Luke #35: Counting the Cost (14:15-35)

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 this morning. As I said earlier, I’m senior pastor Bill Connors, and I’m grateful for this church family and being able to gather together.

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Opening

We’ve spent this year working through the book of Luke. It’s exciting to be able to tackle this Gospel verse-by-verse, chapter-by-chapter. One of the things that can be a struggle in preaching through a book of the Bible is deciding how much to preach, or how little. Last week was one of those times. Preaching the first 14 verses of chapter 14, with its focus on humility, meant that I had to separate those “banquet” lessons from Jesus’s allegory of the “large banquet” in the first part of this week’s passage. But to preach the whole chapter would have just been too much. So understand before we dive in that this week’s passage is very connected to last week’s in context and theme. Whereas last week we focused on humility, this week, we focus on the invitation that Christ gives to believe in Him and become a part of the Kingdom of God.

So if you would please turn in your Bibles or your Bible apps to Luke 14, where I will read beginning in verse 15 through the end of the chapter. Then, would you please stand in honor of the declaration of the Word of God as you are able to do so:

Luke 14:15–35 CSB

15 When one of those who reclined at the table with him heard these things, he said to him, “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” 16 Then he told him, “A man was giving a large banquet and invited many. 17 At the time of the banquet, he sent his servant to tell those who were invited, ‘Come, because everything is now ready.’ 18 “But without exception they all began to make excuses. The first one said to him, ‘I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it. I ask you to excuse me.’ 19 “Another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m going to try them out. I ask you to excuse me.’ 20 “And another said, ‘I just got married, and therefore I’m unable to come.’ 21 “So the servant came back and reported these things to his master. Then in anger, the master of the house told his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city, and bring in here the poor, maimed, blind, and lame.’ 22 “ ‘Master,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, and there’s still room.’ 23 “Then the master told the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges and make them come in, so that my house may be filled. 24 For I tell you, not one of those people who were invited will enjoy my banquet.’ ” 25 Now great crowds were traveling with him. So he turned and said to them, 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, 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, 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.’ 31 “Or what king, going to war against another king, will not first sit down and decide if he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 If not, while the other is still far off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, therefore, every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple. 34 “Now, salt is good, but if salt should lose its taste, how will it be made salty? 35 It isn’t fit for the soil or for the manure pile; they throw it out. Let anyone who has ears to hear listen.”

PRAYER (Erika Kirk and children, Tyler Robinson & family, political tension in U.S.)

For those of you who don’t know Melanie and I very well (or at all), we were I guess you could say “high school sweethearts.” We started dating our senior year at Manzano (though she had no business dating a scoundrel like myself). This is going to be strange to hear, but I asked her to marry me not just once, not twice, but three times. Yes, it’s true. And this will likely offend some of you: the first time I asked her, it was on a dare, and I didn’t have a ring, and we had just finished our last choir concert of our senior year. We all went out to Village Inn on Juan Tabo (it’s gone now), and one of my friends asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said, “yeah,” and he said, “have you asked her?” I said, “no,” he asked me what I was waiting for, and dared me to ask her right then and there. So I did.

Long story somewhat shorter, I asked her the second time with a little gold and diamond chip “ring” that was really an earring, and then I guess what you’d call the “real” time with an actual ring that I bought from an actual jeweler. If you hadn’t already guessed, she said “yes” each time.

What would have happened had she said, “no,” any of those times I asked her? Well, it’s likely that would have spelled the end of our relationship (especially if it had been the second or third time), because it would have said she just wasn’t interested in being with me for the rest of our lives.

I love my wife. She’s an amazing woman who God uses in a zillion different ways in my life and in the lives of others. She loves Jesus, she loves our girls, she loves our son-in-law, and adores our grandson. But I think that looking back, we’d both say that that very first time I asked her to marry me… even the second and even the third times… neither of us had really counted the cost of what marriage really means. Marriage takes work, and we needed to go in with eyes wide open. I’m not completely certain we did that.

Now, had Mel turned me down, it would have come at a great cost: a cost that we still don’t fully understand to this day, because we’re not done living yet. We’d have missed out on SO MUCH incredible stuff! I know, that’s not what happened, and so I can’t really know, and I’m so glad that’s true.

So in the first place, we couldn’t count the cost of what rejection would mean. But that didn’t mean that we shouldn’t have attempted to count the cost of what getting married would mean. Getting married instantaneously creates responsibility and obligation, not to deserve or earn the marriage, but to thrive in it. It has good days and bad days, fun days and tough days, peaceful days and stressful days. We’ve been married for 34 years, and had a lot of all of those kinds of days, and have a lot of them still to come, Lord willing.

My point is that the reality is that each decision: the decision to reject, or the decision to accept, both came with a very real, very serious cost of some kind. Jesus was saying the same thing in our focal passage today. It doesn’t matter if you’re saved as you sit here right now or not—we cannot imagine the the true depth of the cost of rejecting the invitation of Jesus to believe in Him for salvation. But at the same time, Jesus doesn’t call for half-hearted followers. Salvation in Christ is both free and infinitely valuable, but it will cost you everything.

This morning, we consider both kinds of counting the costs:

1: Count the cost of rejecting Jesus

Remember what Jesus said in our focal passage last week? Through the two parables He told, He spoke first to those invited to feasts to practice positional humility, and then to hosts to practice hospitable humility. Jesus brings both together in what would be better called an illustration than a parable, because like the man who asked him if only a few would be saved (Luke 13:23, which we looked at two weeks ago), a man at the feast blurts out a beatitude about the Kingdom of God, and Jesus answers his statement with this story of the banquet:

Luke 14:15–24 CSB

The first thing that we need to consider is this man’s excited statement. “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God!” He’s not wrong. But there’s likely a hidden assumption here. Jesus had just said in verse 14 (last week), “And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” The man’s response probably reflects his belief that those at this banquet (all of whom assumed that they were righteous) are certain to be invited to the banquet—the Messianic banquet at the end of days. This was (and is) the hope and dream of every God-fearing Jew, reflected most clearly in the book of Isaiah:

Isaiah 25:6–9 CSB

6 On this mountain, the Lord of Armies will prepare for all the peoples a feast of choice meat, a feast with aged wine, prime cuts of choice meat, fine vintage wine. 7 On this mountain he will swallow up the burial shroud, the shroud over all the peoples, the sheet covering all the nations. 8 When he has swallowed up death once and for all, the Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face and remove his people’s disgrace from the whole earth, for the Lord has spoken. 9 On that day it will be said, “Look, this is our God; we have waited for him, and he has saved us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him. Let’s rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

And so in response, Jesus tells of a very wealthy man who could afford to give literally a mega-banquet, and invite lots of folks to come and enjoy it. Things didn’t work then the way they work now: the homeowner couldn’t post it on Facebook or Insta, or send out an Apple Invite. The person throwing a banquet would send out a servant to personally invite people, basically a “save the date” with an RSVP. It was expected that some people would decline the invitation at this stage. However, in accepting the invitation, they were declaring that they would be at the banquet. The point was to get a head-count so that the appropriate kind of animal or animals would be slaughtered in order to feed the crowd. There was no shame in rejecting the invitation if you had a conflict.

When the day of the banquet arrived, a second servant would be sent out to tell those who had accepted the invitation that the time for the banquet had come. No rejections were expected at this point, because everyone had already agreed to come. To fail to show up once you had accepted the invitation was considered shameful for you and shaming to your host unless it was for some true emergency.

But in this case, each of those who were invited to the banquet started making excuses about why they couldn’t come. Most commentators talk about what each of the three men prized above the host as evidenced by their excuses, but I don’t think the details of the excuses matters. Each just gave some lame excuse to get out of coming to the banquet, and besides—this is Jesus giving an illustration… these people weren’t real, so there are no actual motives to guess at. But all three excuses were weak sauce, and those around the table would have agreed:

The first one said that he had bought a field, and had to go look at it. He didn’t look at the field before he bought it? And even if that was the case, is the field going anywhere? Can’t he wait one more day to go look at it? Weak.

The second says that he just bought five yoke of oxen (which is ten individual oxen), and he was going to try them out. Again: this guy chose that day to buy these oxen? And is one day going to matter before he “tries them out?” Also weak.

The last one seems the strongest, but is in fact that weakest. This guy said that he had just gotten married, and that’s why he couldn’t come. He didn’t know he was getting married when he said yes to the invitation? To be fair, the Hebrew people had an instruction in Deuteronomy that newly-married men were to be released from their national obligations for the first year after being married. But this didn’t relieve them from social commitments they had made. Not only that, but the host of this banquet in that culture would have only invited men. It was dishonorable to use your wife as an excuse in that culture. Husbands were to be men of their word. We still should be, guys.

The servant returns and tells his master about everyone’s refusal to attend the banquet that they had agreed to, and the master is not happy about it. But the banquet was prepared… what was the homeowner to do?

Rather than cancel the banquet, the owner of the house sends the servant back out quickly into the streets and alleys of the city, the places where the outcasts, the homeless—the poor, the maimed, blind, and lame (remember verse 13 last week?), and invite them to come in. When those were all at the banquet, there was still room for more, so the owner commands his servant to go out into the countryside and implore those outside the city to come in as well so that his house was filled with people for the celebration.

Those who had been invited in the first place—and who had rejected the owner’s invitation even though they claimed to accept it—become the rejected ones. They had not counted the cost of their rejection, and the cost was steep.

The reason that I say that this is an illustration instead of strictly a parable is that I believe some allegorizing is in order. Remember that an allegory is a story where the parts of the story map to reality—the characters represent someone real, the plot reflects something real. Normally I don’t like to allegorize parables because it’s too easy to take the allegory too far. We saw this back in chapter 11 with the parable of the persistent friend, and we will see it again in the parable of the persistent widow in chapter 18.

But in this case, Luke doesn’t announce this is a parable. Jesus tells this story in direct response to the statement of the man at the banquet about the Kingdom of God, which had come in response to Jesus mentioning the resurrection of the righteous. So the topic is the Kingdom, and Jesus’s focus is the Jewish dream of the banquet we just read about in Isaiah 25. Therefore, since these two things are in the frame, we can use them to understand what Jesus is saying.

God is the homeowner, and Jesus is His servant, declaring that the Kingdom of God has arrived. The invitation to enter the Kingdom has gone out to those who claimed they would be looking for it.

Those invited to the homeowner’s banquet are the very people sitting at the actual banquet Jesus was attending: the self-righteous, judgmental Pharisees and scribes of Israel. They were given the announcement of the Kingdom’s arrival, and they had chosen to reject it. There before them stood the Messiah, and rather than rejoice in and worship Him, they were searching for a way to condemn Him. They were invited to take part in the Kingdom banquet, but would rather do their own things instead.

So what does God do? He expands His invitation to everyone in the city—all of those that the religious elite saw as “less than,” or unworthy of invitation into the Kingdom, and then He expands it further—to those outside the city: those who aren’t even a part of Israel, the Gentiles.

The self-righteous have been rejected, and those who come in by God’s grace are accepted and get to experience the banquet of Messiah:

Revelation 21:3–4 CSB

3 Then I heard a loud voice from the throne: Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away.

This isn’t a story about how to treat the homeless, the poor, and the disabled, though taking instruction in that regard from it isn’t wrong. This is primarily a story about salvation—entrance into the Kingdom of God. And in it we see that those who reject God’s invitation into the present Kingdom will also not share in His Kingdom in the future.

This is where we have to count the cost of rejection. If you are hearing this today, and you have never believed the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that you are saved, then understand that this story is about you as well. What did it cost the invited to reject the owner’s invitation? fellowship with the owner. What does it cost us if we reject God’s invitation? fellowship with God.

Right now, the invitation is going out through this passage of Scripture—receive God’s invitation to His banquet. How does this take place? It’s when we realize that God, in His grace, has chosen to invite us to His banquet. We don’t deserve it, but He invites us anyway. The only way for us to be saved is through what Jesus has done: the Bible tells us that Jesus died on the cross in our place, the only One who does not need forgiveness, giving His life so that those who don’t deserve forgiveness can have it. And He rose again, defeating death so that those who believe in Him not only have forgiveness of sins, but eternal life through faith.

The time to respond to God’s invitation is when you receive it. There will never be a better time than right now to surrender to Jesus in faith. Have you counted the cost of rejecting the invitation of King Jesus? It is a greater cost than you can possibly know this side of eternity, but one you will fully understand once your decision cannot be reversed. No excuses are going to be enough when we face Him in the judgment. Faith in Christ is the only way to be saved.

But this doesn’t mean that surrender should be done without thinking about it. As I said in my intro, salvation in Christ is both free and infinitely valuable, but it will cost you everything. This brings us to our second point:

2: Count the cost of following Jesus

Just as there is a cost to consider in rejecting Jesus, there is a different cost to consider in following Him. Jesus here explains that cost, and in the last part of chapter 14, challenges the crowd who were following Him physically to give thought to what it means for Him to be first in their lives, and to reflect on the depth of commitment that would mean, and if they were ready to pay it. The first part of this passage contains one of the most difficult teachings of Christ in Scripture:

Luke 14:25–27 CSB

25 Now great crowds were traveling with him. So he turned and said to them, 26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, 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.

This is a tough teaching. Hate? Jesus said that those who do not hate their family, and even their own lives, cannot be His disciples. This seems very severe, doesn’t it?

Of course, Jesus doesn’t mean that we are actually to hate everyone we are close to, in fact, we’re not to hate anyone if we belong to Jesus. This would go directly against the admonition in the Golden Rule to love “your neighbor as yourself.” (Luke 10:27-28).

And no, it doesn’t matter if you think the person you hate deserves to be hated. Each of us deserves hell, and God doesn’t give us that, so if you have someone that you hate, whether it’s a neighbor or and movie star or a politician or a speaker: STOP IT. Repent and ask for forgiveness from the Lord. Choose to love those that Jesus showed His love by dying for. And who would that be? The whole world. Now, back to our regularly scheduled sermon.

Here in Luke, Jesus is making a very direct point—He has to be first. And not just barely first—nothing else can even be close… So far behind, in fact, that if you compared our love for Jesus to our love for anyone (and certainly anything) else, it would in comparison seem as if we hate everyone and everything but Jesus. This was a hyperbolic Semitic idiom at the time that painted this kind of contrast really drastic terms: preferring one person or thing over another could be said as “loving one and hating the other.” A good example is Genesis 29:30-31. Luke accurately translated the words of the idiom here.

However, we understand the meaning of the idiom because of Matthew. Matthew’s record of this same statement is found in Matthew 10:37:

Matthew 10:37 CSB

37 The one who loves a father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; the one who loves a son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Matthew was giving the Jewish understanding of what Jesus said. It’s not that we are to love others less—it’s that we’re to love Jesus all that much more—more than our parents, more than our spouses or children, more than our siblings, and more than our own selves.

If we’re going to follow Jesus, we have to in essence die to everything but Him if necessary, and follow Him in sacrificial suffering. This is the picture of the cross, which we saw back in chapter 9:

Luke 9:23–24 CSB

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.

Our crosses all look different. One might have the cross of persecution, another the cross of purity, another the cross of a physical problem of some kind—all places where we might have to die to ourselves. We all have one, and we all have to carry ours if we’re going to follow Christ. Count the cost, my friends.

Jesus continued in verse 28:

Luke 14:28–33 CSB

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.’ 31 “Or what king, going to war against another king, will not first sit down and decide if he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? 32 If not, while the other is still far off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. 33 In the same way, therefore, every one of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple.

These are two little parables that reveal to us what Jesus meant by the first part of this section, and both of them have the same basic meaning: know what you’re getting into. The first calls us to consider if we’re willing to go the distance with Jesus. To claim to follow Jesus and then turn away from Him brings shame, just like for the man who couldn’t finish the tower. The second is about a king wondering if his army can defeat a larger army. Foolishly going into battle without considering that would lead to his defeat. If he’s sure he cannot win, then he’ll ask for peace. Better to negotiate than die.

The point of both of these illustrations isn’t that you should count the cost of following Jesus and turn back from doing so if you decide it’s too costly—it’s to count the costs and then embrace them because Jesus is worthy of the sacrifice of anything and everything else.

Because it begins with “in the same way,” the statement in verse 33 is really more of a summary statement lumping everything—our families, our friends, our jobs, our houses, cars, phones, and other possessions—into the same pile. Nothing and no one is to have priority over Jesus if we’re actually going to follow Him.

This is because we can’t serve two masters, as Jesus said in Matthew 6, which we will see that Luke recorded in Luke 16 when we get there:

Matthew 6:24 CSB

24a “No one can serve two masters, since either he will hate one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other.

Sometimes I think we have our calling as Christians all wrong. Let me be clear: being a Christian means to follow Christ. Wherever He leads, we go. He is Lord, we are not. He is Master, we are not. He is King, we are not. He gave His all so that we could be freed from sin, and our “follow-ship” (if I can call it that) is our offering of gratitude and worship to Him. Just as those who have heard the Gospel and chosen to reject Jesus, we who are in Christ have no excuses for not following once we’ve made the commitment to do so.

It will mean that we have to give up our sin, give up our pride, give up our self-righteousness and our self-sufficiency… but aren’t these things actually hindrances rather than helps? They are worth giving up! It might mean that we have to let go of some relationships that pull us away from Jesus, some hobbies that are more important than Him, some obsessions that we should stop obsessing over so we can obsess over Jesus, but Jesus is worth any such sacrifice!

Christian—brother or sister—friends—Jesus has to be first in each of our lives if we are going to be like Him; if we are going to be a godly influence in the world...If we are going to be salt and light, as Jesus said we are in Matthew 5:13 and 14.

Closing

But here (as in Matthew 5), Jesus gives a warning about salt that we must heed as we close

Luke 14:34–35 CSB

34 “Now, salt is good, but if salt should lose its taste, how will it be made salty? 35 It isn’t fit for the soil or for the manure pile; they throw it out. Let anyone who has ears to hear listen.”

Salt from the Dead Sea was the easiest to come by—you could literally pick it up from the ground. But it was also the least pure. It was mixed with gypsum (sand) or a material called “carnalite” (how’s that for a sermon illustration?). If the salt wasn’t processed correctly, it could become insipid—bland and useless—because the salt could dissolve out, leaving still something that looked like salt, but wasn’t salty any more.

It wasn’t even good for being an additive to fertilizer (manure) anymore. Christians, we are never to stop being “salty” by refusing to follow because we neglected to count the cost of doing so.

And it might be that today you have sin in your life that you need to confess to the Lord and repent of. Now is a perfect time to do that. The band will come and lead us in a song of response. You can pray where you are, or come get on your face before the Lord at the steps, or you can come and pray with one of us: Joe, Kerry, and Trevor will all be down on the floor with me.

Maybe today, you trusted Christ when I called you to do so earlier in the message. Then praise the Lord! Come and let one of us know that that’s the case, so we can celebrate with you. Maybe you are convicted that you still need to believe the Gospel. Come and share that with us, so we can help you and pray with you. Online.

If you’re a believer, but you’ve never been baptized as a testimony of your faith in Christ, or if you want to talk about becoming a formal member of Eastern Hills as your church family, come at let us know that as well so we can make plans to have those conversations.

You can also give as the Lord leads during this time using the website or the mobile app, or physically using the boxes by the doors.

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

AOM Tonight at 4:15: Mauna Schott talking about her Bible study with women in Ghana and other ministries.

This Wednesday night: We’re trying something for a couple of months: Wednesday night supper. Forge

Bible reading (1 Cor 11:2-34, Ps 64)

Pastor’s Study

Prayer Meeting

Instructions for guests

Benediction

Baptist Hymnal 2008 Hymn 437 Wherever He Leads I’ll Go, verses 1 and 4:

V1:

“Take up thy cross and follow Me,” I heard my Master say;

“I gave My life to ransom thee, Surrender your all today.”

CHORUS:

Wherever He leads I’ll go, Wherever He leads I’ll go;

I’ll follow my Christ who loves me so, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

V2:

My heart, my life, my all I bring To Christ who loves me so;

He is my Master, Lord, and King, Wherever He leads I’ll go.

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