[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints, our Lord Jesus turns to the crowd this morning in the gospel lesson, Luke chapter 14, and he speaks to them, preaches to them about the difficulty of being his disciple. It’s a hard sermon. In fact, the Lord gives three restrictions. He says, unless you do this, you cannot be my disciple. And we want to consider those restrictions in turn. He says, first, unless you hate me. Unless you hate your father and your mother and your wife and your children and your own life, you cannot be my disciple. And then he says, unless you have a cross, he says, if you would be my disciple and you don’t pick up your cross and follow me, you cannot be. And then, after giving two illustrations about counting the cost, first building a tower and then going to war, he says, unless you renounce all that you have, you cannot be my disciple.
So Jesus requires of us, to be his disciple, hatred, a cross, and renunciation. Now this is the negative side of discipleship. We normally, when we think of discipleship and following Jesus, we think of the benefits: the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, salvation from sin, death, and the devil, rescue, the presence of God, and His promises, which are all true. But Jesus also lays before us today the cost of discipleship and what it means to follow him.
I’d like to put this quotation into your mind, which I think is a way to frame all of this. Some theologians said, Christianity is not a hobby. It cannot be. There are no part-time Christians. It’s all or nothing. Either you will have no other gods than the one who saved you by his suffering on the cross, or you will have a crowd of false gods, none to save. No Jesus. Jesus must be before, above, alone, precisely because he alone can save, and he alone is jealous to save you.
Really, what Jesus is putting before us this morning is the requirement of the first commandment. You shall have no other gods before me. And while this is restrictive because our own sinful flesh always wants to have all sorts of other gods, this is also, we have to remember, for our good, because Jesus alone can save. Every other false god that we’re tempted to follow or tempted to worship cannot save but can only kill and destroy. And Jesus wants us to know and to rejoice in his life.
So let us then consider the required hatred of the disciple of Jesus, the required cross of the disciple of Jesus, and the required renunciation of the disciples of Jesus.
First, the hatred. Jesus says, unless you hate your father and mother, hate your wife and children, hate even your own life, you can’t follow me. Now, at first glance, we say, now how could this possibly be? Because God, after all, is love, and he has given us his command to love. In fact, Jesus, when he is asked, what’s the greatest commandment? He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. St. Paul tells us that all the law is summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself, because love does no wrong to a neighbor. John tells us this in 1 John: God is love, and we love because he first loved us. Jesus says this, that they will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another, so that we are to be marked with love.
So how do we say, how, for those who are commanded and called and set apart to love, how can the Lord come to us and say that we are required to hate? It seems like these two are contradicting one another. But it must be that this isn’t the case. It must be that this hatred that the Lord Jesus requires of us is, in fact, included in the command to love. And it turns out that that’s the case. That God, who is love, is also marked apart by hatred for all that is evil, all that is wicked, and all that would undo the work that he is doing.
I’ll give you a little quote on this one. This is from Wordsworth, who says this: that, and this is amazing, I’m still thinking about it, that which is bettered by being neglected or thwarted, such as an evil counselor in his evil counsel, is best loved by being hated. So the person who is doing evil, or who is tempting us to do evil, or is bringing us along to evil, or is trying to overcome our own good, that person is best loved by being hated.
Wordsworth continues, “We must not allow other men’s evil to overcome our good, but endeavor for their sake as well as our own to overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:21. So when someone comes along who hates the Lord’s word, who hates what he has required, who hates what he’s doing, who despises his works, when someone comes along in this way to tempt us away from the goodness of God and the life-giving gifts that the Lord Jesus has for us, it is actually our act of Christian love to despise them, to reject them, and even to hate them. To not be influenced or drawn away by their evil from the good that the Lord has invited us to.
I imagine most of you know this tension in your own lives now, or you have known it, or if you haven’t, you will. In fact, I think the Lord sees to it that this happens, that there are those people whom you love, who you look up to, those people who you want to serve, or those people who are serving you, even those who are closest to you in your own family, who do not trust the Lord, who do not believe His word, who do not hold to His promises, and who look down upon you in one way or another because you do.
I think the Lord arranges our life like this. God, we praise that there are so many people who do encourage us to believe, and I think it’s one of the great benefits of gathering together in the Lord’s church that we can be around others who believe in the Lord Jesus and who trust in his promises, and we can encourage one another in this way. But there are people in your life and in mine who, when they find out what we believe, or if they find out something that we hold to in the scriptures, would simply despise us for it, or mock us for it, or laugh at us for it.
Jesus knows that that pressure is going to come, even from inside our own families, from parents, from children, even in marriages, even in marriages. Even, and Jesus says, when he’s talking about our own life, he’s talking about our sinful flesh. Even from our own sinful flesh, there is going to come the temptation to renounce Christ, to deny Christ, to reject Christ, to despise His word, to put it away. And Jesus says, you have to be ready for that. This is what He’s calling us to. Unless you hate father and mother, unless you hate wife and children, unless you hate your own life, you’re not ready for this. Because these things are going to tempt you to follow them, and I am calling you to follow me.
So the Lord requires of us, his disciples, that we are anti-whatever is anti-Christ. That we hate what he hates. And that is especially those things or people who hate him. And we know that the cost of following our Lord Jesus Christ will be rejection, even perhaps by those that we love. This is part of counting the cost. Unless you hate father and mother, you cannot be my disciple.
And then Jesus says, the second requirement, whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. The Lord gives you a cross. Now this stands against a lot of the preaching that we hear in the world today that is something like this: That if you follow Jesus, everything’s going to be great. If you would just give your life to Christ, things are going to work out perfectly. I’ve heard this preached any number of times, especially back in the old evangelical days, when the preaching was something like this: Jesus wants to give you a better life. And so if you give your life to him, he’ll give you all that you hope for and all that you desire. In fact, the preaching was like this: Why don’t you just try Jesus for a couple of weeks and see how your life improves? Like it was a two-week free trial money-back guarantee or something like that.
This is not what Jesus promises, and it’s a dangerous thing to present. This preaching sets people up for despair, because what happens when I go and follow Jesus, and the result is not a life of ease or of comfort, but a life of affliction? In fact, I mean, this life is hard enough with just trying to navigate the world in our own sinful flesh, and now to have the devil himself as our great enemy. Jesus does not promise, follow me and your life will be easy. Take up your lazy boy and follow me. He says, look, if you don’t bear a cross, you cannot be my disciple. That the Christian life is a life of suffering and affliction.
In fact, Luther—someone was asking me about this this week—says this in the preface to his German works. He says there’s three things that make a theologian: prayer, meditation on the word of God, and suffering, affliction, tentatio, entractum. It’s what we’re called to as Christians, because you and it, I suppose, makes sense. You and I have a God who took upon himself our flesh and blood so that he could suffer on the cross to save us, which is of all the different gods for there to be in the world. This is perhaps one of the strangest ways for God to be, but this is how it is. God, in your flesh, in your sin, in your tomb, in your place under God’s wrath, so that you could be with him forever. That’s who God is.
And so it doesn’t surprise us that to follow after this God means to take up the cross. This means it’s going to be hard. It’s not an accident that as soon as Jesus was baptized, he was driven into the Spirit to be tempted by the devil. You are called a Christian, which means that you are an enemy of the world and the devil and your own sinful flesh who despise you. Now this is a good reminder that the devil does not love you. I think we need to be reminded of that more often, because the devil tries to tempt us to think that he’s our friend and that he’s helping us out like he did in the garden. Did God really say, oh, come on now? The devil does not love you. The world does not love you. It does not want the best for you. It does not even care about you. It’s using you. Your sinful flesh does not love you. And those desires that it preaches to you are not for your good and are not for your benefit and are not going to fulfill you and give you meaning and purpose. These are the enemies of God, and so they are the enemies of God’s people. And this means that our Christian life is taking up the cross of the one who does love you, Jesus Christ, and who gave his life for you.
So we are called to follow after him, not in the way of ease or comfort, but in the way of suffering, being willing to give up everything. And that’s the third thing: the renunciation of the disciple. So the hatred of the disciple, the cross of the disciple. And then after Jesus tells these parables of the man building a tower and the man going to war, which are not easy, profound descriptions of what our life of Christian discipleship is, then Jesus says, so that if one of you does not renounce all that he has, he cannot be my disciple.
We heard a renunciation this morning already. Now, there’s an ancient practice of renunciation in the church, and it’s actually pretty amazing. Dion was baptized this morning, and I asked her, “Do you renounce the devil?” And she said, speaking with a voice very similar to her mom and dad, “Yes, I renounce him.” And then, “Do you renounce all his works?” “Yes, I renounce them.” “Do you renounce all his ways?” “Yes, I renounce them.” I’ve asked many of you that same series of three questions when you were confirmed in the Christian faith: Do you renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways?
I found out when I was in Denmark a couple of weeks ago, and they had services every day, and they were saying the creed, and I could pick up on the creed even though it was in Danish. I said, oh, they’re confessing the Apostles’ Creed, and I could go along. But there was something that they said at the beginning that I couldn’t get. What is that? And I had my Google translate, but it couldn’t get it either, so I asked one of the guys, “What do you say right before the creed every time you say the Apostles’ Creed?” And they said, oh, we say… “I renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways.” And I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven. In other words, it was like the preamble of their saying the creed. And they said, “You don’t say that before the creed every time you say it?” No, that’s awesome. Maybe we should. But I looked it up. I think they’re the only ones that do, so I’m not sure that…
But this renunciation comes from the ancient church, and especially there was a practice in the ancient church called the scrutinies that went along with it. When someone was coming into the church, their life before they were a Christian was scrutinized. In four places particularly, if there was any sort of sexual sin, especially sort of deviant sexual sin, if there was any drug use, especially any sort of psychedelic drug use, if there was any witchcraft in their past life, and if there was any idolatry. I mean, the whole life was scrutinized, but especially those, the pastors were looking for those particular four things, and probably because those four things are ways that the devil gains access to our own lives, our own conscience, and our own heart. And he’s able to get in and manipulate and tear things up and mess things around.
And so we want to apply the medicine of God’s word to the conscience, to the burdened conscience. And especially if there’s anything to be confessed in those four areas, we want to confess them and bring them out into the light where the confession can disinfect, and where the gospel can be applied and the absolution can be heard. And then, there’s a renunciation that kind of closes the heart off to those demonic attacks: I renounce the devil and all his works and all his ways. But what the Lord Jesus is asking of us is not just a renunciation of the devil, but also of the world and also of our own sinful flesh. Unless you renounce all that you have, you can’t be my disciple.
So there’s a negative and difficult side. Now the reason is because Jesus alone can save. And I want to bring us back to this clarity of the first commandment and this quotation that we’re considering: Christianity is not a hobby. It cannot be. There are no part-time Christians. It’s all or nothing. Either you will have, on the one hand, no other God than the one who saved you by his suffering on the cross, or you’ll have a crowd of false gods with none to save. No Jesus.
And dear saints, that’s why this matters. That’s why Jesus is so serious in his call to discipleship to us today. If we’re unwilling to be ashamed and be thought of as fools, if we’re unwilling to lose our life or lose all that we have, if we’re unwilling to suffer and to be uncomfortable in this life, then we’ll lose the very thing that matters: the blood of Jesus, which brings us through death to life eternal.
And this is why Jesus preaches to us, to you, and to me, this hard sermon. He wants to have you as his disciple. He wants to live with you in life eternal. He wants you to rejoice in the forgiveness of all of your sins that He accomplished by His death on the cross. He knows that you and I are tempted to grab a hold of all these other things of this world. But He knows the most important thing of all is the most wonderful and the most blessed thing of all: His love, His mercy, His kindness, His promises, His kingdom, His glory, His smiling face, which we’ll see when we close our eyes in death and open them in the joy of life eternal.
So Jesus removes from our hearts all the idols that would take his place and sets himself up there as our Savior, as your Savior, and as your friend. May God grant that we would be his disciples, that we would count the cost and consider how he has accomplished everything for us. And may the Holy Spirit strengthen us in this conviction, in this confidence, in this hope, and in this joy. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding. Guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.