Friday, February 20,
2015, 10:00 a.m. – The Lord Jesus put in mind the song “Broken and Contrite.” Speak, Lord, your words to my heart. I read Luke 14:25-33 (NASB).
Following Jesus
Now
large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them, “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. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My
disciple.
On a surface read this sounds pretty drastic, as well as
contradictory to Jesus’ other teachings on how we must love others. So, when we
come up against a passage of scripture which seems to contradict other
scriptures, then we have to compare scripture with scripture, we have to read the
passage in context, and we have to look at what other possible meaning could be
gathered from the passage that would fit with the context. Above all, we must
pray and ask the Spirit of God to guide us into all truth and to grant us
wisdom and insight into what the passage is teaching us, because this is to be spiritually
discerned.
So, what is the context? Jesus was teaching the crowds who
were physically following him that if they truly wanted to be his followers,
i.e. his disciples, that there is a cost to following him. What is the cost?
They must hate their family members and even their own lives. Yet, since the
second greatest commandment (of the two greatest) is to love our neighbors as
we love ourselves (See Matt. 22:36-40), I don’t believe Jesus is teaching that
we should literally hate others or ourselves. So, what could he possibly mean? I
believe Jesus’ words, as is recorded in Luke 9:23-25, help to shed light on
this subject. This is where he said that if anyone would come after him he must
deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow him. He said whoever tries to
hold on to his own life will lose it for eternity, but whoever dies to his old
life has eternal life. So, how does this help us with Luke 14?
I believe that to “hate” our family members and ourselves
means to let go of them in the sense of not holding on to what we want for our
own lives or what we hope to gain from those family relationships, because
following Jesus means he is Lord and Master of our lives and he is now the one
who calls the shots. When we truly follow him in this way, and we do his will,
it may mean we will be rejected and even persecuted by our family members or
that we will have to leave them to go where God wants us. So, we must consider
our own lives and the lives of others as not our own to possess or to hold on
to, and we must not seek to please ourselves or others, aside from pleasing God,
or we may have divided hearts and loyalties, and we may end up choosing
ourselves and/or our family members over God. Our Lord has to not only be in
first place in our lives, but he must BE our life!
So, if we want to be a follower of Jesus Christ, which is
what a Christian is, then we must give up our lives and what we want and lay it
all down at Jesus’ feet, and we must go wherever he leads us to go, and to be
and to do whatever it is he would have us to be and to do, even if it gets us
rejected, persecuted or killed in return. We must trust in the absolute
sovereignty of God over our lives, trusting that he knows what is best for us,
and that he has a plan and a purpose for everything he allows in our lives. We
must never compromise who God created us to be, or our faith, in order to
please ourselves or others, but we must be sold out to God and to his kingdom
work, even if it means leaving behind all that is familiar and secure to us. “All
to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give…”
Counting the Cost
For
which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and
calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he
has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to
ridicule him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or
what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit
down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter
the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is
still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So then,
none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.
So, now that we know what the cost is to following Jesus
Christ with our lives, we must count the cost. So, how do we do that? Well, let
me first talk about what happens when we don’t count the cost.
So many people today are teaching that coming to Christ
merely means we pray a prayer to receive Christ and now we have the hope of
heaven when we die, we are forgiven of our sins, and we won’t face eternal
punishment in hell. And, that is where they leave it. Added to that, though,
they teach that God is pleased with us no matter what we do and that he smiles
on us even when we are sinning against him, because when he looks at us he only
sees Jesus. So, what is wrong with this? It teaches that God requires nothing
of us, and so it ignores all the teachings and instructions (commands) of Jesus
Christ. It does not teach that we have to repent (turn from our sins), that we
have to die to living for sin and self, that we must be changed in heart and
mind of the Spirit of God, and that we are now given new lives in Christ Jesus to
be lived in the power of the Spirit in walking according to the Spirit and no
longer according to our flesh.
So, what happens then is that the “follower” is not really a
follower of Christ because he is still holding on to his old flesh, because he
was never required to give it up. It means he continues to live pretty much the
way he did before, except he may begin to clean up a few things in his life and
to attend church services regularly. It means he has not ceased to be conformed
to the patterns of this sinful world, and so he has not really been transformed
in the renewing of his mind. He still does what he wants to do, for the most
part, only now God is included in some of the things he does, or so he thinks. Yet,
what he has been given is a false hope absent of true grace, for God’s grace
teaches us to say “NO” to ungodliness and worldly passions and to live
self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age while we wait for Christ’s
return. Jesus did not die to give us free license to continue in willful sin
without guilt and without remorse. He died to free us from slavery to sin, and
to purify for himself a people eager to do what is good (See Tit. 2:11-14).
Now, the person may have genuinely repented of his sin and
he may have been born of the Spirit of God, but not taught the cost of
following Christ, and so he remains an immature believer until he learns that
following Christ means letting go of everything on this earth. As well, we don’t
get perfect at this immediately. We are always growing and learning. I know I
am. The Lord Jesus is still perfecting me in this area of letting go of what I
want and laying it all at his feet, and letting God have his way in my life,
even when it hurts like crazy sometimes. Yet, Jesus made it quite clear that if
we don’t lay it all down to follow him that we cannot be his disciples. Not one
of us will do this perfectly all the time so what does this mean? I believe it
goes to the subject of lifestyle and submission to Christ. If we just pray a
prayer and think we now have our ticket into heaven but that nothing is
required of us and so we continue to live pretty much as we did before, we are
in danger of hearing Jesus say to us one day, “Depart from me, I never knew
you.”
So, how do we count the cost? First of all we need to know
what the cost is so that we can count it, and then we need to decide if we are
willing to lay it all down and to go with God or if we still want to hold on to
our own lives and continue to be our own boss. If we choose the latter,
scripture teaches that we don’t really know God and he doesn’t really know us.
So, make sure you really know him today, because your life depends on it. Give
your all to Jesus, nothing held back. Let him have his way in your life.
Surrender all to him, and be willing to be, to say, to do and to go with him according
to his will and his purposes for your life. “I surrender all. I surrender all.
All to Thee my blessed Savior, I surrender all.”
Do you want healing for your life? Have you been hurt by sin’s
deceitfulness or disappointed by how things have turned out for you, or crushed
in spirit due to mistreatment by others? Then, lay it all down at Jesus feet,
surrender all to him, consider the cost of following Jesus, and go with God
wherever he takes you, and trust him to work all things out for good.
Broken and Contrite / An Original Work /
May 13, 2012
I
come before You, Lord, my Savior,
With
humble heart and crushed in spirit.
I
bow before You, I implore You,
Heal
my broken heart, I pray.
Love
You, Jesus, Lord, my master,
You
are the King of my heart.
Lord,
purify my heart within me;
Sanctify
me, whole within.
Oh,
Lord, I long to obey fully
The
words You’ve spoken through Your Spirit.
I
pray You give me grace and mercy,
Strength
and wisdom to obey.
Father
God, my heart’s desire,
Won’t
You set my heart on fire?
Lord,
cleanse my heart of all that hinders
My
walk with You, now I pray.
Oh,
Jesus, Savior, full of mercy,
My
heart cries out for understanding.
I
want to follow You in all ways,
Never
straying from Your truth.
Holy
Spirit, come in power,
Fill
me with Your love today.
Lord,
mold and make me;
Your
hands formed me;
Live
Your life through me, I pray.
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