Rethrone Part 2

 Week 2

Text: Luke 14:25–33
Topic(s): Priorities, Counting the Cost
Big Idea of the Message: Jesus challenges people to count the cost of being a disciple.
Application Point: The believer is wise to count the cost of following Jesus and to prioritize Christ over the other things that may want to usurp his place in their life.

Sermon Ideas and Talking Points:

1. In this passage, Jesus has some strong words about the cost of disciple ship. “Luke had just recorded Jesus’ teaching about God's gracious invitation to enjoy the messianic banquet in the kingdom. It was free for all who would respond. Jesus taught elsewhere that responding meant believing on Him. Now Luke recorded Jesus’ teaching that though salvation was free, discipleship was costly. This is important balancing revelation. Salvation guarantees heaven, but it also calls for complete commitment to Jesus, not to secure heaven but to express gratitude for heaven” (Thomas L. Constable, Notes on Luke [2020], 322, https://planobiblechapel.org/tcon/notes/pdf/luke.pdf).

2. By this time lots of people were following Jesus, and it seem she needed to clear up what it meant to be his disciple (v. 25). He tells the crowd that to be a real disciple, you must love God above all else. You must love Jesus more than your family and more than yourself. This comes across as very blunt. Do we really have to “hate” anyone (v. 26)? Matthew Henry comments, “Every good man loves his relations; and yet, if he be a disciple of Christ, he must comparatively hate them, must love them less than Christ, as Leah is said to be hated when Rachel was better loved. Not that their persons must be in any degree hated, but our comfort and satisfaction in them must be lost and swallowed up in our love to Christ. ... When our duty to our parents comes in competition with our evident duty to Christ, we must give Christ the preference. If we must either deny Christ or be banished from our families and relations (as many of the primitive Christians were), we must rather lose their society than his favor” (Matthew Henry, “Commentary on Luke 14,” Blue Letter Bible, https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/mhc/Luk/Luk_014.cfm?a=987026). In the same way, we do not have to hate ourselves to love Jesus, but we have to be willing to lay aside our desires, our control, and possibly even our lives for the sake of Christ. Thankfully, most of us do not have to choose between life or death or renounce our families for Jesus in the free modern world. However, we should still count the cost.

3. Every disciple will bear some sort of cost as we follow Christ (v.27),andJesus wants us to take it seriously. Will we persevere when life gets hard or when doubts creep in? Will we stand on truth and faith, or will our doubts, feelings, or desires overcome the call to follow God? Will our faith be built on a firm foundation or crumble away and become a joke (vv. 28–30). Will we cave when the odds seem unsurmountable, or will we stand firm in the power of Christ (vv. 31–32)? When we count the cost of Christ, we must be realistic. It isn’t Cloud

Cuckoo Land from The Lego Movie (directed by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord [Warner Bros., 2014]) where life is all positivity and no negativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81QMiGhIymU. There is a cost to following Christ. The question posed is whether you are willing to pay that cost (v. 33).

4. We are fortunate to live in a country that experiences the freedom to follow our religion without much consequence. Certainly, the crosses we bear are real. We may be made fun of for our beliefs. Perhaps we forfeit popularity to follow God’s moral structure by refraining from sex before marriage, not using drugs or alcohol to have “fun,” and standing up for the less fortunate. Those are all valid crosses to bear, but it would be myopic not to recognize that there are people in our world even today who are literally dying for their faith—people who don’t make the headlines but who are ordinary believers like us. A ministry that focuses on the persecuted church, Open Doors, estimates that eleven Christians a day are killed just for believing.

5. When we prop up celebrity believers as examples of faith, we do them a great dis service. This includes popular rappers, musicians, models, actors, and even megachurch pastors or Christian bestselling authors. Like most of us after coming to faith, they are really stoked about God and want to share about him with everyone—but there is a lack of spiritual maturity. For the believer who isn’t famous, as we grow in Christ and he changes us from the inside out, our stumbles and misguided theological statements are not broadcast by TMZ. Instead, we can grow and change and be corrected in love by our spiritual mentors without global criticism. Our well-known brothers and sisters in Christ do not have that luxury. So, we can choose to rejoice that Kanye is singing gospel music on a plane with James Corden, and give him grace to learn that God doesn’t need to “show off” or “show out” (13:00) by giving Kanye millions in tax returns. That is bad theology that is called the prosperity gospel. This passage in Luke 14 and many others make it clear that following Jesus isn’t a path to the good American (or prosperous) life; it’s a hard-won path that required Jesus to die on a cross to give us the best kingdom life. When we count the cost, it isn’t based on Kanye’s experience; it’s based on Jesus’s.