8-12-21 Count the Cost

Last week we started talking about what it means to follow Jesus, and we defined what is meant by the term ‘disciple.’ In a Christian context, it means that we’re trying to be like Jesus both in thought and in action - we’re trying to imitate His character, His heart, and His way of life. And we talked about the transformation of heart that we need and how the Holy Spirit is the One that gives it to us as a grace gift if we will choose to continue to press into Jesus and into relationship with Him. Remember, heart transformation is a growth process, like a plant that starts as a small seed and grows into a large, fruitful tree. And God is less concerned with where you are spiritually right now as much as He is with where you are going and who you are becoming in Him. This is good news, because it allows us room to change. It makes room for character change by His grace in our lives for the growth that needs to happen in each one of us. God’s grace is what gives us the space to grow without fear that we won’t be completely loved, accepted, and forgiven. In other words, we can grow without being afraid of being punished. We can move forward because we have a safe place to fall, to think about how to move forward, and to try again. We are totally and completely loved and accepted by Jesus, and that never changes once we put our faith in Him. Now of course, love doesn’t mean tolerance of things contrary to God, acceptance doesn’t mean we become doormats and have no boundaries, and forgiveness doesn’t necessarily mean we forget. If someone has a gambling problem, for example, and you keep loaning them money that they never pay back because you chose to forget about their issue when you forgave them, it doesn't work. And in that example scenario, forgetting is not loving, kind, or truthful because it doesn’t allow that person to grow through and out of their issue. Count the Cost | 1 I don’t have time to get into all of the nuances of love, acceptance, and forgiveness today, but help establish the foundation of following Jesus because they empower us to “keep going on, grasping ever more firmly that purpose for which Christ grasped me.” Philippians 3:14 PHILLIPS. We are totally loved, accepted, and forgiven by God Himself if we’ve put our faith and trust in Jesus. And that positional fact allows us to follow Him and grow in grace to be more like Him functionally. So we’re moving from the positional - that means it’s a fact on paper, so to speak, to the functional, which means it starts affecting our daily, practical lives. And again, that’s a process that takes time. But let’s pray before we start talking through a second aspect of following Jesus - it’s one aspect of the gospel that often is never talked about, but it tends to come up pretty quickly after we are drawn to God. We’ll be talking about persecution and suffering for Christ today. Let’s pray. Father in Heaven, thank you for blessing us with Jesus, and Jesus, thank You for Your completed work on the cross and for sending the Holy Spirit to live in us and help us grow in relationship with You day by day. I ask You to bless Your word today, and empower us to follow You; not by might, nor by power, but by Your Holy Spirit. Help us not to fall prey to empty religion and constricting rules, but instead to be freed by love to walk in obedience to Your will. Bring Your hope, Your healing, Your love, acceptance, and forgiveness to each one of us today, and open our ears and hearts to hear Your voice. We give You all of the praise, honor, and glory, Jesus, and ask You to bless this time; in Jesus’ Name, amen. Being persecuted for your faith in Christ is something everyone will encounter in their christian walk at some point if they choose to put their faith in Jesus and follow Him fully. 2 Timothy 3:12 NKJV “Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution.” Count the Cost | 2 Paul says we’re going to be persecuted for our faith - in other words it’s going to cost us something during our journey in this world if we really want to follow God. Notice, Paul says “all who desire.” Paul isn’t necessarily referring to people who are actually living godly lives yet - he’s just referring to people who have a desire to follow Jesus, and says they will suffer persecution. Remember, following Jesus starts in the heart, and then, as we learn how God wants us to follow Him by reading His word, getting time with Him, and imitating the example of others, He changes our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit. But it’s important for you to know that if you have even a tiny, little desire to follow Jesus at all, to be in relationship with God, that you’ll ‘suffer persecution.’ That means you’re going to be attacked for your belief in some way. You’ll be resisted as you try to follow Jesus in some way, shape or form. So Paul is saying that everyone who chooses to try to live a godly life of pursuing Jesus is going to face persecution. Persecution is the hatred and affliction that follow the witness and holy life of God’s people in a hostile world. The Greek word actually means to “drive someone away by force.” The idea is that if you’re following God, people will try to push you out, push you away, hurt you, or get rid of you. You see this concept stressed in both the Old Testament and the New. Jesus taught that God’s prophets have always faced persecution. Jesus talks about persecution for following Him this way; Matthew 5:12 MSG “Count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.” Count the Cost | 3 Jesus is saying that throughout all of time anyone who was His prophet, His witness, or His follower has gotten into trouble with the rest of the world because the truth is not always comfortable or convenient. So anyone who follows Jesus should expect the same thing.1 In the early church, the Jewish theologians taught that the death of a righteous sufferer has redemptive value. In other words, if someone was good enough, if they were a righteous person, a person who was right with God, that when they suffered it mattered, it was helpful, it was redeeming, it was sacrificial. And you can probably think of a lot of illustrations for this concept - it could be illustrated by the superhero in pain, fighting through hurt, heartache, and loneliness to conquer the evil villian and save the world. It could be a parent working all day and suffering in the heat and the toil to provide for their young children who are hungry. Obviously, the church looks at the perfect, universal, ultimate, literal picture of Jesus suffering on the cross and dying for our sins so we could have a spiritual life and freedom from death. Jesus' suffering had incredible value, and the value was our eternal redemption and relationship with God. And Paul references this idea of a righteous person suffering for others when he talks about his work in following Jesus. Colossians 1:23b-24 TLB “This is the wonderful news that came to each of you and is now spreading all over the world. And I, Paul, have the joy of telling it to others. 24 But part of my work is to suffer for you; and I am glad, for I am helping to finish up the remainder of Christ’s sufferings for his body, the Church.” It’s very important that I pause here for a moment, because I don’t want you to get the idea from this passage that Jesus somehow didn’t suffer enough on the cross to secure our salvation and redemption. 1 Hayford, Jack W., editor. The Hayford Bible Handbook, P735, ‘persecution’. Nashville, TN, Thomas Nelson, 1995. Count the Cost | 4 The cross is the final word, and Jesus fully, totally, and completely defeated sin, death, hell, and the grave, and gives us everlasting life by faith in His Name. His work is finished. Ok, so what does this mean, then, when Paul says, “I’m helping finish up Jesus' sufferings?” Well, one of the common misunderstandings of persecution and suffering for Christ involves this idea of self-inflicted punishment or of accepting punishment from someone else because we think we deserve it. In other words, the faulty idea is that because we’re not perfect yet, we don’t look enough like Jesus yet, and we still sin too much, that we should either physically hurt ourselves or let others physically hurt us, emotionally berate us, or mental deride us. And the historical context is real - what I mean is that this actually happened, people did this. For a long time people hurt themselves for Jesus, because they thought they were going to “to fill up the remainder of His sufferings.” In the Middle Ages, they had a special whip that they used to beat people with when they came to confess their sin and repent of it. Like, we’re not sorry enough already for our sin, so let’s tell the pastor about it so he can whip me into shape. Then I’ll be suffering like Jesus did and my heart will change. That’s crazy talk! Before they came up with this whip idea, they used thorn branches, iron chains, or leather straps tipped with metal or bone. I bet they also wondered why more people weren’t signing up to follow Jesus. That comment was facetious, I know. Anyway, people thought they were being good christians because they were imitating Christ’s last hours before the cross when was whipped. In other words, they thought God wanted them to suffer physical beatdowns and whippings because it happened to Jesus. But, as I am very happy to report, this crazy, mixed up idea doesn’t really have anything to do with suffering for Jesus. It has nothing to do with it, in fact. Count the Cost | 5 Colossians 2:23 AMP “These practices indeed have the appearance [that popularly passes as that] of wisdom in self-made religion and mock humility and severe treatment of the body (asceticism), but are of no value against sinful indulgence [because they do not honor God].” These kinds of things, whippings and beatings and severe treatments of the body, needless to say, really have nothing to do with following God. Jesus Himself never did anything like that at all. You won’t find Jesus whipping His followers when they mess up, or finding the disciples beating each other with chains when they failed.2 They were being beaten enough by the non-christian world, thank you very much. My point is that that’s not what it means to suffer for Christ. When we follow Jesus, we will face persecution and we will suffer, but not like that. For one thing, suffering for Christ, or being persecuted for Jesus actually means that we’re getting in trouble because we are acting according to God’s will in a given situation and/or telling the truth about Jesus by our words and our actions. Jeremiah 15:15 NLT “Then I said, “Lord, you know what’s happening to me. Please step in and help me. Punish my persecutors! Please give me time; don’t let me die young. It’s for your sake that I am suffering.” In Jeremiah’s case, he is suffering because he’s doing what God told him to do. He was telling the people of Israel that they needed to obey God and turn back to Him or else Israel would be invaded by other nations. He was saying that obedience to God is vital to the covenant relationship with God. The people didn’t like that message (they wanted to do what they wanted to do, not what God wanted them to do), so they persecuted Jeremiah and threatened his life. And Jeremiah goes on to ask God why the evil, bad people always seem to prosper and get all the good stuff in life while he is stuck in a hole in the ground half-starved to death when he was the one obeying God the entire time. 2 Willard, Dallas. The Spirit of the Disciplines, P135. Harper SanFrancisco, 1988. Count the Cost | 6 God answers Jeremiah and basically says He’ll take care of it. He’ll discipline the people, but He’ll also make sure there’s a way for both Jews and Gentiles to be blessed and be in relationship with God if they choose to follow Him instead of their own ways. Jeremiah 12:14-16 NLT “Now this is what the Lord says: “I will uproot from their land all the evil nations reaching out for the possession I gave my people Israel. And I will uproot Judah from among them. 15 But afterward I will return and have compassion on all of them. I will bring them home to their own lands again, each nation to its own possession. 16 And if these nations truly learn the ways of my people, and if they learn to swear by my name, saying, ‘As surely as the Lord lives’ (just as they taught my people to swear by the name of Baal), then they will be given a place among my people.” The love and compassion of the Lord never fails. No matter where you are today, no matter what you’re going through, whether you’re suffering because you’ve been obeying God’s ways, or whether you’re having trouble because you messed something up and have to deal with the consequences of that, God says He will return to you, He will have compassion on you, He will be faithful to lead you in His ways and give you Himself as your hope, your guide, your possession, your inheritance as You choose to seek Him. You see, when we suffer, when we’re persecuted because we love God and we’re obeying Him, we get Jesus. The Holy Spirit (who’s Name is the Comforter) personally comes to us to help us. He gives us a new measure of the Holy Spirit He brings the kingdom of God down to earth and flows His Holy Spirit ministry out of the situation! Matthew 5:10 AMPC “Blessed and happy and enviably fortunate and spiritually prosperous (in the state in which the born-again child of God enjoys and finds satisfaction in God’s favor and salvation, regardless of his outward conditions) are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake (for being and Count the Cost | 7 doing right), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!” I want to point out here that this blessedness, this happiness comes regardless of our outward conditions or circumstances. That means it doesn’t matter what you go through or how hard it is, you can be spiritually blessed, happy, fortunate and spiritually prosperous in God’s eyes. Notice it also says this will only happen if you’re actually being persecuted for righteousness sake (for doing the right things). If we suffer for doing wrong things, that’s called either justice or punishment. That doesn’t have a blessing in it, that’s just a consequence of wrong actions. Very different. And God will help us through those situations too, if we let Him; He doesn’t abandon us to the consequences of our screw-ups. Thank You Lord. But when we are suffering because we’ve done what Jesus told us to do, for righteousness sake, that produces blessing, ministry, and the fruit of the Spirit, and it brings the very kingdom of God to earth! Luke 21:12-13 NKJV “But before all these things, they will lay their hands on you and persecute you, delivering you up to the synagogues and prisons. You will be brought before kings and rulers for My name’s sake. 13 But it will turn out for you as an occasion for testimony.” Suffering for God turns into an opportunity to talk about Jesus and bring others to Him! You see, some suffering in life is the result of the evil impact of sin in the world, which came from the fall of mankind. Some suffering is related to being persecuted for righteousness sake, and a right heart response to it can shape and refine our character and build hope, faith, joy, love, and peace. How we respond to the situations we face in life is of utmost importance. Now, of course, Jesus responded perfectly to every situation He faced, even when and through persecution and suffering. The Bible says Jesus learned (isn’t that crazy! He had to learn) by what He suffered. And that His suffering was the Count the Cost | 8 key to perfecting His full provision for our needs. Hebrews 5:8 NKJV “Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered.” Suffering for following God can lead to a fresh demonstration of God’s power and grace in our lives and the lives of others. You see, if we suffer for Jesus, we learn a sensitivity and ability to comfort others who are suffering. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 NLT “All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.” You see, Christ’s suffering, as well as our suffering and persecution for Him holds an immense promise for those who believe in Him that we will eventually be released from suffering! Christ’s suffering, as well as our suffering and persecution for Him holds an immense promise for those who believe in Him that we will eventually be released from suffering! Being persecuted for Jesus also holds a promise that we’ll be given the grace and power we need to go through suffering unto ultimate deliverance. We’re not promised an exemption from suffering - we might not be able to get out of it, but we have God’s promise of triumph through it. Romans 8:28-39 NLT And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. 29 For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. 30 And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory. 31 What shall we say about such wonderful things as these? If God is for us, who can ever be against us? 32 Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else? 33 Who dares Count the Cost | 9 accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself. 34 Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us, and he is sitting in the place of honor at God’s right hand, pleading for us. 35 Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? 36 (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”) 37 No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us. 38 And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. We have the promise and guarantee of triumph through trial, healing when we get sick, and deliverance from evil because Jesus has overcome all by suffering on the cross for us! His death and resurrection give us the promise of victory over and/or through whatever suffering we might face for our faith in Him.3 So let’s try to make this practical - what does suffering for Jesus look like in our lives? Well, maybe you’re a student and you get made fun of because you believe Jesus and you’re following Him, and you don’t participate in activities other people do because you know it’s not what God wants; or you get made fun of for being a ‘crazy religious person’ when you share your views on truth, God, and Jesus. 3 Hayford, Jack W., editor. The Hayford Bible Handbook, P798 ‘suffering.’ Nashville, TN, Thomas Nelson, 1995. Count the Cost | 10 That’s suffering for righteousness. Maybe you’re in a marriage and you’re following Jesus and responding in grace, mercy, and forgiveness over and over again in situations you face and your spouse isn’t. Maybe your family treats you poorly or walks away from you because you are operating according to God’s ways and they don’t like it. It’s actually very common in other countries where entire families disown people who choose to follow Jesus. Luke 14:26 NKJV “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.” This doesn’t mean we hate anyone - God is love and we know this. It means that we choose to follow Jesus and we choose to love Him the most regardless of what our friends or family members might think or do because of it. This isn’t a fun topic, I know; Jesus said Mark 13:13 NLT “And everyone will hate you because you are my followers. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” Everyone of the world, who is opposed to the Spirit of God, will hate us, but there are amazing blessings on the other side of suffering for Jesus. Luke 6:22 NLT “What blessings await you when people hate you and exclude you and mock you and curse you as evil because you follow the Son of Man.” And so the point of this message today is not to scare you, to intimidate you, or to give us all some philosophical, intellectually Medieval beat down with thorns to whip us all into shape. No, the point of the message is simply this: are you willing to suffer for Jesus? There is a cost to following Jesus; it’s not all roses and rainbows, it’s not all health, weath, and a good reputation. It’s going to the cross for love, it’s dying to self, to ego, to preferences when it’s hard and when it hurts. It’s forgiving when someone else cuts us to the core, it’s perseverance in grace and faithfulness when we don’t feel loved, honored, affirmed, or secure. It’s suffering through the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous Count the Cost | 11 fortune’ while doggedly, stubbornly holding on to your faith in Jesus Christ and His promises to you. It’s not easy, but it’s infinitely worth it. And as we begin to close, this conversation about suffering and persecution brings us straight back to what it means to be a disciple, what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ. It means we have to honestly and from the heart answer this question; am I still willing to follow Jesus if it costs me something? It may cost me my rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; it may cost me my preferences, the things I would prefer but ultimately make no difference. It may cost my comfort, both physically and in relationships; it may cost me my money and my plans for how I want to spend it. Following Jesus may cost me relationships - people you love may just disappear from your life. It may cost my reputation, how my friends, family, coworkers, think about me. It may cost me my hopes, my dreams, my way. Make no mistake, following Jesus will cost you your life in some way. But what you gain will far outweigh our lives on this earth. You’ll gain eternal and everlasting life in heaven where there is no more pain, suffering, or tears, you’ll gain an eternal, big picture perspective and inner peace, joy, power, and strength. You’ll gain a friend that is closer than a brother, a life purpose and a lasting legacy. And you’ll get full, unfettered, personal access to the Holy, Uncreated, All-Powerful, All-knowing God of the Universe Himself, the Awesome Creator of all things Himself. And you need to settle it in your own heart today - is it worth it? Are you willing to pay the cost? Are you prepared to go through some suffering and persecution in this world to gain Jesus Christ? Revelation 2:10 TLB “Stop being afraid of what you are about to suffer—for the devil will soon throw some of you into prison to test you. Count the Cost | 12 You will be persecuted for ‘ten days.’ Remain faithful even when facing death and I will give you the crown of life—an unending, glorious future.” Jesus offers you and me an unending, glorious future in Him. He offers us a crown of everlasting life. But we have to choose to follow Christ no matter what may come. Let’s pray. Count the Cost | 13