Kingdom Servants - 1 - Plan Ahead

Scripture: Luke 14:25-33

Luke 14:25–33 NIV

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. 27 And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 28 “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? 29 For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, 30 saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’ 31 “Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? 32 If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.

9/7/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Communion

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 1: Communion

Opening Prayer:

Source of life and blessing, of garden, orchard, field, root us in obedience to you and nourish us by your ever-flowing Spirit, that, perceiving only the good we might do, our lives may be fruitful, our labor productive, and our service useful, in communion with Jesus, our brother. Amen.

Plan Ahead

Love and Plans

I want you to think for a moment about five of the people in your life that you think you love the most.

When did you first begin to dream about their future with you?

When did you first find yourself making plans so those hopes might become a reality?

Jeremiah 29 says:

Jeremiah 29:10–12 NIV

10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.

Nobody loves like Jesus. Nobody hopes as much as Jesus. And nobody plans as much as Jesus. Real love always comes with a plan. If God’s love always carries a plan for His people, then our love in Christ must do the same—especially when it comes to making disciples.

We’ve spent several months learning what it means to be a disciple and follow Jesus faithfully. Part of that relationship with Him involves sharing Him with others and making new disciples of Jesus. This month, we’re gonna look at several ways we do that, both individually and collectively as the church.

This work of making disciples has a foundation of love. We love those we make disciples because Jesus loves them, and He shares His love through us. And if we are serious about that work, we need to remember: Jesus already has a plan for their lives. Our role is to join Him in that plan.

Those who make disciples with Jesus plan ahead.

Plans for Honesty

Jesus loved His disciples. And because He loved them, He was honest with them about the plans He had for their lives. In this passage from Jeremiah, God told His plans to His people in Judah. He told them that they would be disciplined and sent away to Babylon for 70 years, but that after that time had passed, He would bring them back into the Promised Land.

When He brought them back, they would no longer be insolent, ignorant, and disobedient children who could not remain faithful to Him. Once they learned how desperately they needed God in a foreign land and how to serve Him and be faithful, there in a place where their faith was disregarded and sometimes even punished, they would finally be grateful and acknowledge God's goodness to them when they could return and live life with Him in the Promised Land.

Jesus knew it would be the same for all the crowds of people who were following Him. Many said they would follow Him anywhere, provided He kept performing healing miracles on them and feeding them every day. But when they were called to sacrifice and give up some of the things they love, when they saw how much faith in Jesus actually costs, they would fall away.

So, Jesus let them know what they were getting into before they arrived. He loved them too much to let them follow Him under false pretenses. He showed them the cost upfront, because real love always comes with a plan.

And the same is true for us. If we only follow Jesus when it’s easy, our faith will not last. But if we plan ahead, knowing the cost, we will endure with Him.

Plans to Finish

The cost of following Jesus is the lives we live now. He gave His life for ours, to pay the price of our sins. And we give up our lives now, and everything that comes with it, so that we can receive eternal life—a new life in Him. This means discipleship isn’t a hobby or an add-on—it costs us everything about the way we live right now.

Jesus gives us two examples of what this looks like. The first is like someone building a great tower. Before you start a project like that, you need a plan. And a key part of that plan is knowing what it will take to finish, not just to start.

If you don’t know the full cost, you won’t know whether you can complete it. Even if you have to gather resources along the way, you can only do that if you know in advance what’s required.

Money alone won’t build a tower—you need solid materials like brick, stone, and mortar, set on a strong foundation. Without that foundation, the tower will sink, lean, and collapse into rubble no matter how much you’ve invested. In the same way, making disciples requires planning, a clear vision of the finished work, and the discipline to follow through on each step.

Counting the cost doesn’t discourage us—it protects us from shallow faith. If we know the price, we’re more likely to finish the race.

The second example shows us that discipleship isn’t just about logistics and resources—it’s also a battle. The enemy does not want us to follow Jesus, and he certainly doesn’t want us to bring others with us. Satan wages war with every weapon he can. If we are unprepared or unwilling to defend ourselves, we’re finished before we begin. Anything we build—whether in Jesus’ name or not—will be conquered and turned into a mockery, a warning to anyone who thinks they can follow without counting the cost.

If we aren’t ready for the fight, our half-built towers become ruins that warn others not of God’s faithfulness, but of our failure to plan.

Plans for Yourself

Do you want to follow Jesus?

Many of you here today probably said yes to that question years ago. And you may say it again today and every day without any idea where he might lead you. But what has your faith cost you so far?

Jesus makes it abundantly clear that there is a cost to following Him. But what does that have to do with having a plan? The cost He describes is that we should not allow any relationship in our life to be more important than Him, not even the relationship with ourselves, the love of our own life. Those are not one-time costs. Those are things that we have to turn over to Him every day as we choose to follow Him again and again.

When we don't have a plan, our tendency is towards sin, towards turning away and turning against Him at times, allowing the enemy's weapons to defeat us and knock us down. We hear the good news again, and we pick ourselves up and try again, only to stumble over the same mistakes again. Does that sound like the good plan that God has for us? I don't think so.

God doesn't expect us to get everything right all the time, or to have everything figured out at once. But He wants us to grow and mature and bear good fruit for Him, and that won't happen if we spend our entire lives trying to figure out each day whether we're gonna follow Him or not. We need a plan to show us where we're going and how to get there. And while it's true that we probably won't know exactly what God wants us to look like as His finished product, we probably have a good idea of what our next step of growth might be. If we have a plan, we can make a goals to stick to and see through. As we near completion of each step, God will reveal the next one to us.

One of my mentoring pastors years ago told me that not everyone has to see the big picture and all the details, but they must know where their handle is as they carry it forward. When it comes to spiritual formation and growth in your life, you don't have to know the grand plan and all the details, but you have to know where your handle is. And somewhere in the work of your spiritual life and formation now, that handle is the hand of another person. Nobody follows Jesus on their own. Jesus didn't allow his disciples to follow him on their own.

Sometimes that hand is someone leading you along in the next step that you're working through. And sometimes that hand is someone that God wants you to take with you as you share what He has given you, allowing Him to grow and form you together. After all, making disciples is not extra credit in God's kingdom. It's the main work that we do.

Plans with Others

As you understand that having a plan is critical to keep you moving toward Jesus and following him daily and growing in your faith and your abundant spiritual life that he wants you to have, you will find out very quickly that it's even more important when you are trying to bring others with you and make disciples of them.

When I was in seminary, I was asked to create a spiritual development plan for a church. Instead of doing it, I argued that everyone is different and it wasn’t right to force a plan on people. In other words, I refused to do the job—and my grade showed it. Later, my professor helped me see that trying to make disciples without a plan leaves us open to constant failure.

Whether it’s our own walk with Jesus or the way we help others follow Him, the pattern is the same—without a plan, we end up stumbling in circles, failing again and again.

Yes, it's important to do more than just give people arbitrary things to do if they don't understand why. But some lessons are learned by doing, and understanding comes later. We teach our kids to say "please" and "thank you" and to keep themselves clean and healthy long before they can understand all the reasons why. And it helps ensure that they make it to the place where they can understand this.

We may not know the specific calling that God has on their lives—not just children, but anyone we’re helping Jesus shape into a disciple. But we know there are specific things that every disciple needs to know and be able to do. They need to have a relationship with Jesus. They need to know who he is. They've got to know where to find him in the scripture and how to hear him speaking to them there. They need to know how to communicate with him through prayer. They need to learn to let him shape them in the way that they serve and in all the things, big and little, that he calls them to do with him. And as Jesus tells us today in the scripture, they need to know that it's gonna cost all of their former life. They need to know how to lay down their old life and pick up the new, abundant life that Jesus has planned for them. Only if they receive those pieces will they ever reach their perfect calling, to be the people He has created, called, saved, redeemed, and empowered to be. We've got to have a plan.

Bekah has done a lot of studying about the spiritual development of children and how the people of God have raised them to be disciples all throughout history. She shared with me our former churches and our discipleship team plans and timelines, spiritual milestones that children can and should receive if we want them to live the life that Jesus has planned for them.

She told me how the Catholic Church borrowed from Jewish tradition the idea of an “age of accountability.” In Jewish life, this wasn’t about when God finally started caring about a child. It was a time when a young person was considered old enough to marry, have children, and pass on the faith. The real question wasn’t about the child—it was about the community. By that age, had God’s people given them everything they needed to follow Him and help others do the same?

We think that's a more important question for us today as the people of God. For us as the church, have we given people everything that they need to follow Jesus and begin making disciples themselves? And for those of you who have little disciples in your lives, whether they're children or grandchildren, friends, neighbors, maybe even your own parents and grandparents—because age doesn't mean a lot in God's kingdom, where everybody has eternal life—have you given them everything they need to follow Jesus and begin making disciples with them themselves?

Do you have a plan to follow Jesus and grow in your faith every day?

Who are the people holding your hand and helping you stay on the path with Jesus?

Who are your friends, family, or classmates, and coworkers that God wants you to bring with you as you follow HIm?

What’s one step you can take to help them know Jesus better and learn how to follow Him?

Closing Prayer

Lord, we know that a church that does not follow your will and make disciples stops being a church. We know we can't make disciples with programs, performances, or any act that tries to show how good we are. We know we cannot truly love people that we don't know. We want the best for those in our lives you are calling us to lead to become disciples of You. We're tired of spinning our wheels and trying to make it up as we go along, seeing our efforts fail far too often.

So Lord, we pray today, as we say yes to You in this very important work You set before us, that You would give us Your plan—the plan that You've had from the very beginning that we find in the Scripture, that we've experienced in our lives, and most importantly, that plan that will lead us all to You. We lift this up in Jesus' name. Amen.