The Mission Field - 2 - What We Have to Lose

Scripture: Luke 9:51-62

Luke 9:51–62 NIV

51 As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52 And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53 but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. 54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” 55 But Jesus turned and rebuked them. 56 Then he and his disciples went to another village. 57 As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” 59 He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” 60 Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” 61 Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” 62 Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

6/29/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

God, you call us to go where Christ leads.

Turn us from the ways of the world;

guide us to fullness of joy in the Spirit,

where bodies and souls rest secure;

and grant us strength

to follow the way of the cross,

which frees us to love one another

for the sake of all creation. Amen.

What We Have to Lose

Losing

Jesus taught that it was a great loss to win the whole world, but to lose your soul. But is the opposite true? Do we gain everything if we lose our whole world and gain our soul?

David, struggled to follow God faithfully, and wrote in the Psalms about his suffering. He knew that God would protect the righteous and deliver justice to those who are wicked. There was a similar passage in Job, chapter 18, where one of Job's friends falls right in line with David, telling Job that when people suffer, it's because they've done something wrong. The idea of being rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior makes sense to us. But there's a difference between suffering and punishment, and sometimes it's really hard for us to tell that difference in each situation. We often see good people suffer. David suffered for doing the right thing, and so did Job. These passages are in the Bible precisely because those ideas are called into question. When we suffer, is it punishment for something we've done wrong? And if it is not, why are we suffering? What is the reward for good behavior?

Paul wrote to the Corinthian church that he preaches about the cross everywhere he goes, and it seems foolish to many people. It looks more like suffering, punishment, and failure than victory and reward. But Paul points us back to Jesus when we're questioning why good people suffer. You won't find a much better illustration of that question, a picture of that paradox, than the perfect and holy Son of God dying on the cross for us. He won the souls of all creation, the souls that belong to you and me, by losing everything.

We are working the mission field with Jesus, and maybe after last week, seeing how much attention Jesus pays to individual people, it makes a little more sense when He looked out to the crowds of people, knowing they were all like sheep without shepherds, and said the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. With enough equipment, a few people can harvest a large amount of corn and beans, but to Jesus, people are more than just crops, and He values us more than livestock. How many people does Jesus need to reach the needs in our mission field? The ratio may be much closer to what Kerri and Terri shared with us last week. It may be each one reach one. We can't handle all the needs around us ourselves. In fact, we may need to do a better job of equipping, training, and supporting each other in our church family so that we can reach out to the one that God is sending us to, or sending to us.

So, as we dial back our expectations of how big an impact we make and focus instead on the impact that Jesus makes through us in the lives of even one person, I think that gives us a clearer picture of what we have to gain. It gives us our why, so that we can begin to find our way. As the way is revealed to us, Jesus reminds us that we need to count the cost of following Him, because following Him into the mission field is not just about what we gain for ourselves or for Him, it's also about what we lose. Following Jesus means putting Him above everything else.

Lack of Reception

Our passage today is an account of Jesus going out into the mission field with his disciples and visiting two very different villages. The first is a village in Samaria, perhaps even the one where Jesus met the woman at the well.

The first frustration we often face on mission with Jesus is a lack of reception. Last week, we heard about Jesus stepping into Gentile territory, which ended with one soul saved but a whole town asking Jesus to leave. Similarly, when Jesus and the disciples entered a Samaritan village, they weren't received because Jesus was headed to Jerusalem and wouldn't conform to their preferences. They wanted him to be their own hometown hero, not the savior of the world. They weren't violent or hateful about it. They didn't try to throw him off a cliff like the people in his hometown of Nazareth did. They just pulled up their welcome mats and told Jesus to keep on moving. If he was going to visit their enemies, too, they didn't want anything to do with him.

In ancient Eastern cultures, hospitality was one of the most highly valued virtues. The disciples would have felt that lack of reception as a slap in the face. Yet this teaches us something crucial about mission work.

We need to understand that when we follow Jesus, there is no guarantee that we will achieve our desired result. Whether in foreign missions or our own community, faithful servants often face rejection, and that can feel like failure. But we cannot control the results of sharing Jesus with others. We can't make people love Jesus, because Jesus doesn't make people love him. Our primary goal is to be faithful to Jesus, rather than seeking specific results. When we face this kind of rejection, we don't need to be upset or angry like the disciples were. We simply kick the dust off our feet and move on to the next place Jesus is taking us. That is a way of showing grace in the face of rejection, which leaves the possibility of open doors later on for ourselves or perhaps for the next followers of Jesus who come after us.

I once had a friend in college, and I tried to reconnect with Jesus and church fellowship. I spent my entire junior year inviting him to church and bible study, but he kept coming up with excuses. I stayed on campus all summer long to try to reach him, but he never went with me. The next year, another friend of mine invited him to attend a church, and he said yes. He and his family have been attending church ever since. How we handle a lack of reception can make all the difference.

Loss of Connection

After leaving the Samaritan village, Jesus meets three more men.

The first one he meets on the road, in between places. This man came up to Jesus and said, I will follow you wherever you go. It was unusual back then to find people walking on the roads between villages and towns by themselves. It wasn't safe. This man seemed to be entirely unattached. No family, no work, no friends, and perhaps no place to live. He may have thought he had nothing to lose. Perhaps, seeing Jesus coming down the road with the disciples, this man may have seen an opportunity to find a new family to care for him.

Jesus tells the man, If you're looking for a comfortable home, you'll have better luck with the animals out in the wilderness. They have places to rest. Jesus is preparing Himself to be rejected from one front door after another, not knowing if anyone will even give them a place to rest before night falls. Even when we're down and out and feel like anything has to be better than where we are now, following Jesus does not guarantee greater comfort. That sounds a bit forboding. But did you notice that Jesus did not tell the man 'no'? He's welcome to come along if that's what he really wants.

Jesus met a second man and invited him to be his disciple by telling the man to follow him. This man seemed a little bit willing. But he wanted to put a pause on that invitation and said he had to go bury his father first. Most Bible scholars don't believe that this was a case where the father was recently deceased. It was more likely a case of extended illness or perhaps even just old age.

We know family relationships are important. The Bible, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, teaches us that we have a responsibility to care for everyone in our lives in various capacities. But we can't use those responsibilities as an excuse when Jesus calls on us. Our first priority, our first commitment, and our first responsibility is to follow him. And just as he taught that loving God and loving your neighbor, family, friends, anybody else, were like two halves of the greatest commandment, when we try to be responsible and care for those other relationships in our lives without putting Jesus first and following him faithfully, we cannot take care of them as well as we do when we follow Jesus first and let him love them through us.

The third man, who may have overheard the conversation between Jesus and the second man, tries to hit the pause button a little more lightly than his friend. “I will follow you. Just let me go back and say goodbye to my family.” That's like a very reasonable request for me. But Jesus gives him the harshest response of all. No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.

We can contrast these responses to the way Jesus called His other disciples. Peter, Andrew, James, and John left their nets full of fish, their boats, and their families, and immediately followed Jesus. Matthew left a table full of money, some of which was his own and some may have belonged to the government, and he walked away from all of it and followed Jesus. There's a similar story in the Old Testament. In 1 Kings 19, when the prophet Elijah, one of the greatest prophets who ever lived, went looking for a disciple and found Elisha plowing his field. Elijah came up and told Elisha to follow him. Elisha stopped the plow, walked over, slaughtered his ox right there in the field as a sacrifice to God, and walked away from his family and his farm to follow Elijah into God's mission field without looking back. All of these people were willing to lose everything they had. And as they took their first steps in following Jesus, they lost their connection to their old life and the world they had once lived in.

Past, Present, and Future

When following Jesus, our focus is on following him into our future. The last two men Jesus met in this passage demonstrate that there are many reasons to turn away from Jesus and go back to living our lives as they are. We might listen to him for a while and then return to our lives, trying to apply what we learned from him and call ourselves good Christians. However, we'd only be fooling ourselves. Over time, people would get to know us and realize that we're just like them.

We all have a past with things we'd rather keep out of sight and mind. We can spend a lot of time and energy covering up and making up for that past, so others don't look down on us. But when Jesus calls us to follow Him, He calls us to let go of that past and give it to Him to handle. There are parts of that past that will never sit right in our heads and hearts. We have to believe that Jesus forgives us and learn to forgive ourselves. There will be other parts that require forgiving and making amends to others. But when we follow Jesus, we don't get to choose which things to let go of and which to work on. We let him choose and give it all over to him. We don’t worry about our past. We let Jesus handle it and focus on following him into our future.

We also don't worry about our present. There are many things we could worry about that would keep us from following Jesus or leave us paralyzed. We all have family and friends in need, and the needs in our community far exceed what we can offer. The troubles in the world seem to keep playing on repeat, filling us with worry. Jesus taught us to hand over our worries to him because he loves us and those we worry about more than we do. The best thing we can do is to give those worries to Jesus and follow where he leads.

The first man that met Jesus on the side of the road reminds us that there are many reasons to turn away from Jesus, but all we need is one reason to lose everything else and follow him.

What's your reason to say no to everything else and to follow Jesus?

Do you have something in your past or present holding you back?

If so, I want to pray for you to lose whatever is holding you back.

Some of you have stumbling blocks in your past and present that you've shared with me, and I'm already praying for you. I'll continue to pray until Jesus takes those things away or helps you through them. If you have something holding you back, let me know, and I'll start praying for you, too. If you're not ready to share with me, please talk with Pastor Bekah or find a friend to pray with. Jesus doesn't want us to live our lives chained down by our past and present excuses, frustrated that we can't seem to follow him.

Closing Prayer

Jesus, Your call on our lives has always been and will always be, to lay down our lives, pick up our crosses, and follow You.

Empty our hands,

empty our minds,

empty our hearts,

of anything that keeps us from carrying our crosses

and following where You lead us.

In Your Holy Name. Amen.