Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome back to Luke! We’ve taken a break from the gospel of Luke since early December, but we’re back, and we’re going to jump right back in where we started.

Welcome back to Luke! We’ve taken a break from the gospel of Luke since early December, but we’re back, and we’re going to jump right back in where we started.

So if you’re just now joining us, here’s where we are.

The gospel of Luke tells the story of the Son of God, Jesus, who became a man in 1st-century Israel, where he lived and ministered.

We’ve seen the circumstances surrounding Jesus’s birth, and a small bit of his childhood.

When Jesus grows up, he begins his ministry—he travels around healing people and teaching them about the kingdom of God, telling them that the kingdom of God is now here, in him.

He calls twelve men to be his disciples, and they follow him around, learning from him, and actually go out on some occasions, ministering on his behalf.

Then in chapter 9, we see things make a bit of a shift.

Jesus is transfigured on a mountain—he shows himself to three of his disciples in all of his glory; it’s here that our suspicions are confirmed: this is not just a good teacher, or a talented healer.

This man is more than a man.

And when he comes down off the mountain, he “sets his face toward Jerusalem” (9.53).

He begins the road that will lead him, ultimately, to his death.

But he takes his time getting there—on his way, he does what he always does: he stops to heal people and to teach them.

And last time, we saw him at a dinner party filled with Pharisees (the guys who hated Jesus more than anyone).

At this dinner party, he gave them a series of teachings on pride and humility—to treat others the way you’d treat your own children; to never seek the best seat at the table; to serve those who can do nothing for you; and to remember that ultimately, none of this is about you at all, but about God himself.

The context of today’s text is a little different.

Although it immediately follows the dinner party, Luke says that great crowds are accompanying Jesus—so think of this as a fade cut in a movie.

Jesus is sitting at dinner, he finishes his teaching, then it fades away and picks up again on Jesus surrounded by the crowds.

The crowds are not like the Pharisees.

There are certainly some Pharisees in the crowd (there always were), but there were also many people in the crowd who are following Jesus because they genuinely want to be his disciples.

One can easily imagine Jesus surrounded by the crowds, spotting a Pharisee or someone else who is trying to trap him, and saying to that person, “Yeah, you shouldn’t be here.”

But what Jesus is going to say to the crowd at this point is startling.

Essentially, he’s going to say just that: You shouldn’t be here.

No matter how well-intentioned some people may be, some of them should not be there, because being a disciple of Christ is not a game.

It’s not a pleasant way to spend a summer.

There are conditions to being Jesus’s disciple.

And the bar for these conditions is unbelievably high.

So that’s where we’re going.

Jesus is going to give us three conditions we must meet if we want to be his disciples.

Condition 1: You must love him more than the most important people in your life (v.

26).

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.”

Anon, 2016.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version, Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.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.

This is a reality that makes a lot of people really uncomfortable.

We talk about the grace of God in Christ being totally free.

And that is true: it is God who saves us, from beginning to end.

We can’t work to obtain it, we can do nothing to contribute to it.

But God saves us so that a series of very important things might happen in us, and he intends for those things to happen.

The first thing that happens is that God opens our eyes to make us see the gospel as the truth, and not fiction.

He opens our eyes to such an extent that we can no longer ignore the gospel, but are compelled to accept it.

And he opens our eyes, not just to the truth of the gospel, but to the beauty of the gospel.

He opens our eyes, not just to the reality of who he is, but to why he is wonderful.

He opens our eyes to see him as marvelous, and when we see something as wonderful, we think it’s wonderful.

Think of the Grand Canyon.

How many people here have been to the Grand Canyon?

You can hear about the Grand Canyon as much as you want.

You can know how it was formed, and even see pictures of what it looks like.

You can hear it spoken of so much that you might assume the real thing couldn’t be that good.

But when you actually go there, and see the real thing with your own eyes (and not through an Instagram filter), it never disappoints.

When you see something as wonderful, you feel it as wonderful.

When you see something as beautiful, you admire its beauty.

When you see something as lovely, you love it.

That’s what happens when God saves us.

He opens our eyes to see not only his existence, but his beauty, his goodness, his worth.

To say it another way—to know God is to love God.

Now, if you’ve been in this church for a while, this isn’t news to you.

We talk about this all the time.

And many of us—everyone here, I hope—has experienced at least some semblance of this.

We know what it is to be changed by God, and to love God for what he’s done for us.

But let’s be honest: that love is something we struggle to maintain.

That love is something that gets easily snuffed out.

It can be because of bad things or good things, but our love for God is something that all of us, at some point or another, struggle to keep up.

And despite our best intentions, the reality of that struggle makes us settle.

It makes us settle into the idea that our love for God is something that will always be at this level—that this might be as good as it gets.

What Jesus says here should dissuade us of that.

Jesus never says the things he says to discourage us—he says what he says to set our sights higher, to help us see that this is not as good as it gets.

“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.”

This phrase he uses is an idiomatic expression—obviously, as we see elsewhere in the Bible, God doesn’t want us to literally hate our families.

It’s an expression which means “to love less than.”

This is what he’s getting at: Jesus intends for us to love him more than our parents.

More than our husbands.

Our wives.

Our brothers and sisters.

Our kids.

Our __________.

In the end, who goes in that blank doesn’t matter—he’s talking about those people who are most important to us.

Everyone has someone who is important to them.

Take what you feel for that person, whoever it is—take your affection for them, your devotion to them, your commitment to them… Your love for Jesus is meant to be greater than all that.

And Jesus goes even further—he says not only should we love him more than the most important people to us; we should love him more than even our own lives.

And that is where he is going next.

Condition 2: You must be ready to lose everything (v.

27-33).

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.

Let’s work backwards here.

Verses 27 and 33 are like bookends to everything that comes in between.

They’re two ways of stating the same thing.

In verse 33, he says that any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

This is similar to what he said before about hating your family—he doesn’t necessarily mean that every Christian should reject his family and get rid of all earthly possessions and go live like monks in a convent; we see this abundantly in other teachings he gives on how to use the material possessions we have.

He’s saying we should be ready to give all of that up if necessary.

I hope you see that Jesus is being abundantly fair to his followers here.

He wants every one of them to know exactly what they’re getting into.

And that’s what the parables in v. 28-32 are getting at.

In the first one (v.

28-30), he talks about someone building a tower.

This person—if he’s smart—will count up how much it will cost to build it (how much material he’ll need, how much manpower he’ll need) and make sure he has what he needs to make it happen.

Because if he doesn’t, he’ll get started and not be able to finish, and everyone will know.