“Counting the Cost”
Luke 14:25-35

I. Introduction

A hog and a hen sharing the same barnyard heard about a church’s program to feed the hungry. The hog and the hen discussed how they could help.  The hen said, “I’ve got it!  We’ll provide bacon and eggs for the church to feed the hungry.”  The hog thought about the suggestion and said, “There’s only thing wrong with your bacon and eggs idea.  For you, it only requires a contribution, but from me, it will mean total commitment!”  That’s the cost of discipleship.  Many just want to make a contribution to the work of the kingdom.  Christ doesn’t want or need our contribution…He wants our whole life!  

Prayer & Scripture reading


II. Exposition

When Jesus walked on planet earth in human form, he was quite the charismatic, popular figure at times.  After all, he was going around blasting the religious leaders whom few liked anyhow for their hypocrisy, proclaiming a message of grace not legalism, and miraculously healing people!  So at times, as in our passage today, we read “large crowds were traveling with Jesus.”  

However, Jesus knew better than to put much stock in the fickle adoration of large crowds.  Even though large crowds is what most modern Evangelical churches seek, Christ repeatedly would make radical statements for the very purpose of weeding out the curious crowds down to the faithful few by exposing the real motives of those following him, and to declare the high cost of being a true disciple.  

The modern American Church keeps lowering the bar in order to attract people into their buildings, while Christ keeps the same high bar of absolute surrender of self!  As we pursue radical remodeling of how we do ministry as a local congregation, and as we seek to discover how best to repackage the gospel in a form that connects with our 21st century culture, we must do so in a way that does not in any way weaken the high call of Christ to come and die in order to live!  To obey the Great Commission we are called to make passionate, devoted disciples of Christ not just church members!

In our Bible study passage, we discover five required commitments to being a devoted, passionate follower, or disciple, of Jesus Christ.  

1. Passionate followers of Christ make their relationship with Christ top priority over all other relationships.  
Christ declares that unless you hate father, mother, family, even your life, you cannot be His disciple.  This call is racial, counter-cultural, even disturbing!  This form of exaggerated teaching was meant to shock the listeners to a response.  What Christ was teaching here is that all other relationships in our life must come secondary to our relationship with Christ.  

I rarely use myself as an example of faithfulness to Christ, because quite frankly, I’m not all that good of a role model for radical obedience!  But the one time I can think of that Kelly and I had to chose between placing God’s calling over family, was the choice to leave Alaska and come to seminary and then to take this call to Third and stay in Dubuque.  

To do so required us to take our four children away from both sets of grandparents, all of Kelly’s extended family, and all but one of my extended family.  And it’s not like we can just hop in a car and go see them.  This was and is a very high price to pay to be here in Dubuque.  But our relationship with Christ has a higher priority over our relationship with our family.

2. Passionate followers of Christ make the needs of others to have a higher priority over their own needs.
Christ declares, if anyone does not pick up his or her cross and so live a life of daily denial and death of personal preference and plans in order to obey the commands and call of Christ, he or she cannot be an authentic Christian.  

I’m proud to be an American, and I thank God all the time for being born in this country.  But if I could change one thing about our history, it would be to remove the phrase from our Declaration of Independence that we are “endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.”  This collective value wedded with the inbreed American trait of rugged individualism have fostered all manner of really anti-Christian values.  

Christ calls us to pursue God’s glory not personal happiness, and to do so in community, not as independent individuals.  If being a Christian does not often cause you to make costly sacrifices of how you use your time and money in order to serve others over meeting your own needs and desires, than you are not living as a disciple of Christ.  Dietrich Bonheoffer, in his highly recommended book, The Cost of Discipleship, declares, “When Christ calls (a person) to come, He calls him (or her) to come and die!”  

3. Passionate followers of Christ are willing to pay whatever price is required to build God’s kingdom
Christ tells two mini parables in this passage.  The first one is about someone planning to build a tower, and the foolishness of doing so in manner where one ends up unable to finish due to a lack of resources.  In other words, Christ is warning us, don’t start what you cannot finish.  This warning is meant to apply at many levels.  

First of all, Christ is saying this in relationship to becoming a Christian in the first place.  Christ is just not that interested in having a bunch of lukewarm, half-hearted, worldly followers.  Christ is saying, look if you are not interested in being a radical, sold-out, willing-to-die-for-me disciple, than don’t bother coming to me at all!  So this warning applies to calling yourself a Christian in the fist place, but then it continues to apply to each ministry activity we undertake as a disciple of Christ.  

VISA Tattoo commercial

Our Lord Jesus is right now calling us as a congregation to refocus all our resources on reclaiming the captive through aggressive evangelism, restoring the broken through inner healing ministries, and redeploying the equipped through comprehensive discipleship.  We had better not continue down this path unless collectively we are willing to pay wherever price is required!  To become a congregation that glorifies God through saving the lost and discipling the saved will cost us much in terms of time, money, and the giving up of personal preference for the sake of what reaches the unsaved.

4. Passionate followers of Christ engage in the battle for people’s eternal destiny through strategic planning
The second parable Christ tells is of a king going to war who must first consider if his ten thousands troops can defeat the opposing army of twenty thousand.  The point of this parable is that Christ calls his followers to be wise, shrewd, and strategic when planning how to proclaim the gospel and make disciples of all nations.  Being led by the Holy Spirit does not mean doing things haphazardly!   

When Christ walked on planet Earth, he was very strategic in where he traveled, how he healed, and when and how he proclaimed the gospel.  Christ is operating from a master plan to redeem all creation and establish the eternal kingdom of God.  Likewise, the evil one and the kingdom of darkness is also operating with a strategic plan in the vain, but still dangerous and deadly, plan to keep Christ from reclaiming planet earth and the human race.

In the same manner, Christ expects us to engage in ministry with a strategic plan that connects with Christ’s strategic plans.  And indeed, this is exactly what we are seeking to do as a local congregation.  The Vision Team, and I trust that most of you as well, are praying fervently for our Lord to show us very specifically what battle fronts he want us to join him on.  

We cannot take on every battle.  Last Sunday and Thursday night a group of us walked through the neighborhood primarily along Windsor, Lincoln, & Rhomberg, interviewing our neighbors to discover how we might better serve the community surrounding our church.  This proved to be a very enlightening activity.   

Here is some of what we discovered:
 - That is was much easier and much more fun than any of us had anticipated to step way out of our comfort zone and go talk to people
 - That most of our neighbors living within a 1.5 mile radius don’t even know we exist or if they do, it’s a faint memory of some church that use to do good things
 - That there are far more needs out there than we could ever possibly meet!

We must now evaluate the strength of our troops as a local congregation, and then spiritually discern which battle to fight.  Many of you are praying about this, and many of you are coming up with lots of creative ideas.  Let me now give you some guidelines to narrow your prayers and brainstorming.  

We are seeking to birth at this time one new missional outreach ministry.  This new ministry must meet two criteria:
  (1) it must match our current ministry strengths with a deep, current need of the neighborhood within a 2 mile radius, and
  (2) it cannot be a ministry that only meets a social need but it also must connect the users of this ministry with the gospel.  

5. Passionate followers of Christ live radical counter-cultural lives in order to be salt and light
The average American Christian wants to have all the benefits of American lifestyle and all the blessings of the kingdom of God as well.  The problem with this approach is that one cannot live like the average American pagan, then turn around, and have any credibility when we proclaim that there is a better way to live by being a passionate, devoted follower of Christ.  

We cannot be watching the same extreme movies, listening to the same ungodly music, getting intoxicated, using foul language, gossiping about others, living primarily for our own success and pleasure, and then be of any value as salt and light in this world!

Indeed, Christ declares then when Christians live this way they become salt that has lost its saltiness, unable to be made salty again, and so become useless to him and so are  thrown out.

So many Christians want a fast-food faith as this humors but convicting video clip portrays:
 - “McFaith” clip
 - Leadership magazine once ran a cartoon that showed a church building with a billboard in front that said: “The LITE CHURCH: 24% fewer commitments, home of the 7.5% tithe, 15 minute sermons, 45 minute worship service; we have only 8 commandments—your choice.

If this is the kind of Christianity you want, then you got the wrong pastor, and indeed this is the wrong church!  Because I, and the majority of you from what I can discern, are indeed seeking to live as passionate, devoted followers of Christ!  

We don’t have to water down the hard and high calling of Christ to radical discipleship in order to attract new members because those who really belong to God deeply desire such discipleship.  
We don’t have to be one bit ashamed of reaching out and inviting people to give us a try as they seek a church because this congregation is already a place that offers to God’s people a place to see modeled and to become a devoted, passionate follower of Christ!