“A religion that costs nothing is worth nothing. A cheap Christianity without a cross will prove in the end a useless Christianity without a crown.” And those are the words of J.C. Ryle, written in 1877 in his classic and well known book called Holiness. In the chapter on “Counting the Cost,” Ryle is reflecting on the passage that we come to tonight in Luke chapter 14. If you could turn there in your Bibles to Luke chapter 14, you can find that on page 874 in your pew Bibles. And Ryle writes further. He says that, “It costs something to be a Christian. There are enemies to overcome, battles to be fought, sacrifices to be made, an Egypt to be forsaken, a wilderness to be passed through, a cross to be carried and a race to be run. Salvation is not putting a man in an armchair and taking him easily to heaven. It is the beginning of a mighty conflict in which it costs much to win the victory.”
Well over the past few months we have been looking at the central section of the gospel of Luke and we have been looking at it with a focus on evangelism. And beginning tonight and for the next five weeks after tonight, we’re going to shift somewhat and think about the cost that Christ calls us to count as we come to follow Him. It’s all too easy for us to slip into a comfortable Christianity. What we’re going to see over the next several weeks, how Jesus challenges us when it comes to self-righteousness and money, keeping the status quo, falling into prayerlessness, and being passive in our Christian lives. And we are going to start tonight by hearing His challenge to be all-in for the long haul and for good. That will be our three points as we study this passage tonight. Number one, all in. Secondly, for the long haul. And then thirdly, for good. So before we read God’s Word, let’s pray and ask Him to help us tonight. Let’s pray.
Father, we give You praise that You have called us and drawn us here tonight to close this Lord’s Day and to prepare us for a week ahead in which there will be challenges to overcome. There will be costs to count, crosses to bear. Would You help us as we hear Your Word, by Your Spirit, would You give us ears to hear that we might hear what You have to say to us, that we would apply it into our hearts and into our lives and live lives which are glorifying to You but a blessing to those around us as well. We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Luke chapter 14. We’ll start in verse 25 to the end of the chapter:
“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. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace. So therefore, any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.
Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.’”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
All In
The same Jesus who says, “Love your enemies,” also says, “Hate your family.” Now maybe it’s not quite as simple as that, but this is one of the hard sayings of Jesus. Verse 26 He says, “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.” It’s such a hard saying that I think we sometimes missed the best part of all of this passage. And we’ll get to that a little bit later, but for now, what we notice is that the call to follow Jesus demands renouncing everything else. Hate is such a strong word. It’s such a strong word that surely we could look to some of the Greek lexicons and theological dictionaries to find a more nuanced translation that we could use for that word here in this passage. In fact, when we look to some of those lexicons we find that this Greek word, “miseō,” one of them says that, “The English word ‘hate’ does not always do justice to the Semitic shame, honor oriented use of this word” and that this word could actually have the meaning of “disfavor” or “disregard.”
But what about the way we find this word used when we read it in Luke’s gospel? Places like Luke chapter 6 verse 22, “Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude you and revile you and spurn your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.” Or what about what Jesus says in chapter 21 verse 16 and 17? He says, “You will be delivered up, even by parents and brothers and relatives and friends and some of you they will put to death. You will be hated for My name’s sake.” Now it doesn’t sound like it’s quite as mild and easy going as “disfavored” and “disregarded” when we read “hate” in those passages. It sounds a lot stronger than that. And what Jesus is doing in this passage, He’s warning them about the extreme and the sometimes violent reaction that will come to them as a result of their following Him and being His disciple. It was a situation that called for strong language.
If we look in the Jewish Mishnah, which was the first major work of rabbinic literature – it was compiled around AD 200 – and it gives us some idea of the oral traditions that existed at the time of the first century and even before that. But there’s a series of daily benedictions in the Mishnah. And one of them is called “the Birkat haMinim,” or “the benediction concerning the heretics.” Really it’s not a benediction; it’s more of a curse. And here’s what it says. It says something like this. “For the apostates, let there be no hope. Let the Nazarenes and the Sectarians perish as in a moment. Let them be blotted out of the book of life and not written together with the righteous.” Now who are the Nazarenes? The Nazarenes are those who followed Jesus of Nazareth. And a later commentator on that part of the Mishnah says not only did Jewish people have a hatred for the Nazarenes, they even stand up at dawn when they recite their prayers in the synagogue and curse and anathematize them. Three times a day they say, “God, curse the Nazareans!” for they harbor an extra grudge against them because despite their own Jewishness, they preach that Jesus is the Christ, the opposite of those who are still Jews.
And as we look in the Bible and we look into the rest of the New Testament and the book of Acts, we find that there was extreme persecution and violence that arose against the Christians in those days, beginning in Jerusalem and sending them out into Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. And it’s easy to think as we read about that persecution in the book of Acts that it came from a faceless and a nameless authority, that there was something almost generic about it. But no, that upheaval that began in Jerusalem against the Early Church, against the Christians, it came from their homes and it came from their families. It came from the foundation of their own identity.
Sholom Aleichem, he has a scene in one of his stories, the stories that were later made into Fiddler On the Roof, and it’s when Tevye’s daughter, Chava, marries a non-Jew and he says to his wife, he says, “Get up, take off your shoes and let’s begin the seven days of mourning as we’ve supposed to. “Hashem nosan vehashem lokakh” – “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” Let’s just pretend there never was any Chava to begin with or that she has gone off to the ends of the earth and we’ll never see her again.” Is following Jesus worth those kind of consequences? One commentator explains it, that “hate” in this context, it’s not so much an emotion or a feeling as we tend to think of it, but it’s actually a description of an action, it’s a description of the way things are and it can be translated as “reject.” And so what’s really being said here is that if you had to choose between your parents and Jesus you must reject your parents in order to be faithful to the call to follow Jesus.
Someone asked me earlier this week what I was preaching on tonight and I said this passage; I read that passage. He said, “What? Jesus says what?” And that’s something of what His words do for us. They draw us near. They draw us in. We want to know, “What is He really saying? What does He mean when He says this?” And His strong words are doing that for us so we would actually hear what He’s saying and what He’s warning His disciples here in this passage. And just because we haven’t experienced those kinds of ties being severed for the sake of following Christ, that does not mean that there are those in this world who have and who have faced these painful experiences and consequences. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to hear, again, the call that Jesus gives to us tonight to give up the love of ourselves, to give up the love of anything else that gets in the way of our following Jesus. There is a cross to carry. What is it tonight? What is it right now that is holding us back from following Jesus wholeheartedly? What do we need to renounce for the sake of being faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ? Is it our families? Is it possessions or activities? Is it popularity? Is it safety and comfort? Maybe there is something at school or with a team or with our peers or even with ourselves that we need to go up against and turn away from for the sake of following Jesus. Because you see, Jesus is not one facet among many in our lives. Jesus is everything and He’s calling us to follow Him with all that we have.
For the Long Haul
Those are questions we need to ask ourselves from this passage. Jesus calls for an all-in discipleship and He tells us to count the cost, to count the cost in following Him. And part of that cost is the cost of following Him for the long haul. Someone asked me a few days ago about how the semester was going teaching at Belhaven. And I said that we are at the part of the semester that I would say is the “losing interest” part of the semester. He asked me if I meant for me or for the students. I started to say, “Yes,” but I meant the students. And the mid-semester lull or the mid-semester slump is a real thing for college students. And the longer the semester starts to go on, the attendance starts to drop off. And for some people, they drop out altogether. And something similar can happen in the Christian life. Like C.S. Lewis said, he said, “The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged affliction are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.” And like Jesus said in the parable of the four soils, we have all known those who started out well in the Christian life, and yet when the cares of the world came, when trials, when temptations, when pleasure, when distractions came, they either withered away or they were choked out and they turned away from following Jesus. And it’s tragic. It’s a tragic story and so discouraging for fellow believers, for those who knew them and loved them. Jesus says, “Count the cost.”
Verse 28, “Which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” Even an everyday building project, it is necessary to know whether there is enough money or whether there is enough materials in order to finish the project. And if not, there is the shame that comes along with beginning to build and not being able to finish. And the same thing applies to international diplomacy as well. Verse 31, “What king goes out to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with two thousand.” If he’s not able to fight the fight, then he declines to enter into the engagement altogether. Jesus is saying that the Christian life calls for perseverance.
Now what He’s not saying is that any of us have the resources or the strength or the ability to finish strong or to finish well within ourselves. But you see, when Jesus tells these parables it’s not that every detail in the parable has a direct correlation to real life, but the parable is told in such a way to make a particular point or to have an impact and effect on the listener. And the point of these parables is that the Christian life is not all peaches and sunshine. There are costs to count. There are battles to fight. There are burdens to bear and races to run. And yes, God preserves and keeps all those who are His. That “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.” But we have a duty to be ready to engage in the struggle and to fight the good fight. We don’t want to be caught off guard when there is pain or suffering or disappointments. We don’t want to be surprised when temptation is a lot harder to fight than we ever thought it would be.
I was in a meeting with an older brother in the faith not that long ago and we had learned about someone else we knew who seemed to have fallen away. And as this older brother prayed, he thanked God for His grace in his own life and then he prayed, “Lord, get me home before it’s dark.” Lord, get me home before it’s dark. Don’t let me start and not be able to finish. Don’t let me begin the fight and not see the victory. “Through many dangers, toils and snares, we have already come. ‘Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.” Yes, there are many dangers, toils and snares that have already come, but there are many dangers, toils and snares still to come in the Christian life. Don’t forget it. Don’t let them catch you off guard. And don’t give up when they come. The commitment to follow Jesus calls for our all for the whole of life.
For Good
There was a survey done last year that asked, “What was the modern day idol that has the most significant influence on US churches?” and what the survey identified as the biggest modern day idol is comfort. Comfort. One of the researchers said that the largest number of congregations battle the influence of first world comforts and the church’s second most common modern day idol is the commitment to keeping secure the comforts that they already have. And wouldn’t we all admit that we are drawn to comfort and the easier it is, the better. And yet so much of the Christian life, so much of the New Testament is about perseverance. We heard about it this morning. We read it over and over again. “Stand firm. Hold fast. Press on. Stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day approaching.” Jesus doesn’t call us to a discipleship that bails at the first sign of trouble. No, He calls us here to something different. He doesn’t call us to a comfortable, bland and tepid Christianity. He calls us to a Christianity that is realistic about the trouble it is ready to endure so that we can be an influence for good in the lives of others and in the world around us; an influence for good.
See, comfortable Christianity doesn’t say, “No.” It doesn’t renounce anything. Comfortable Christianity doesn’t bear a cross. There’s nothing in it about self-denial. There’s nothing in it about self-denial. There’s nothing in it about going against the flow of the culture or about breaking the expectations of family and friends with the desires within our own hearts. No, comfortable Christianity won’t do anything difficult for the sake of representing Christ and His kingdom in a fallen world. In other words, there is nothing in Christianity, comfortable Christianity, that is salty. Verse 34 and 35, “Salt is good, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is of no use either for the soil or for the manure pile. It is thrown away.”
Now when we think about salt, how do we usually think about it? We usually think about it how it relates to food. And what does salt do for food? Well, it does one of two things. It either adds flavor or it preserves. It makes food taste better or it keeps food from spoiling. But how does Jesus talk about salt in verse 35? He says that bad salt is no good for the soil or for the manure pile. We don’t eat dirt and manure, at least I hope not. You see, Jesus is not talking about the taste of salt. He’s actually talking about salt being used as fertilizer. And apparently, salt has a long history of being used as fertilizer and it can still be used that way today. In fact, I saw an article from a few years ago and the headline was this – “PCA Urges Farmers to Use Salt as Coconut Fertilizer.” PCA of course is the “Philippine Coconut Authority” and they recommend using salt as a fertilizer. And there’s an older article from 1962, the former head of soils department at West Virginia University wrote that “Agricultural literature abounds in references to the use of salt as fertilizer.” And there is this thought that certain types of salt can actually kill off the weeds that have less developed roots so that it removes some of the competition for the plants that are trying to grow. And there’s even some thought that the salt actually nourishes the soil in a way that strengthens the root of the crop. Jesus is saying that a good disciple, like good salt, is fertilizer. Could we even say that a good disciple is like manure? It makes you think twice, doesn’t it, when we read about Jesus saying to be the salt of the earth. Doesn’t it?
We talked about it a little bit today. David Felker mentioned one of the new Sunday school classes looking for a new name. A name for the new Sunday school class. We have a Sunday school class called “Salt and Light.” Maybe a good option for the new Sunday school class is “The Manure Pile.” Manure’s not that bad of a word when you really think about it. Or maybe you go with a Greek word. That would be kind of cool. Use the Greek word for manure, “kopria.” There you go. So tuck that one away. All it is, that’s what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. It means to be an instrument for good. It’s to be used for the health and the growth and the fruitfulness of others. It’s to be used for the harvest of the mission of Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus is having a positive effect on the culture in the workplace and in our neighborhoods and in the church. It’s about being used and about being at work to spread the way of the kingdom of God and the ministry of Jesus wherever we go.
But you know what? We can’t do that if we look just like the culture, if we haven’t separated ourselves from our old life for the sake of following Jesus. In other words, “salt is not good if it has lost its taste,” verse 34 says. Now again, taste doesn’t really go with the whole idea of fertilizer, does it? But taste is probably not the best translation of that word here. The Greek word is “mōrainō,” from which we get the word “moron,” and it means something like being foolish or dull or weak. And salt, as it was harvested in those days, it could have certain impurities that could actually break down and diminish the effectiveness of the salt. Now I don’t understand all that is involved there, but the complex salts of Palestine could physically disintegrate or lose its saltiness. And what Jesus calls for here is a distinctiveness. He’s calling for a saltiness from His disciples. And so over the next few weeks, we’re going to think about that. We’re going to think about some of the ways that we can maintain our saltiness in our costly service for Jesus and in Jesus’ name. But for tonight, we ask ourselves, “Have we grown too comfortable? Is there anything holding us back from following Jesus completely? Are there things that we love more than Jesus?” We could even ask ourselves, “Forget about renouncing all other things. What about the way we think about our own desires? Are there ever times when we say ‘No’ to our own desires, to our urges, for the sake of following Jesus?” That’s what it means to separate and to be distinctive.
And yet, don’t you see here something beautiful in what Jesus is teaching in that He calls us to renounce and to separate and yet at the same time to be fertilizer? What we see is that Jesus is not saying to remove ourselves totally from the culture and from the people around us. No, He’s saying not to be of the world but in the world. There’s both here – to renounce and separate, and by our separation we are actually being a positive effect to others and to the advance of God’s kingdom. Jesus is calling us to be all in, for the long haul, and for good. And it’s a hard saying. This is a sober warning from Jesus.
But like I said earlier, there is an amazing blessing in these verses that is not to be missed, and it’s this. This passage is an invitation. It is an invitation to come and to follow Jesus. Yes, there’s a cross to carry. Yes, there is a cost to count. But it is for the sake of following Jesus. And it was Jesus who Himself was rejected by those who were closest to Him. It was Jesus who gave up His own life. It was Jesus who bore the cross and went to His death and resurrection for you. He did that to call you to Himself, to invite you to be His disciple. And because Jesus did all of that for us, this is an invitation to resurrection life, to give up this life and to gain the life that is to come, to gain the life of what Scott was talking about earlier in the new heavens and the new earth. Resurrection life. And whatever may be holding you back right now, it’s holding you back from something much, much better. So would you come and see? Would you come and follow Jesus according to this invitation that we have in this passage?
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we give You thanks that when we come to hard sayings in Your Word that You do not hide these things from us or try to make it seem as if it’s something else, but that You call us to the realism of the Christian life and of the challenges we may face following You. And yet we thank You for Your grace that You extend to us in Christ, the gracious One, our perfect Savior. Would You help us to repent, to turn from all those things which hold us back and that weigh us down, that we would take upon ourselves Jesus’ burden, His burden which is light, that we would come to Him and find rest for our souls. We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.