The Cost of Discipleship

Read Luke 14:25-35

Today’s sermon will be about the cost of discipleship. We as a fellowship are entering a season where our desire is to disciple others. In order to disciple others, we have to understand what discipleship is and what is expected of disciples. The term can be an elusive term, that in some ways holds a very loose definition. In fact, we had a discussion the other night during our leadership meeting about what discipleship even is. What’s strange about the word is that it is so often used in evangelical circles. As is often the case with many Biblical words, the definition conforms itself to modern cultural usages.

The word discipleship had a very specific meaning to the disciples of Yeshua... evident by the fact that they were disciples. It is a concept we see speckled across the TaNaK: “prophets associated with Samuel (1 Sam. 19:20-24), the sons of the prophets associated with Elisha (2 Kings 4:1,38; 9:1), the writing prophets Jeremiah and Baruch (Jer. 36:32), Ezra and the scribal tradition (Ezra 7:6,11), and the wise counselors within the wisdom tradition (Prov. 22:17; 25:1; Jer. 18:18).”

However, it should come as no shock that we would see it more prevalent within Second Temple Judaism. By this time, Israel had already gone and left captivity. They had been occupied on multiple occasions. Judaism was very cautious with trying to maintain a cultural identity and devotion to God. They had begun developing rules for keeping Torah, which went on to become known as the Mishnah and the later Rabbinic writings. Judaism was doing everything they could to preserve their faith, and this meant that particularly astute and renowned teachers would have young men follow them around and learn what it meant to obey God and carry on the heritage of their faith.

“Rabbinic Judaism represents itself as the record of revelation preserved and handed on by a chain of tradition of learning formed by men qualified by learning through discipleship. To underscore their subordination within the process of collective tradition—in our terms, book-making—sages always called themselves ‘disciples of sages.’” Jacob Neusner: The Four Stages of Rabbinic Judaism.

It would be easy to think that disciples were unique to Judaism, but truthfully it is a word used widely in Greek. It wasn’t strange for a Greek philosopher, religious leader, or mystery cult to attract disciples. The Greek word, mathetes, quite literally means “a learner”. However, beyond the definition of mathetes, the function of the words ran much deeper. To be a disciple, meant to commit yourself to esteem your teacher and conform your life to their practices. Allow me to enlighten you to how seriously Judaism took discipleship:

Rabbi Akiva said: I once entered the bathroom after my teacher Rabbi Yehoshua, and I learned three things from observing his behavior: I learned that one should not defecate while facing east and west, but rather while facing north and south; I learned that one should not uncover himself while standing, but while sitting, in the interest of modesty; and I learned that one should not wipe with his right hand, but with his left. Ben Azzai, a student of Rabbi Akiva, said to him: You were impertinent to your teacher to that extent that you observed that much? He replied: It is Torah, and I must learn. (Berakhot 62a)

Lois Tverberg states the following:

Jesus lived in a deeply religious culture that highly valued biblical understanding. Rabbis were greatly respected, and to be a disciple of a famous rabbi was an honor. Rabbis were expected not only to have a vast knowledge about the Bible, but to show through their exemplary lives how to live by the Scriptures. A disciple’s goal was to gain the rabbi’s knowledge, but even more importantly, to become like him in character. It was expected that when the disciple became mature, he would take his rabbi’s teaching to the community, add his own understanding, and raise up disciples of his own. (Listening to the Language of the Bible: Hearing It Through Jesus’ Ears)

This turns us back to the text we started with and where we will look to understand. It’s easy to read the first part of this text about hating our own family and assume that Yeshua is being harsh here. However, we often miss that Yeshua says we are to hate our own lives. This means if Yeshua literally meant that we are to act contemptuously toward our own family, we must also act contemptuously toward ourselves. If we contrast this passage with Matthew 10:37, which is a parallel passage to this one, we see that the writer of Matthew understood Yeshua’s words, not as a literal hate, but as valuing your family and life as more important than following Yeshua.

However, even diluting the severity of the statement, these are hard words. We love our children. We love our parents. We love ourselves (our own desires, our plans, our possessions). We are called to love Yeshua more than all of these. This is truly a radical statement. Yeshua is our teacher, and we shouldn’t even bother coming to Him, unless we are prepared to elevate Him and His status in our lives above all the people we hold most dear. It’s important to understand this passage isn’t to the believer who wants to be a better believer. This isn’t Yeshua telling us how to be better disciples. This is a caution to the unbeliever prior to approaching Him, “If you are unwilling to elevate me above everything you hold dear in your life, don’t bother coming at all.”

He continues by calling us to pick up our cross. The cross is a death sentence and the visual imagery Yeshua lays out here would have been graphic and severe. “Anyone unwilling to carry their cross, anyone unwilling to tie their own nuse, anyone willing to insert their own head into the guillotine, anyone unwilling to load the rifles of the firing squad, anyone unwilling to strap themselves into the electric chair, will not and can not be my disciple.” It adds weight when we reframe the statement and remove it from its religious pretexts.

So when Yeshua says this and launches into His parable about the tower and a king, it makes sense. Count the cost. Examine the cost before coming to Him. Am I truly prepared to lay it all down on His behalf?

Many commentators believe the tower in this parable was a tower used to protect vineyards from thieves. Imagine you live in an agrarian society, and you own a vineyard. You’ve been having an issue with people coming in and stealing from your vineyard. This is how you make a living for your household, and naturally the theft is damaging your ability to provide for yourself and your family. So, you set out to build a tower to defend your vineyard. However, in the midst of construction, you realize you didn’t sit down and actually establish a budget and determine what sort of tower you can actually afford. What results is a structure that sits there and serves no purpose. Once this becomes public knowledge, anyone wishing to take advantage of your vineyard will know you can’t afford to protect your produce, and you’ll be a target and a subject of mockery. You’ll be worse in the second state than you were in the first.

Now, imagine giving significant time and resources to following Yeshua. But when things get hard, and following Him starts to actually cost you something, you walk away. Think about people who have been in the public eye and known as Christians, but later recant their faith and walk away. Their social status becomes a wreck, and it almost seems as if it would have been better had they never claimed to be followers at all.

Yeshua continues His point with the illustration of a king going to war. I’ve read commentaries and heard sermons on this illustration, and there’s one I’ve heard on several occasions, and I’ve found to be the most compelling. In Yeshua’s illustration two kings are headed towards war, and one must decide if his troops are sufficient to overtake the other. And if he discovers his troops are insufficient, and in this case they are, he must go make a peace treaty with that king and avert his own impending destruction. In this parable, you are one king and Yeshua is the other. War is coming, and Yeshua will come upon the earth as a conquering king. However, you have time right now to determine if you will stand opposite Him on the day in which He comes. If you sit and count the cost, you will indeed find out that your ability to evade or inhibit His conquest will be an exercise in futility, and so you have the time now to make peace with Him on His terms, or otherwise perish.

These two parables are similar except they come at the question from two angles. In the first, Yeshua urges us to ask what will happen if you follow Him rashly and apostasize. In the second, He urges us to ask what will happen if you don’t follow Him on the day in which He wages war against the earth.

This is exactly Paul’s consideration as He writes in Philippians:

But whatever things were gain to me, these things I have counted as loss because of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them mere rubbish, so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; if somehow I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 3:7-11)

“The verb “loses its saltiness” is translated everywhere else in the NT as “to become foolish.” Yet how can salt become “foolish”? It may be that the reality part of this analogy, which involves the “foolishness” of an unconsidered decision to follow Jesus, has intruded into the analogy itself, with the salt becoming equally worthless/foolish by losing its taste.

14:35 It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile. Bad salt is worse than nothing. It has a negative value. It is a kind of environmental hazard, for it would ruin soil or even a manure pile. Sowing the earth with salt was the ultimate punishment for a defeated enemy.”

Stein, R. H. (1992). Luke (Vol. 24, p. 398). Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers.

It’s another severe statement. This salt will ruin a good pile of dirt and poop. What is Yeshua telling us here? It’s worse to have not followed Him at all than to have followed Him haphazardly and turn away.

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A DOG RETURNS TO ITS OWN VOMIT,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.” (2 Peter 2:20-22)

If we rashly come to Him without the sincere consideration that all our plans for our kids, for our families, and for ourselves will be secondary considerations to our service to Christ, we will become foolish salt not fit for the dirt nor dung. Likewise, if we reject Him and His kingship, we find ourselves at odds with a King which has command of legions of heavenly creation, the likes of which we have never seen.

So I ask you today, right now, and this isn’t rhetorical, as you are living your life, are you considering your service to Christ as chief over your decisions? The decisions you have made, have they been made revolving around your personal ambitions, or around your service to Christ? Does your prayer time fit around your schedule and hobbies, or do you fit your daily activities around your time with Christ? Do you make time to engage your kids with Scripture and doctrinal teaching, or do you plop in front of the tv with them and abdicate your responsibility? Have you ever sat in a moment of quiet reflection and actually thought about what this will cost you?

Yeshua asks no less of you than the Rabbis asked of their disciples, in fact, He asks more of you. He requires total conformity in every aspect of your life. He asks that you Him above everyone and everything around you. If this isn’t something you’ve considered, or if you’re unsure, you can not be His disciple.