Luke #25: Decisive Discipleship (9:51-62)
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Luke 9:51-62
N: Laser pointer?
Welcome
Welcome
Bye, kids!
Good morning, and welcome to family worship with the church body of Eastern Hills: People helping people live out the unexpected love of Jesus every day. Whether you are here in the room, or online, thanks for being part of our celebration of Jesus today.
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I need to do a special thanks this morning to Rich and Lara Willard. Rich is a blessing to have on staff as our Associate Pastor to Senior Adults, and Lara has been involved in so many different places: music, the school, Bible study… The senior adults already know this, but Rich and Lara are going to be retiring and moving to Arizona. They need some warmer weather, some lower elevation, and have some medical needs that will be addressed better there. Rich is planning on continuing to minister as he is able and called through such things as pulpit supply with the Arizona state convention. They will be with us into the first part of August.
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VIDEO
Opening
Opening
We’re going to dive right into our focal passage this morning as we continue our study of the Story of the King in the book of Luke. Please stand as you are able in honor of God’s holy word and open your Bibles or your Bible apps to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 9, where I will begin our reading with verse 51 this morning:
51 When the days were coming to a close for him to be taken up, he determined to journey to Jerusalem. 52 He sent messengers ahead of himself, and on the way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for him. 53 But they did not welcome him, because he determined to journey to Jerusalem. 54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” 55 But he turned and rebuked them, 56 and they went to another village. 57 As they were traveling on the road someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” 59 Then he said to another, “Follow me.” “Lord,” he said, “first let me go bury my father.” 60 But he told him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and spread the news of the kingdom of God.” 61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go and say good-bye to those at my house.” 62 But Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
PRAYER (Camp Mystic in Texas, families who have lost loved ones and those who are missing; Worship 4 Life students)
We are on a journey through the Gospel of Luke this year, and if you were here two weeks ago (VBS Sunday was last week), you’ll recall that we looked at verses 28-50 of chapter 9, which marks (along with 18-27 from the week before) several things: the end of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee; the highpoint of Jesus’s ministry arc and of the disciples’ understanding of who He is and what He has come to do, as well as the midpoint of His ministry on earth overall. This may seem odd, because we’re only in chapter 9 of a book with 24 chapters, but the end of chapter 19 through the end of Luke’s Gospel only covers a little over a month of time… and most of that skips the forty days that Jesus was with the disciples following His resurrection. The midpoint marks a change in direction for Jesus: He’ll move toward Jerusalem from this point forward in Luke. Collectively, this is called the “travel section” of the Gospel of Luke. Much of what we see from this point through chapter 19 is only found in Luke’s Gospel. Verse 51 is the where this section begins, because it notifies us of a change in what was coming.
51 When the days were coming to a close for him to be taken up, he determined to journey to Jerusalem.
Luke moves his narrative into this new section by giving us a hint that something big was on the horizon: “the days were coming to a close for Him to be taken up.” For Luke’s focus, Jesus’s ascension was the culmination of what Jesus had come to do. It was so important to Luke that he recorded it in both of his writings (Luke 24, Acts 1).
Luke records that Jesus determined, literally “fixed His face” toward Jerusalem. This doesn’t mean that He would take no detours on the way (He did), or that once He arrived there, He wouldn’t leave it again (He would). It means that Jesus was looking toward what would ultimately take place in Jerusalem. He knows He’s going to the cross, and that the path to His return to glory runs straight through it. He’s said it already a couple of times in the book (9:22, 44).
Even though we miss it because of translation, there’s actually a hint here of one of the “Suffering Servant” passages from the book of Isaiah (I’m going to read more than the direct reference so we can see the beauty of the passage):
4 The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are instructed to know how to sustain the weary with a word. He awakens me each morning; he awakens my ear to listen like those being instructed. 5 The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious; I did not turn back. 6 I gave my back to those who beat me, and my cheeks to those who tore out my beard. I did not hide my face from scorn and spitting. 7 The Lord God will help me; therefore I have not been humiliated; therefore I have set my face like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame.
In both the Isaiah passage and our focal passage this morning, there is nothing that will shake the Suffering Servant of the Lord. He will do what He is called to regardless of the difficulty doing so will bring to Him. He will face ridicule and scorn (which He’s already mentioned in Luke), and He will be resolute in His mission of dying for our sins, overcoming death, and ascending to the Father. His face is set. He will not be moved from His course.
For the rest of our focal passage, we get to see four (really five, but two are combined) different illustrations of opportunities that Jesus gives to various people regarding discipleship: following Him. The last three of these pictures include very direct statements—statements that might actually push us a little or make us a bit uncomfortable because of their severity. Our culture (and yes, some of us) struggles with statements that we feel are overly direct or exclusive. We might pride ourselves on speaking directly, but live in glass houses: we are willing to speak directly, but are easily offended if someone speaks directly to us. Today’s passage might even offend us because of how severely Jesus speaks about what discipleship looks like. This is why I’m calling this message Decisive Discipleship. Jesus isn’t messing around in these situations.
The issue here is one of PRIORITIES. This is where Christianity should rub a little, because all of us are broken. We all have places in our hearts and lives where our priorities are not Jesus’s priorities. And Jesus tells us unequivocally that He is to be the very first priority of our lives. I suppose that the question this passage should force us to ask is: “What keeps us from really following Jesus?” By this I mean: What misplaced priorities do we hold, perhaps even without realizing it, that prevent us from walking with Jesus, being like Jesus, and seeing ourselves and others the way that Jesus sees us? We see four answers to this question in today’s focal passage.
The first is prejudice.
1: Prejudice
1: Prejudice
There are a couple of definitions of the word “prejudice” that fit here. According to merriam-webster.com, the first definition is “an irrational attitude of hostility directed against an individual, a group, a race, or their supposed characteristics.” We’ll come to the second definition in a moment. But this first kind of prejudice, specifically racial prejudice, is what we see in this morning’s passage:
52 He sent messengers ahead of himself, and on the way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make preparations for him. 53 But they did not welcome him, because he determined to journey to Jerusalem.
For Jesus to travel from Galilee to Jerusalem in the shortest possible route involved Him traveling right through Samaria. Here’s a map so you can see the geography of the trip. Now, in John chapter 4, Jesus spoke to the woman at the well. The town where he had that conversation was called Sychar, which is just at the foot of Mount Gerizim. According to John 4:20, one of the issues that the Samaritans had with the Jews was one of worship location. The Jews said that the only proper place to offer sacrifices to God was at the temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans had worshiped on Mount Gerizim at some point, likely after Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Babylonians.
Once the Jews returned and rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple, they demanded that all worship of Yahweh be conducted there. But the Samaritans worshiped Yahweh right where they were, so conflict developed. At the time of our focal passage, there had been several centuries of animosity brewing: the Samaritans thinking that the Jews were a bunch of self-righteous elite legalists who thought they had the market cornered on the God of the universe, and the Jews thinking that the Samaritans were a bunch of pagan half-breeds who had no clue about the Lord of all creation. This prejudicial perspective predisposed both the Samaritans and the disciples to reject each other, just because of their lineage.
These types of prejudices still exist, and they impact us today as well. And there is no room for these types of prejudice in the life of the body of Christ, because everyone is invited to believe in Christ and become family. Paul wrote in Col 3:11:
11 In Christ there is not Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.
But the second type of prejudice can be just as damaging. This is defined as “an adverse opinion or leaning formed without just grounds or before sufficient knowledge.”
Since Jesus “had his face set” to go to Jerusalem, they wanted nothing to do with Him. Talk about a missed opportunity! They could have welcomed Him and had a time of fellowship with the very God that they wanted to worship, but they were too busy holding on to their racial prejudices to do so.
I think we do the same thing: both with God and with each other. We tell God how we think things should be done, and when things don’t go the way we think they should, we mope. We complain. We worry. Or worse: we get angry at Him. This is forming an adverse opinion about God without just grounds. Who are we to demand He do things the way we say? What fellowship with Him we miss out on because of our own prejudicial ideas of what He is “supposed” to be like!
Not only that, but we do the same thing with others. Just because the disciples were going where Jesus was going, the Samaritans rejected them as well. They heard one thing, and that was it. Often, we see one thing about a person, like their clothes or hair, and we instantly decide whether we are willing to talk to them. We all do this. But we need to be willing to work around of such prejudices, especially inside the church.
One of our outcome expressions is “I can describe how I’m helping others feel known, seen, and part of the Eastern Hills family.” This is a job for ALL of us. And this not only demands a willingness to lay aside our prejudices; it also demands a willingness to forgive. When we wrong one another (and we will… we’re family), we need to be willing to forgive that wrong. And when those in the world offend us, we need to be willing to turn the other cheek as needed also. Who we should NOT be like is James and John, the Sons of Thunder:
54 When the disciples James and John saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of behavior from John. We saw it in verse 49 last time. Now, it’s possible that James and John are wanting this to be like what happened with Sodom and Gomorrah: That fire and brimstone would rain down and wipe out this village because of their immorality.
However, it’s more likely that they were thinking of themselves as “Elijah”-types, men of God who could call down His punishment on those who stood against His work, such as what Elijah did with King Ahaziah’s captains and soldiers in 2 Kings 1:
9 So King Ahaziah sent a captain with his fifty men to Elijah. When the captain went up to him, he was sitting on top of the hill. He announced, “Man of God, the king declares, ‘Come down!’ ” 10 Elijah responded to the captain, “If I am a man of God, may fire come down from heaven and consume you and your fifty men.” Then fire came down from heaven and consumed him and his fifty men.
This happened one more time after this, and then Ahaziah sent a third captain who approached in humility and fear before the Lord, and God told Elijah to go with that captain.
But doesn’t this seem super severe from James and John? Wow, guys… you don’t need to go nuclear. This is because prejudice is easily offended, and when we are offended, we find ourselves beset with anger. And anger, if allowed to burn, will demand action. And when we give in to our anger, we are become fools:
11 A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise person holds it in check.
James and John probably thought their suggestion was completely justified because of the Samaritans’ rejection of Jesus, and we probably feel completely justified when we attempt to get revenge when we are offended.
But brothers and sisters, we are not called to be easily offended, not called to be quickly angered, not called to take revenge. In fact, it is just the opposite:
19 My dear brothers and sisters, understand this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger, 20 for human anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness.
Our anger does not accomplish God’s righteousness. Think about that. If it doesn’t accomplish God’s righteousness, what does it accomplish? At best, I suppose it could accomplish simply “nothing.” But I doubt that’s the case. Our anger accomplishes our sinning, even if just where only God knows about it. Consider what Peter wrote to the church:
11 Dear friends, I urge you as strangers and exiles to abstain from sinful desires that wage war against the soul.
This is why Jesus rebukes the brothers, and then He chooses to do nothing further: They just go to another village.
55 But he turned and rebuked them, 56 and they went to another village.
Remember that this is what He told the apostles to do when He sent them out: if a village or town rejected them and the gospel, they were to shake the dust off of their feet and move on. We can do the same. We don’t have to go nuclear when we’re offended. In fact, if we lay aside our prejudices, the odds are that we won’t be offended in the first place.
From this point, the passage moves to a scene of Jesus walking, being followed by people as He went. He has three dialogues with three individuals, and each one gives us a picture of the level of priority Jesus is to have in the life of the believer. In this way, verses 57-62 form kind of a “primer” for discipleship, because each two-verse vignette is built around the word “follow.” Jesus draws decisive lines, and calls us to complete surrender if we claim to follow Him. But they each continue to answer the question, “What keeps us from really following Jesus?”
The second point is comfort.
2: Comfort
2: Comfort
Even though it is sometimes our “comfort zone” that keeps us from really following Jesus, that’s not exactly what I mean this morning. The type of comfort that I’m talking about is an expectation that because we are Christians, then everything is going to go our way. This is what the first of the three faced.
57 As they were traveling on the road someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” 58 Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
So picture the scene here: Jesus is walking along the road, and this crowd of people is following Him. And this one person, referred to as “someone” by Luke, declares that wherever Jesus goes, he’s going to follow. Jesus’s answer is that He doesn’t have a “place:” His ministry at this point is completely itinerant, and He doesn’t even have the comforts that animals do.
I don’t believe this person kept this promise once Jesus said what He did in response. We can assume this for two reasons: First, while Luke calls this person “someone,” Matthew doesn’t. In Matthew’s gospel, we see a little deeper: The man making the declaration is a scribe:
19 A scribe approached him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” 20 Jesus told him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”
Jesus’s response, as always, was aimed at precisely what this man was lacking in faith. The scribe likely believed that following Jesus meant that he would get to sit at Jesus’s feet, going from town to town and learning. But he didn’t understand what he was saying. That wasn’t what Jesus’s ministry was like. Following Him would (and still does) require sacrifice and discomfort.
Second, I don’t believe he kept this promise because while we don’t see him make an excuse for not following Jesus, the other two did. This is set up by Luke as a parallel story, so the three are all related. Almost certainly the outcomes are related as well.
If we are in Christ, then this world is not our home. It is not the ultimate end that we are living for. Paul says that:
20 Our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly wait for a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ.
So what Jesus is saying to those who would follow Him is that we are to hold loosely to the trappings of this world and what the world says is important. He has already made this clear in 9:23-25:
23 Then he said to them all, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. 24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will save it. 25 For what does it benefit someone if he gains the whole world, and yet loses or forfeits himself?
The Christian life isn’t about making ourselves look good or happy or contented, although those things might flow out of following Jesus. It’s about making much of Jesus. If we want to make much of ourselves, then we’ve missed the mark. We are called to count the cost of the commitment that we will make to Christ, which we will see in chapter 14:
28 “For which of you, wanting to build a tower, doesn’t first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, after he has laid the foundation and cannot finish it, all the onlookers will begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This man started to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
The commitment that Jesus calls His disciples to is to look like Him, walking in obedience to God no matter what. If we belong to Him, then there is nothing that is out-of-bounds for Him to demand if it will bring Him honor and glory through our lives. This demands that we hold on to the things of the world loosely, because this world is not our home, and the things of this world are not the most important.
Is our pursuit of comfort keeping us from really following Jesus? But the next question is whether our security is keeping us from really following Jesus:
3: Security
3: Security
The first man’s statement and Jesus’s response actually set us up for the last two. This is because while the first man declared his intention to follow Jesus, the last two were invited by Jesus to do so. The first has an excuse that seems completely legitimate at first:
59 Then he said to another, “Follow me.” “Lord,” he said, “first let me go bury my father.” 60 But he told him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and spread the news of the kingdom of God.”
You might be thinking that Jesus is awfully harsh to not let this guy go and bury his dad if his dad just died. And it’s possible that he had. And in ancient Israel, it was considered a near-sacred duty to bury your parents when they died. If that’s the case, then what Jesus said to this man just goes to show the seriousness of the commitment that we make when we come to Christ for salvation: He’s to be more important than our responsibility in any other vein of life.
And while this is a worthwhile way to view this guy’s excuse, I don’t think that’s what was happening. I think that his dad was still alive. Sure, he might have been on his deathbed, but he wasn’t gone yet. Since burying your parents was such an important duty, if this man’s father had just died and he saw this responsibility as so important, wouldn’t he have been there, taking care of that critical task, instead of walking along the road following an itinerant rabbi?
So in response to Jesus’s invitation to follow Him, this guy was saying, “Not just yet. Let me get set up financially before I make that commitment.” He’s waiting for his inheritance, which wasn’t going to come until his father died. So once he has the resource that he has coming to him eventually, which he thinks he needs, then he’ll follow. He wants to be secure first.
Jesus’s response is kind of cryptic for us, but He’s basically making two plays on words: “Let the [spiritually] dead bury their own— the [physically] dead. You go and speak life (spread the news of the kingdom of God).”
Jesus wasn’t saying that this person shouldn’t bury his father when he died. He was saying that the moment of the call is the time to respond to Jesus in obedience, even if it costs him the security that he’s waiting for.
And the same call goes out to us:
15 As it is said: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.
7 he again specifies a certain day—today. He specified this speaking through David after such a long time: Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
Now, you might be here this morning, and you’re thinking, “Why would I follow Jesus if it’s going to mean that I will change my priorities so drastically that I’ll lay down my prejudices, risk not living a comfortable life, and focus on Him instead of my own security?” (And don’t forget that there’s still one more point!) I’ll tell you why: Because He is completely and totally worth it. These things that we hold on to: prejudices about others, comfortable living, the idea of security… they’re all temporary. There’s going to come a day when none of those things are going to matter: when we reach the end of our lives, our prejudices will not make our last moments any better, the comfortable lives we pursued will not make them last longer, and what we thought kept us secure will not protect us.
Jesus came to solve our biggest problem: sin. Because we harden our hearts and God and His love, we are sinners, and the Bible tells us that we deserve to be separated from Him forever because of our sin. So Jesus, the completely perfect Son of God, took that separation on Himself on the cross, taking the punishment for sin in our place, so we could be declared righteous because He is. And after He died and was buried, He rose again, overcoming death so that we can have eternal life if we are His followers. This comes through surrendering to follow Him in faith, believing in Him as Savior and Lord. Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts. Following Jesus is the only way to be saved, to be secure literally forever. Trust in Christ today, even right now.
And if you’re already a believer, remember that you’re already secure in Christ, because we have been given His Holy Spirit as a down payment:
20 For every one of God’s promises is “Yes” in him. Therefore, through him we also say “Amen” to the glory of God. 21 Now it is God who strengthens us together with you in Christ, and who has anointed us. 22 He has also put his seal on us and given us the Spirit in our hearts as a down payment.
And because we are made secure in Christ, we can be who God made us to be without fear. We don’t have to try to create the impression that we’re doing better than we really are. We can be honest about our victories, and honest about our failures, because of the love that God has shown us in Christ.
And this impacts the last answer this passage gives to the question, “What keeping us from really following Jesus?” Relationships.
4: Relationships
4: Relationships
Please hear me: relationships with people are incredibly important. If we aren’t in relationship with other people, then there are no families, no jobs, no church. God is from eternity a relational God, since He is three in One. And from the very beginning, He created us to bear that aspect of His personality by being relational as well. However, relationships are some of the most powerful things that keeps us from really following Jesus. Consider this last man:
61 Another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me go and say good-bye to those at my house.” 62 But Jesus said to him, “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”
We don’t hear the invitation to this man, but it must have been presented, because why would he couch his excuse in this way. This person is willing, but first needs to take care of some things—he wants to go back home and say good-bye to the people at his house (likely his father and mother, and probably siblings).
There’s nothing wrong with him wanting to say good-bye to family and friends. But Jesus’s answer tells us that the truth is that this man would rather not follow Jesus, because “no one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.” His relationships with others were more important than his relationship with Jesus.
There’s an interesting similarity between this man and a passage in the Old Testament. In 1 Kings 19, we see the calling of Elisha by Elijah. And Elisha asks to go and kiss his father and mother before following Elijah:
19 Elijah left there and found Elisha son of Shaphat as he was plowing. Twelve teams of oxen were in front of him, and he was with the twelfth team. Elijah walked by him and threw his mantle over him. 20 Elisha left the oxen, ran to follow Elijah, and said, “Please let me kiss my father and mother, and then I will follow you.” “Go on back,” he replied, “for what have I done to you?” 21 So he turned back from following him, took the team of oxen, and slaughtered them. With the oxen’s wooden yoke and plow, he cooked the meat and gave it to the people, and they ate. Then he left, followed Elijah, and served him.
For some reason, the answer here is “yes” or at least not “no.” But look at what Elisha did: He “burned the ships,” so to speak. He made it so that there was no turning back. His old life was over, and the work of God in and through his life had begun. This man in Luke didn’t have that same focus. Jesus’s answer shows that for this man, once he started “the work” of following Jesus, would look back.
Plowing was hard work. With one hand, the farmer guided the oxen pulling the plow. With the other, he drove the plow itself, both things working together to make straight rows for his crops. Take your eye off of either, and your field would suffer. So Jesus told the man that His work wasn’t to be done as a half-measure.
Commitment to Jesus is lifelong and all-consuming, not a casual joining of some movement for a while or a convenient add-on to our lives. Look at how Paul spoke about it in his letter to the church at Philippi:
13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, 14 I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.
I saw a sign this past week that read, “Quit looking backwards. You’re not going that way.” Forget what is behind. Reach forward to what Jesus has for you. It may mean that it costs you some relationships to really follow Jesus. But if we’re going to live out what we’re called to in Christ, we will need to get outside of our relational bubbles, and these walls, and take the opportunities that God gives us to proactively share the gospel in a clear and compelling way, because we have the message of hope that those people need.
Now that I think about it: why didn’t this man see the people back at home as a part OF the work, instead of a reason to delay starting it? Hmm.
Closing
Closing
Following Jesus is an all-in thing. And I’ll be honest: This is HARD teaching. We don’t like this, because we want both. We want Jesus, but we don’t want to give up our rights to ourselves. But following Jesus is not only more important than anything else, it’s more valuable than anything else, because it’s only in Jesus that we have eternal life.
Do you have eternal life? You can if you believe in Jesus.
Repentance
Baptism
Church Membership
Prayer
Giving EHBCGIVE to 888-364-GIVE
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Mission: No words. Then put the words up and see how we did.
Bible reading (Luke 18:31-19:44, Pro 26)
Prayer Meeting: Second look at Ezra’s prayer from Ezra 9
Picnic!
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
I Have Decided to Follow Jesus (Hymn 434: 4 verses)
