Count the Cost | Luke 14:25-33

Intro

Hey Y’all! Welcome back to Wednesday Night Worship! How are Y’all? School going well, you’ve had a whole week to adjust. How was everyone’s summer? Good Good, who is glad to be back in school? interesting.

Okay cool, so let’s do a couple housekeeping things really quick. Tonight this is the first night you’ve been in here with us, if it is we are really glad you’re in here, this is going to be different from what you are used to if you’re coming from downstairs but it is gonna be good.

So that being said, I need you to take out your phone and hold it up, cool deal. Everyone who does not have my phone number, put this in your phone.

770-653-6025 - this is my cell phone number, when you put it in your phone, I want you to text me your First and Last name. Cool, go ahead and text me if you don’t have my number.

Now keep your phone out and do the same thing with this number

478-986-8745 - this is Lauralee’s number, text her your first and last name.

The reason we do this is so that you have our cell number and if you ever need something, you can text us. if you ever have questions, you can get in touch with us. We are here for you.

Alright, so let me ask you a question, how many of you have something you love to do? Sports, music, gaming, anything that you like to be good at. What is it? So what are you willing to give up to be better at that thing, or what are you willing to sacrifice in pursuit of what ever it is that you do? Now, think with me, let’s go to the end of your life. lets say you are 110 years old, on your death bed, the year is 2112, and lets say you devoted your life to some of those things, did it matter? Did your life actually matter after you died? Did it have any significant eternal impact? Think about that question while we are in this text tonight. I know if you were here the last night of spring semester we touched on this. As we start this school year, I think we should remind ourselves that we should not waste our lives. Let that be the backdrop of whats going on in this passage tonight.

Context

So with that lets get in to this text tonight. If you have a bible great, flip over to Luke 14:25-33. We are going to be there tonight. For those of you this is your first night, if you brought a bible, awesome, if you didn’t i’m gonna ask you bring one. If anyone needs a bible tonight go ahead and throw a hand up, and we will get you a bible, we have some in the back, if you don’t have a bible at home take that with you. you can have that thing, we can always buy more bibles.

But before we truly jump in, let’s pray for our time in the word tonight.

Lord thank you for who you are, we come tonight seeking your heart. Jesus go before us in this text and make a way, holy Spirit give us eyes to see and ears to hear. And Father speak for your servants are listening. We ask these things in your name so that we know you hear us. Amen.

Alright, so let’s read this whole passage together, and then we are gong to break it in to chunks. So read this with me, verse 25.

English Standard Version Chapter 14

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. 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.

Alright, there is a lot going on here in this passage so let me give you some context as to what is going on here.

First off we are in the book of Luke, written by, Luke. Easy enough, now this passage show Jesus Traveling, he had left were the pharisees were in the previous passages and is head toward to Jerusalem where he will be eventually be arrested and crucified. Jesus is traveling down the road, and crowds followed him, people were starting to notice that something was different about Jesus. Jesus was preaching something they had never heard before. These people all wanted to follow Jesus, they all had a suspicion that he was going to restore Jerusalem, and over throw Rome too.

So that is where we find our selves in this passage tonight.

Jesus is traveling down the road and a crowd is surrounding Him. He has the disciples with Him, and these great crowds are following Him around.

Following Jesus will require your life

So what does Jesus say to this great crowd? If Jesus was just trying to get as many followers as he wanted, he would have said something like, “if you follow me, it’s gonna be easy, you’ll have money and health, and life is gonna be great. Let’s go take down the Romans. who’s with me?” And they would have marched on.

But what did Jesus say? Let me read the first couple verses again

English Standard Version Chapter 14

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. 27 Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.

Now how does that hit a crowd? So what do we do with this? First thing we need to realize is, Jesus doesn’t care about sheer number, if Jesus wanted a bunch of people, he could have had them. Instead Jesus had 12. Think about that for a second. Jesus Christ, Eternal God of the Universe had 12 dudes that followed him. 12, that’s it. Some of y’all had more than 12 in your Sunday Morning groups. Wright Barksdale’s class had like 16 dudes in there. Think about that. Jesus had 12 and those 12 people changed the entire world. Changed all of history.

So what do we do with that?

Think about this, I want you to imagine for the rest of the time we are in here tonight that you were in that crowd that day. Especially knowing what you know about Jesus, what would you have done? Think about that.

But how do we read this? Because at first read it sound like Jesus is saying you need to hate mom and dad to follow Christ. That is not what he is saying, but what He is saying is that your devotion and commitment to Christ will look like hate to the outside world toward your family. But in reality, if you do not know Christ, and are not following Christ, you cannot truly love your family because you don’t know how to truly love anything.

But Jesus doubles down, and says you have to lay your own life down, you have to pick up your cross and follow Christ.

Now think about this, think about how the people in that crowd would have heard what Jesus was saying. When we see a cross or hear the word cross we are not thinking about it like 1st century people would have heard that. They would have heard pick up your cross as a death sentence, they had all seen what the Romans could do with two pieces of wood and three nails, it wasn’t pretty. It would be like if i told you to pick up your electric chair and follow me. It would have shocked them.

So what is Jesus getting at? Following Jesus will require your life, if you are writing things down, write that down. Following Jesus will require your life. Now i’m not saying that your goal is to go and try to get murdered for Jesus, but what I am saying is that any life that you think you have planned out in your head without seeing what Christ says first, you need to lay that down in submission to His will and change course if He is calling you to something completely different than what you think you have planned. But also if that plan includes laying your physical life down for the sake of the Gospel. Then yes Jesus is asking you to lay your entire life down. Following Jesus will require your life. Following Jesus is not a Sunday morning and Wednesday night thing, it is a life long pursuit.

Okay so lets keep going.

Count the Cost of Christ

So after Jesus tells the crowd that following Him has the potential to be bad for their health he tells them to think about it. and gives a couple of illustrations. read with me this next chunk. verse 28

English Standard Version Chapter 14

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

Okay, so these two allegories give the crowd time to think about what Jesus said. All of these people wanted to follow Christ, and Christ is giving them that choice. What Christ is doing is getting them to count the cost of Christ, if you are writing things down write that down. Consider the Cost of Christ.

These two stories at first seem like they are saying the same thing, figure out the amount of stuff you need to build a tower.

When I was about 10, me and some buddies in the neighborhood I grew up in were in the woods one day and we found the ultimate tree house tree. Anyone ever have a tree house growing up? Like a legit built in a tree tree house? I had always thought those were super cool. so we were like, let’s build this thing. Ourselves. At 10 years old. How hard could it be? One of my buddies grandad lived across the street and he had a bunch of scrap wood and nails so we went and raided his shop, and just grabbed a jar of nails, and some 2x4s and we set out to build this thing.

We get out there, climb up and start nailing boards to the tree, it actually involved like two trees that grew close to each other. So we start nailing boards to the tree, it’s got three main outside boards, and a piece of plywood as the floor and one support beam through the middle. So it wasn’t really a tree house, but more of a tree patio, no walls or rails.

but heres the thing, we did not really take in to consideration the building materials that go in to making this glorified tree patio. The random jar of nails we had grabbed we like 2 1/2 inch nails, that went through a 2x4, and they weren’t even good nails, they were probably like 40 years old. So the three of us, sitting on the tree patio, with only like 6 nails nailed a half inch into a tree all of the sudden hear a pop, and then we are on the ground. the whole left side of the tree patio had fallen apart because duh.

And we were sitting there like what happened? You know like we didn’t already know we were not great carpenters. But what had happened was, we put about 5 mins in to planning this thing. As 10 year old are wont to do. But really what had happened was we had not considered the cost. We didn’t sit down and see what would take to actually do this. And we all had a good laugh about it.

but that is on a small scale what Jesus was talking about.

But the second story has some more imagery. It is about a war that is about to break out. A king seeing if he can come against another kingdom that has double the army. Can he defeat that army in open warfare, and if not he should make peace before it is too late.

This is a picture of what is coming and a state that all of us have found ourselves in. We are the king, in our little kingdom, seeing the vastly bigger army coming and we have a choice to make. Peace or War? Well that army coming is the Wrath and perfect Justice of an Almighty God. We have our little kingdom here in our minds that we can control all of this by ourselves. We think we can do it better than God, we know better than God. but we are wrong, there is nothing we can do to earn salvation, nothing we can do that is good enough to pardon our sin on our own power. The Kingdom of God is coming, and is making war on sin. Jesus is telling the people and telling us to make peace with God. When an army went to make peace with another army, especially if that army was vastly more powerful than the other, the only way to make peace was fully submit to that ruler.

When you die, you will stand before God and if He asks why you should come in to His kingdom, if you say well I was a good person, that isn’t going to be good enough, the thing is that you submitted to Christ and let him take on your sins on the cross. That you died to yourself and lived for Christ. That you fully submitted to Christ and He became the Lord of your life.

Why does this matter?

Okay so why does this matter? What is the point of talking about this tonight?

Read with me the last verse in this passage. verse 33

English Standard Version Chapter 14

33 So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.

So Jesus here in this passage is telling the great crowd of people that if they want to follow Him, they have to give up all they have. That following Christ is going is not going to lead an easy life. and for us siting here in this room, I know some of us in here are the people in the crowd, they have heard the words of Jesus, but they are not sure which way they want to go. This text is calling us to consider the cost of Christ. Some of us are going to try and play both sides, you may be one way on Wednesday nights and another way tomorrow at school. This text is calling us to lay that life down. We cannot play both sides of the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of this world.

This text is calling us to not waste our lives on things that will have no eternal significance. If you are going to give your life to something, make it count in eternity.

This text also gives us some insight as to what is important in what we do here at church. Jesus drew a crowd and then thinned that crowd out. He said some seriously shocking things to the people of that day. Jesus wasn’t concerned with crowds, he wasn’t seeking crowds, he was seeking disciples. He was seeking people who were going to follow Him. that is what we want to do here. I’m not saying we aren’t going to have fun, and that we aren’t going to do things. We are going to have fun, but the goal is not to merely have fun, the goal is draw closer to the lord. The goal is to know the Lord deeper. If you graduate out of this group and you do not know the Lord closer through your time with us, then we have missed the point of having a student group. Everything that we do here is going to be geared toward you knowing the Lord deeper. We have small groups on Sunday night that are meant to let you grow closer to the Lord and have Christian community. Sunday mornings we want you to learn about what it means to follow Christ in all of your life. Wednesday night we want you to learn how to truly worship the Lord, how to study the bible. We re going to do fun things, but our goal here is to make disciples. We aren’t here to plan events just to plan events. We care about disciples more than we care about crowds, do we want a lot of people, yes we do, because we want to make as many disciples as possible.

I know for some of you this is the first night you are in here. We are so glad you are here, welcome to FBC Students, please consider the cost of Christ. Do not waste this year, do not waste your life. Following Christ is going to cost you everything, but Christ is better than anything.

Pray with me.