Hate Your Family

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, happy Sunday to you. It’s good to see you here for our worship service. I have a few things I’d like to call your attention to before we get started.

Thank you to everyone who came out in the heat yesterday morning to work on our pavilion and playground. Both of those have new paint and look great. It was hot work but good work, so thank you all.

The men’s group will be meeting tonight at 6:30. That will be followed tomorrow night by our safety team meeting, and then on Tuesday with our deacon meeting. If you’re a deacon or on the safety team, please try to attend those.

Our community revival begins just a week from today, and the local pastors have been busy finalizing some things. Right now we’re calling for volunteers to help with some small activities during the week, such as directing parking and picking up trash. We also need volunteers for our community fun day on that Saturday. There’s a sign-up sheet on the bulletin board right outside the door here, so please, after the service, head on back there and add your name wherever you can. All the churches will be pooling volunteers, but it would be nice if our church, as host, had the strongest showing of people willing to serve.

Also, if you are available and willing this coming Wednesday morning, Gospel Hill Ministries will be bringing the tent to set up. It’s a big tent that can hold 400 people, so the call is also going out to all the churches to have people here who can help set that up. They’ve also asked that you bring a cordless drill if you have one to help set up the stage. That’s this coming Wednesday at 9:00am.

Coming behind that, Shane Lilly is an associate pastor at Church on the Hill in Fishersville. He also heads a prayer group called Valley Intercessors. Shane reached out to me this week and asked if Valley Intercessors could hold prayer here under the tent next Saturday evening at 6:00. If you’d like to come and join them in prayer for our community revival, please do. There’s a flyer on the bulletin board by our signup sheet giving you more information on that.

Finally, please continue to be in prayer for Danny Johnson. Danny had to be taken to the UVA Emergency Room on Friday. He is in a lot of pain and is not doing well. He very much enjoyed your birthday cards and covets your prayers, so please continue to pray for Danny, Brenda, Anthony, and their family.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we come to you this morning in worship of a God who hears, a God who understands, a God who knows, a God upon his eternal throne over all creation. Truly you are our only source of life. You are the source of our hope and our peace. All we have and all we are is yours, Father. To you we trust our hearts and our very being. Let your Spirit be present in this place. Lift up our hearts, our minds, our very lives to you. For it’s in Jesus’s name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

We’re continuing our series on looking at some of the more difficult passages of the Bible (and by the way, these are just a few of the ones I’ve struggled with at one time or another. If there’s a part of scripture you’ve always found hard to understand and would like a sermon on it, please let me know and I’ll get that done).

Last week, we talked about what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God. Today we’re turning to the New Testament and some words spoken by Jesus.

There are quite a few things Jesus said that we could include in this series. The Gospels are full of moments when Jesus says something that just kind of shocks us shocks us, which is one of the ways he loved to teach. A lot of Jesus’s teaching was designed to wake people up, to get them to see the world and God in a new and truer way, and Jesus always knew exactly how to speak to whoever was around him. No one in history knew people the way Jesus did, which makes sense because he knows every person’s heart, and he knows our hearts because we’re all made in the Father’s image.

He also had a lot of enemies during his time on earth. There was Satan, of course, and there were the religious and Roman authorities. But if you read through the gospels you’ll find that a lot of times, the biggest enemy Jesus often confronted was the spiritual laziness hiding inside of people, and that laziness was often found in the crowds that would accompany him, crowds filled with people who followed Jesus for the wrong reasons and with the wrong expectations.

From the earliest times in Christ’s ministry, God’s grace has been at the center of all Christian teaching. God’s grace means not getting what you deserve. It’s God being good toward those who deserve only punishment, which is all of us. Our salvation — our eternal home in heaven — doesn’t depend in any way by anything we can do or be, it’s given only by God’s grace.

And that’s the best news we could ever possibly hear, because it means we’re free in the truest sense. We don’t have to be weighed down by our mistakes. We don’t have to try to settle a debt that even a lifetime of good deeds could repay. Jesus took all of your sins, all of your failures, all of your mess, and said, “I’ll take care of this for you,” then he died as if all that mess was his own so you could be perfect in God’s eyes.

Grace doesn’t cost you anything. That message has for the most part been preached in every Christian church in every corner of the world from the time of Christ to right now. But the early church and much of the modern church are different in one important way. The early church also preached that even though grace is free, there’s a deep cost to you that comes with it. Nowadays a lot of people don’t like to hear that. A lot of people don’t like to preach it. We like the getting something free part, but we flinch when we hear that the thing you get, no matter how wonderful it is, comes with conditions and expectations.

That’s the background for the passage that we’re going to talk about today, which is found in the gospel of Luke. Turn there with me now, Luke chapter 14, starting in verse 25 and continuing through verse 33:

25 Now great crowds accompanied 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.

27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

28 For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?

29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him,

30 saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’

31 Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?

32 And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.

33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

And this is God’s word.

Crowds. Crowds everywhere. “Great crowds,” says verse 25, all of these people following Jesus to Jerusalem. Many of them are going to celebrate Passover when they come across him and hear his teaching. Others have been with Jesus for a while now. They’re astonished at his miracles. There hear rumors that he’s the Messiah. There’s excitement. There’s something building all through the nation.

You’d think this was a high point in Jesus’s ministry. But it isn’t, because again — he knows the people’s hearts. Jesus knows most of these people aren’t following him, they’re following their idea of him. They’re following what they think the Messiah should do, according to them. Some of these people are there because they’re true believers. They’re true disciples. But a lot of them are there because they think the kingdom Jesus is building is going to be a worldly one. A worldly kingdom of wealth and comfort and prosperity, and they want in on that.

That’s the fight Jesus fought during his whole ministry, and it’s one that we as his followers have to fight over and over again too — it’s not this life that he’s focusing on, it’s the next one. Not the life that’s going to end, but the life that will never end. Not our treasures and our comforts here in this world, which we’ll only enjoy — at the very most — 90 or 100 years, but the treasures and comforts that we’ll enjoy forever. And Jesus wants the people around him to understand that. He’s never going to lead anyone astray. He’s always going to be completely honest. Which is why he stops along that road and turns to all that crowd following and says in verse 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.”

Just imagine what’s going on in the minds of all those people who’ve been following him along that road. They’ve never heard Jesus speak this way. Jesus was always about love, about grace and mercy, about forgiveness. But this right here? This is harsh, isn’t it? This is like Jesus is trying to get people to not follow him. And you know what? That’s exactly what he’s doing.

Now, let’s get this out of the way first. Let’s talk about that word hate. Jesus is not telling you to hate your father, or your mother, or your wife and children or siblings. That’s not what that word means.

Jesus has actually said these words before, but the first time he said them it was just to the twelve disciples, and he said it a little different then. Back in Matthew chapter 10, Jesus is warning the disciples about the tough road ahead. He says persecution will come, but he also tells them not to be afraid. And then in verse Matthew 10:37, he says this: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

That meaning in Matthew 10 is the same meaning here in Luke 14:26. The only difference is that Jesus says it in stronger terms. The Jews would use the word hate like we do, meaning to despise something. But they would also used the word hate as a way of saying to love something less and something else more, and that’s the meaning here.

Jesus uses that stronger word “hate” as a way of telling the crowd they’re following him for all the wrong reasons. They don’t want him, they want what they think he can do for them. And if that’s why you follow him, he’s going to turn around and tell you, “No, I’m sorry, that’s not going to work for me.”

So we can all breathe a sigh of relief — we don’t have to literally hate our family to follow Christ. But actually, what Jesus is saying here means we have even more a burden. The cost of following him is even steeper than hating your family. Christ paid every bit if your debt on the cross. The grace of God is free. But Jesus is saying here that it still costs you everything, because he wants it all.

He wants all of you. Every bit. He says, “Give me all of your hope. Give me all of your faith. That worry you keep hanging onto? I want that. The fear that keeps you up at night? That’s mine too. I want the love you have for your family. I want the concern you have for your children and grandchildren. Your sins? Give them to me. Those sins you keep committing over and over? Mine. Give me your guilt. Give me your dreams. Give me your deepest longings.” Jesus says, “I ask for nothing more than the heart of you, and you can’t give me that in pieces. It’s all or nothing.”

The reason Jesus focuses his words on the families of the people following him — their spouses, their parents, their children — is because in that time, family was everything. You were defined by the family you had. They were the center of your universe, your most important thing. Jesus is saying, “If you’re really going to follow me, then you have to love me more than the most important thing in your life. If you’re going to be my disciple, I have to be the most important thing in your life.”

But he doesn’t leave it there. Jesus takes it a step further and says, “If you come to me and want grace, if you want forgiveness, if you want eternal life in heaven and a fuller life on earth, then I don’t want you to just love everything else in your life less than you love me. You also have to be willing to give up anything in your life for me, and that includes your life itself. That means your physical life, but it also means what makes up your physical life — your emotions, your opinions, your way of seeing and thinking. Every bit of you has to be mine.”

It’s John chapter 3, verse 30. If you don’t have John 3:30 underlined in your Bible, do it now, because it’s the Christian life summarized in seven words: John the Baptist says of Jesus, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” That’s it, that’s everything right there. The Christian life is all about Jesus becoming more, and you becoming less. You have to embrace Christ, but the only way you can do that is if you let go of yourself.

Being a Christian is an all or nothing thing. You’re either all in or you’re all out. That’s the choice. And if you say, “Well I want heaven, but I also want my own way” — nope, you can’t have both. C.S. Lewis said, “Aim at heaven, and you get the earth thrown in. Aim at earth, and you get neither.” But it’s an easy choice once you understand that the reason Jesus wants every part of you is because that’s the only way you’re ever really going to be safe. It’s the only way you’ll ever feel completely loved. If you really want to save your life for eternity, you have to lose your life by giving it over to him.

You’re either his disciple or you aren’t. There’s no middle ground. So, how do you be a disciple of Christ? Jesus gives us three ways in this passage today. If you want to be his disciple, you first have to bear your cross. Then you have to count the cost. And finally you have to walk away from everything. Let’s look at each of those.

First, you have to bear your cross. Verse 27 — “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.” That is the next logical step to everything Jesus just said about loving him more than anything in your life.

Now, it’s crucial to understand what Jesus means here. Too many people think bearing your cross means carrying a burden in their lives. It’s a bad relationship you’re in, it’s a job you hate, it’s a physical illness. And you just carry that with a sneaky sort of pride and say, “Well, I know this is bad in my life, but I’m still getting by. It’s just my cross to bear.”

No. That’s not what Jesus is talking about. To us, the cross is a symbol of love and grace. In Jesus’s day, when he said this, the cross only meant one thing. It meant death in the worst way. It meant disgrace. It meant shame.

Bearing your cross means knowing exactly what you’re getting into, and that is death every single day. Death to every desire except for the one that says, “All I want for me is what you want for me, Lord.” Death to every thought except the one that says, “Give me your thoughts, Lord.” Death to every hope that isn’t in him. It is absolute surrender of everything in your life to his will.

These people Jesus is talking to here? He knows they’re not committed. They haven’t taken up their crosses. They don’t want to put things in their life to death, they want to add more things to their life. And that’s exactly why these are the people are praising him now, they’re pledging themselves to him now, but in just a little while, once they realize Jesus isn’t going to do what they want him to do, they’re going to shout, “Crucify him!”

Are you willing to follow Jesus if it means losing your closest friends? If it means your family will turn their backs on you? If it costs your reputation, or your job, or your life? Bear your cross. And when you bear it, Jesus says in verse 27, “ … come after me.” To come after him means to obey him. Then you can be called his disciple. You’re going to get a crown in the next life, but you’ll have to carry your cross in this one. And notice too what Jesus says. He says “Whoever does not bear his own cross … ”. Not everybody has the same cross. Each one has his or her own, made just for you.

Now, second, you don’t just bear your cross to be a disciple. You also have to count the cost. The rest of this section is two small parables and one conclusion that define a disciple’s life. Verses 28-30 tell the first parable, and Jesus uses the example of building a tower.

Towers were common in the ancient world. They were a place of defense against attack, and also a place where you could stand and see the enemy coming from a long way off.

Judea at that time was under Roman rule, and the Romans loved to build monuments both to the empire and to themselves. Jesus uses the example of a tower because, historians say, Pilate had recently begun to build a tower, probably in Jerusalem, that he couldn’t finish. He was relying on taking some of the treasure from the Temple to finance this new project, but of course there was no way the people would allow that, so he had to abandon his tower halfway through because he didn’t have the resources to finish it.

Jesus says, “That tower Pilate tried to build, that can easily become your spiritual life if you’re not careful. If you’re going to follow me, you better realize from the beginning exactly what it’s going to cost you. Because if you start following me and then fall away, that’s actually worse than never following me to begin with.”

These crowds going along with Jesus are missing the most important point of what it means to be a disciple. They’re thinking that being a follower of Christ is like a business transaction — I’ll give you this, you give me that. I’ll give you my time and attention, you give me the thing I want. But having Jesus as your Lord isn’t like that at all. It’s not a transaction, it’s a relationship. That is what Christ is after. God wants your everything so you can have a relationship with him, and the only way a relationship grows is with loyalty. It’s being all in, committed, unwavering. It’s going in with your eyes wide open. It’s counting the cost.

Jesus was always sifting the people around him to find the ones who were completely devoted to him, because he knew those would be the ones to change the world. And that’s another reason why he uses the imagery of a tower here — because whether you’re a follower of him or not, whether you believe in God or not, every person in this world is building their life into something.

Some people just can’t get over their guilt — their tower is a prison they lock themselves inside.

Some people just live for pleasure — they’re building a tower of desires that will crumble around them.

Some people live for wealth — they’re building towers of gold that will tarnish and fall.

They build all of these things, they make towers of their lives, but they never count the cost. They give all their thought to how high of a tower they’re building and how decorated their walls are, but they never stop to think of what what foundation they’re building upon. They never count the cost of what they’re building their lives on.

But if your foundation is Jesus, if it’s on his ground that your life is built, then your tower is going to hold. It’s going to stand forever. That’s the only sort of life you can build that the world can’t knock down. But it takes effort. That’s another important part of what Jesus is saying. You don’t just get a tower, a life. You don’t just have one. Jesus says you build one. And where all these shaky towers like Pilate’s are built up only to never be finished, where these worldly lives are all focused on getting more and more stuff, the Christian life is built in a different way.

All of your effort in building the Christian life is focused on the two ways Jesus just talked about. One is every day making sure you’re clinging to him more than you’re clinging to anything else in your life. And the other is being willing to every day take up your cross and crucify what you want for what he wants, and what you expect your life to be for what he wants your life to be. He must increase, but you must decrease.

You’re building a tower. But unless you count the cost — unless that tower is built upon the rock of Christ, and unless he’s the one stacking one brick on the other, you’re going to end up with an incomplete life. Your life, no matter how successful it is on the outside, is going to be empty on the inside. Your tower’s going to be unfinished, like Pilate’s. It was supposed to be a monument, but now it’s just a ruin.

If you accept Christ into your heart and say, “You’re my Savior, Lord. My life is yours,” that is the best decision you can ever make. But if you don’t count the cost of following Jesus every single day, if you’re not taking up your cross, if you’re not saying no to your own wants and yes to his, Jesus says it won’t take much for you to fall away. Your life will be unfinished, and that’s going to bring mockery from everyone who looks at your life, to the point where falling away from your faith will end up being even worse for you than never having any faith at all.

Now, why does your life need to be like a strong tower? Why does the right foundation — which is Christ — and the right builder — which is Christ — matter so much? Jesus answers that by telling another parable in verses 31 and 32.

And again, Jesus probably used this example based on something that actually happened. Herod, who was the Roman ruler over Judea, had divorced his first wife in order to marry his brother’s wife. That first wife he divorced happened to be the daughter of a powerful Arabian prince, who then declared a war that ended up greatly reducing Herod’s power. Just like Pilate didn’t count the cost of building his tower, Herod didn’t count the cost of divorcing his wife. He became involved in a war that he couldn’t fight, much less win.

Jesus says you have to love everything in this world — and I mean everything — less than you love him. And you have to carry your cross every day — you have to follow where he leads and trade whatever you want for whatever he wants. You have to make sure he’s the foundation of your life, and that he’s the one in charge of that tower you’re building.

And Jesus calls it a tower for a very specific reason. Remember what a tower’s for — it’s for defense. For spotting people who wanted to hurt you. And in this next parable, Jesus is talking about two kings going to war. He’s making a very important point here, and it’s this — counting the cost of being a disciple means understanding that a big part of your life is going to be spent fighting, so you have to endure.

You’re going to be fighting a world that’s always telling you to leave your faith behind, because it’s old-fashioned and doesn’t work anymore.

You’re going to be fighting a devil who’ll show you bright shiny things to tempt you away from the God you worship, and then try to eat you alive.

You’re going to be fighting your own sins that you’ll never stop committing.

You’re going to be fighting other people’s sins that cause you pain and suffering.

You’re going to be fighting time itself, and an aging body that reminds you nothing in this world lasts forever.

You’re going to be fighting your own thoughts and feelings that constantly make you wonder if God is there.

And for a lot of people, that fight just isn’t in them. They’ll fight for a while and then just give up. They can’t endure. And for a lot of people, like the king that Jesus talks about here, they look at all the evil in the world and all the evil in themselves and say, “You know what? Fighting all of that every day just isn’t for me, so instead I’m just going to make peace with the mess that’s in the world and the mess that’s in me. I’m just going to say, ‘Well, that’s just how things are, and it’ll never get better, so why bother trying to change anything?’”

But Jesus says in Matthew 10:34, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” You have to fight if you’re going to be his disciple. If you bear the mark of Christ in your heart, it’s like a spotlight that draws the darkness to you. You can’t hide from it, you can’t ignore it, you can’t wish it away. The only thing you can do is draw your sword that is His truth and His Spirit and fight.

Fight, and never give up. Fight and keep on fighting, no matter what life brings you, no matter how hard fighting seems, no matter that you’re so tired you don’t think you can swing your sword one more time. Fight and fight on through your grief, through your despair, through your sickness, through your depression, through your addiction. Fight because Jesus says to fight. Fight because you’ve been made in the image of God and you have His Spirit in you. Fight because however dark this world becomes there is an eternal heaven waiting for you. Count the cost — know how hard it’s going to be — and then say, “However great the price I pay for Christ, it can’t compare to the price he paid for me, and I’ll fight to keep my faith and my hope and my love to my very last breath.”

And that is exactly why we can do the one thing, the most important thing, that Jesus saves for last. If we bear our crosses every day, if we count the cost of following him every day, then we can walk away from everything to follow him. Verse 33 is the sum total of everything Jesus has said in this passage. Whoever doesn’t count the cost and say, “I’m going to fight the devil in the world and the devil in me every day no matter what, and I’m going to hold everything in my life including my life itself as cheap compared to Jesus, and I’ll be willing to let go of anything if he tells me to do it,” — unless you decide all of those things, Jesus says you can’t be his disciple. You just can’t. He’s not interested in followers who just come to church on Sunday, he wants followers who make their lives his church every day. Because God’s never going to use that first group to change the world, but the second group? He’ll move mountains with them. Saint Francis de Sales once said, “We must live in this world as though the soul was already in heaven and the body mouldering in the grave.” That’s the attitude Jesus wants.

Why were all these people crowding around Jesus? Because they wanted something from him. They wanted an easier life, they wanted their troubles to go away. But Jesus says, “No. Being my follower isn’t just about me giving something to you, it’s about you giving everything to me. It’s about you loving me more than what you think you can get from me. It’s about a relationship that’s built on both of us sticking together to the very end, no matter how scary or painful it might get, because at the end of the road that you’re carrying your cross down, you’re going to find a crown.”

And if you’re ready to bear that cross starting today, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father we’re so thankful that grace is free, that your forgiveness is unending and your love is never failing. But always remind us, Father, that even though the grace you give us is free, it still costs us everything. Help us to give our lives to you. Help us to bear our crosses. Help us to count every cost. And help us to consider everything we have as less compared to the saving grace of Christ. For it’s in his name we pray, Amen.