on you. Now,
you just wish you could have some you time when you aren’t at work. You used to love her sense of humor, now it
just gets on your nerves. Marriage all
of a sudden becomes hard work. You fell
in love, that was easy, but staying in love, working on the marriage
relationship intentionally and deliberately, that hard. That takes effort and discipline and work.
Guess what word comes from
discipline that we are talking about today: disciple. To be a disciple takes discipline. It takes reading the word and being
consistent in worship services and praying and going to Bible studies and
deliberately and intentionally growing your faith. So that you can continue to understand what
it means to die to yourself. If
something in you doesn’t die when you get married, it makes marriage that much
harder. One of the last things I say at
a marriage to the couple is to commit to lay selfishness at altar and commit to
be selfless…because it is absolutely essential for a healthy marriage. And the ideal in marriage is that you are
serving one another. In Ephesians Paul
says “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” If you submit to each other, guess what you
are serving each other constantly. And
if you are serving each other constantly, you are being selfless. Now what’s cool about that in marriage is
that if you are serving each other you are also being served and who doesn’t
want to be served?
That’s how discipleship is. If you don’t deny yourself, if you don’t die
to yourself, if you don’t work on being selfless instead of selfish you cannot
be a disciple of Jesus. In Luke 9:23
Jesus says it this way “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves
and take up their cross daily and follow me.”
This doesn’t sound easy does it.
We haven’t even talked about what it means to take up your cross, in the
Luke 14 text, that’s what Jesus says next…”whoever does not carry their cross
and follow me cannot be my disciple.” I
wanted to talk about that but I don’t have time.
I want to ask you something, if
discipleship is about dying to ourselves (and denying ourselves and being
selfless purposely and deliberately) then the question is this: what needs to
die inside of you? Where have you been
selfish and self-centered? Is in a
relationship with your husband or wife?
Is it in a relationship with your children? Is it a friend or a co-worker? What inside of you needs to die? Because unless we ask that question and
really seek out the answer, Jesus says, we cannot be his disciple. Keeping this simple…discipleship is an
intentional dying to self so that we can be more like Jesus.
Salvation is free and it’s easy and
wonderful and glorious…discipleship is hard.
So pastor, why do it? Why pursue
this life of discipleship if it’s hard and if it takes so much work. Because Jesus also says in Luke 9 “whoever
loses their life for me will find it.”
In John 10:10 Jesus says I came to give life and life in
abundance.” When you lose your life by
becoming a disciple of Jesus…it may be hard and involve work…but what you
experience is the fullness of joy and the radicalness of grace and the
consistency of hope and the wonder and power of sacrificial love. It’s worth it.
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