“Now great crowds accompanied 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 bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’” (Luke 14:25-27 ESV)
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 was teaching that we should literally hate others or ourselves.
So, what could he possibly mean? I believe Jesus’ words, as is recorded in Luke 9:23-26, 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 (die daily to sin and to self) and follow (obey) him. He said whoever tries to hold on to his own life (of living in sin and for self) will lose it for eternity, but whoever dies to his old life, and who now follows our Lord in obedience, has eternal life. So, how does this help us with Luke, chapter 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…”
More Precious Than Silver
Lynn DeShazo
Lord, You are more precious than silver.
Lord, You are more costly than gold.
Lord, You are more beautiful than diamonds,
And nothing I desire compares to You.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKmlrlzTHXY
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