Sermon Tone Analysis
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Call to Worship
“I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord”
Please rise as we read the word of the Lord.
The Word of the Lord.
New year new what?
Blessed be God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
And blessed be His kingdom, now and forever more.
Let us pray.
Today is the second Sunday of Christmas.
Some of you thought
Here we are at another year...
Time is moving fast...
Reflections on the last couple years...
I’ve been watching all of your Facebook posts.
We are story telling creatures aren’t we?
Some of you told a story of this last year that was really great.
Some of you told a story of this last year that was full of sorrow.
But we’re setting off on a new year.
How should we frame our lives for this year?
What is it that over-arches and governs how we make our decisions?
We all have something...
Goals are all well and good but maybe we shouldn’t make them until we are rock solid on what our framework is...
You wanna lose weight?
Why?
You want to read more?
Why?
You want to read your Bible more?
Why?
You want to experience and travel more?
Why?
How have you been framing your life?
What principles or beliefs dictate your action?
What is your telos?
The word telos is a word that we get from philosophy that communicates what something or someone’s end goal is.
What is the chief purpose of that that thing.
The danger of being men and women that are prone to stray away from God is that we often think that our telos is God, when in reality it is something else.
For many, maybe even in this room, our telos is something like,
“I am going to be a better person.”
“I am going to make the most money possible”
“I am going to be the healthiest version of myself”
And as we make goals for a new year or resolutions we make them in light of these telos’s that we have.
Today as we peer into the scriptures and find Jesus walking along a road to Jerusalem, we will see him encounter three different men.
All of these men thought that their telos was the pursuit of God, when in reality there were other things standing in the way.
And Jesus reveals those.
Today we have three points.
Three points to help us frame our year, and the rest of our lives.
This passage is often titled “The cost of discipleship”
Jesus communicated three things effectively through these interactions to help those who were following him “count the cost.”
Those three things are:
You will die
You will live
Burn the ships… or something.
Let’s walk with Jesus on the road this morning.
Let’s enter into this story and have Jesus look us in the eyes and say the same things through His word that He said to three men on a road to Jerusalem
Where did he come from?
He’s been about the business of tearing down some people’s ideas about what the kingdom of heaven looks like.
He just recently turned the disciples understanding of the kingdom of heaven on it’s head twice.
First, by catching them arguing about who was the best, and showing them a little child and letting them know that he who is the least is actually the greatest.
And secondly after Jesus was rejected by some Samaritans, James and John asked if Jesus would like them to kill everyone in the village by calling down fire from heaven.
I think we get some of these stories just so we know how patient Jesus will be with us.
Jesus is literally on his way to Jerusalem to die for the very people that are currently rejecting Him, and his disciples are like
“Would you like us to kill everyone in this village for you?”
Which brings us to our first point:
1.
You will die.
We’re walking with Jesus on the road.
Where is He going?
He’s going to die.
He’s on his way to the cross.
He’s headed right to a place where he will be betrayed, deserted, beaten, whipped, and killed.
Jesus life up until this point had not been a highly luxurious experience to say the least.
Refugee from the wrath of a infant killing king,
small town upbringing,
poor family,
simple trade that required sweat and toil,
and a ministry that relies on the generosity of others.
So let’s consider this first man who approaches Jesus.
In a parallel account in Matthew we see that the man is a scribe.
Now a scribe would have been one who enjoyed wealth, and honor.
Additionally, a scribe would have enjoyed being at the top of the social/religious ladder.
Not accustomed to hardship or abuse.
Following Jesus would not achieve wealth, status, or comfort in this age for anyone who wanted to follow Christ.
In fact, for a scribe to follow Jesus, this would undoubtedly incur abuse from his former colleagues for following this man who challenged so much of what the scribes taught.
This is the case for some of us in this room.
If we actually declared and then showed our allegiance to Christ in our workplace then we would be looking for a new workplace by Tuesday.
If that’s not the case for your profession quite yet, just wait.
As we see in the book of Acts and in church history, to be a disciple of Christ meant to be jailed, abused, whipped, exiled, shipwrecked, homeless, beheaded, and crucified.
And Jesus tries to warn this man about this.
“Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head.”
Jesus is saying, I see you like being a scribe,
Do you like being homeless too?
Do you like being poor?
Oh and btw… Do you like giving up your own life?
Because that’s where I’m headed.
There is no following Jesus without following him to His death and then joining Him there.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor/theologian who lived was martyred in a Nazi death camp less than 100 years ago.
This man understood this call of Jesus better than most.
Jesus’ call:
“The cross is laid on every Christian.
The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world.
It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ.
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