The everything cost. Luke 14.25-33

Luke 14.25-33

This is a difficult passage.

A large crowd of people are starting to travel with Jesus.
But there is a big difference between travelling with Jesus and being a disciple of Jesus

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And Jesus says that to be his disciple, we need to have made the decision to give up everything for him
- Our families, our possessions, even our very lives

Jesus is pretty clear:
‘Whoever does not hate .. even life itself cannot be my disciple’ (v26)
‘Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple’ (v27)
‘None of you can become my disciples if you do not give up all your possessions’ (v33)

It is not just here.
In Luke 12 Jesus speaks about how he will bring division to families: father against son, mother against daughter.
In Luke 18 a rich young ruler comes to Jesus and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus tells him, ‘Sell all your possessions and give to the poor and come and follow me’.
And we are told that the young man becomes sad because he is rich.

I wonder how you feel when you hear Jesus say this?
Do you feel sad because you also think you can’t possibly do that.

Perhaps it is true that the gospel is really only for people who have absolutely nothing: no possessions, no family, no resources and who hate their lives in this world.

As we read through Luke’s gospel we hear Jesus say repeatedly that he has come for the people who have nothing – the poor, the hungry, the sad now
In this chapter, in Luke 14, we heard that the good news is for people like the man who had dropsy, dreadful swelling, who Jesus healed on the Sabbath. It is for people who sit in the lowest seat. It is, and this is said twice, for ‘the poor, crippled, lame and blind’.

And as for us, we – who have so much, and who don’t hate our lives or our families - are simply travelling with Jesus. We are not yet really his disciples.

I said that this is a hard passage

So what is going on here?

Is Jesus only for those who have absolutely nothing in this world?
- Those who have given everything away
- Or those who have had everything stripped away from them.

Well Jesus also in this passage gives some advice

The first is advice about building a tower: before you start, sit down and work out whether you have enough resources to complete the project: enough money, enough time and enough energy. Because if you don’t and you begin but do not complete, you’re going to look foolish.

And perhaps he is saying to people who want to follow him
"Before you decide whether you want to follow me, work out if you are able to do so."
You don’t want to be someone who – in another picture Jesus uses – starts to plough the field and then looks back.
You don’t want to be someone who, like the plant that quickly grows up, rapidly withers because you have no roots, or because you are strangled by the cares and desires of this world.

Do you have, says Jesus, what it takes to follow me?
Are you good enough, committed enough, religious enough, disciplined enough?
Do you possess sufficient will power to keep following me when it gets tough – when you have to make decisions for me that your family and closest friends will disapprove of, or if you are mocked or persecuted?
Do you love God, me enough to take up your cross and follow me to death – even death by crucifixion.

Peter thought that he did.
He said to Jesus, ‘Even if everyone else denies you, I will never deny you’.
But only a few hours after saying that, when a nobody, a slave girl, asked him if he was a follower of Jesus, he denied it!

The point is that not one of us is able to build the tower of following Jesus. NOT A SINGLE ONE OF US.

We do not have the resources.

Quite often we challenge people to make the decision to follow Jesus. We invite them to pray a prayer to say that they will follow him for the rest of their lives.
And there are people who come up and say, ‘I want to follow Jesus, but I know that I won’t be able to keep it up’.
I love it when that happens, because they have begun to understand what it involves to be a disciple of Jesus.
They have counted the cost, they have begun to work out whether they have the resources to follow Jesus, and they realise that they do not.

But Jesus then gives a second piece of advice

He speaks of a king who is threatened by another king. He decides to go to war against him. But before he does that, he makes a calculation. I have 10000 soldiers. The one who is attacking me has 100000 soldiers. There is no way that I can defeat him. I have to make peace.

In the first story about the man building the tower, Jesus is asking can you afford to follow me.
In this story he is asking can you afford not to follow me

God is the King who is coming to us.
And God has everything on his side. 

And you have nothing.
You may think you can resist him, but it is foolish
You may think that you can run from him, but you cannot.

Francis Thompson (1859-1907) wrote a poem called the Hound of Heaven. It is very difficult language. But he describes God like a hound who is hunting him – chasing after him. Wherever he goes, the hound follows. It will not let him go.

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him,”

He was someone who knew what it was to face God, the invading king, who is coming to overwhelm him. And he flees for his life. He tries to hide.

And it is only when he has finally been hunted down
“Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke!
My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,
And smitten me to my knee;
I am defenceless utterly”
that he realises that the one from whom he is fleeing, the one who is hunting him, is the very one who loves him and who he is seeking.

God says
"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 

I am He Whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from me, who dravest Me."
That last line means: "You drove love away from yourself because you have driven my love away from you."

JRR Tolkein writes of this poem that it is, ‘one of the most profound expressions of mature spiritual experience’. It had a profound influence on his own writing.

And it matches Francis Thompson own personal story.

Born in Bolton in 1859, he was brought to rock bottom. He failed at three different colleges, was homeless, sleeping rough in London, addicted to opium because of an earlier prescription for an illness, selling matches on the streets. At one point he literally only had a halfpenny, 50 kopeks, with which he bought 2 boxes of matches to sell.

He really had no resources with which to build a tower. He had nothing.
He was one of ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and blind’
He was cast off from his family, had no possessions and hated life.
And God came to him. In the form of an editor who discovered his writing, and in the form of a monastic community who took him in and cared for him. And it was in the monastery that he wrote, ‘Hound of Heaven’.

We are probably not at rock bottom. We probably have more than 50 kopecks.
Many of us have loving supportive families

But the story of the man who built the tower should make us realise that, however much we may think we have, however committed we feel to Jesus, none of us here have the resources to follow Jesus

In CS Lewis, Prince Caspian, Aslan asks the young Caspian if he is ‘sufficient’ to rule Narnia. Caspian replies, ‘I don’t think so, sir. I am only a kid’. To which Aslan replies, ‘Good. If you had felt sufficient it would have been proof that you were not’.

Our only option as people who know we do not have resources to build the tower or to face the overwhelming king is to stop putting our trust in our position in our families in society, in our abilities and strengths, in our possessions, and it is to surrender to him – and to throw ourselves on his love.

It is like learning to swim.
If we can swim, we have probably forgotten how scary it is to learn to swim.
I remember at school we had to pass a swimming test. We had to swim a length. The problem was that I could not swim. So, I pretended to swim. I moved my arms and hopped along close to the side, desperately hoping that they would think I was swimming.
I think that some of us are like that as Christians. On the surface it looks OK, but underneath we’re trying to do it all in our own strength.
But in order to swim, you have to be prepared to stop trusting everything that so far you have trusted in. You have to lift your foot off the ground and trust yourself to the water.

Choosing to follow Jesus, to become his disciple (which means to allow him to teach you) is like that.
It is the point when you stop trusting in yourself and you surrender and trust yourself completely to the overwhelming love and mercy of God.

Sometimes God takes us to the point, as he did with Francis Thompson, where we have absolutely nothing. Where we are literally ‘poor, crippled, lame or blind’.
It is a bit like dropping us into the middle of the ocean.

But often in his mercy, God does not take us to that point. Or at least not straight away!
We start in the shallows and he then leads us into the depths.
And there will come a point for all of us when we have absolutely nothing – except for Him.

But however He does it, God brings us to that point when we are prepared to make the decision to follow him: not because we can afford to do so, but because we realise we can not afford to not do so.
And so we lift our foot off the ground, and we entrust ourselves to him.

We stop and turn to face the one who is pursuing us. We die to ourself, to our possessions, to our families – what they say about us, what they dream for us, and we become alive to him. We die to the glamour and power and comfort and status of this world. We choose to live as a dead person to this world.
And we cast ourselves onto the love of Jesus.

Of course, we have to make that decision to die to the expectations of our culture, our possessions, our life, our ability to build the tower – that is what it means to take up our cross - daily.

It is as if we live in a world of swimming sceptics who say, ‘of course the water will never hold you up’, and it is easy to listen to them and put our foot on the ground and hop along!

But as people who have made that first decision to trust the Lord Jesus with our lives, we know that he will never let us down.