Luke 14:25-35 (NASB)
David Bruce Linn, Pastor-Teacher
30 April, 2006
All Rights Reserved, www.breakfree.org

Imagine that you are a soldier in the United States Army ten years in the future. The world situation has deteriorated to the point that an invading army is threatening our northern border. You are standing in formation in a staging area just back from the front lines of what has become a battle for the future of America. On your back is a heavy pack of the latest high tech military equipment. A canteen is on your belt and a gun at parade rest at your side. A Kevlar helmet is on your head. The captain of your company has arrived with your orders and the sergeant calls you to attention.

The captain shouts: "The enemy is overrunning the border! You are the first line of defense for your country against the invader. You are being called upon to give the highest measure of devotion. God, honor, and your country demand no less. The people of this great nation are counting on you to preserve not only our way of life, but our very lives." At this you see a fair number of soldiers fall out in a random fashion. They toss their guns and helmets as they head away, followed by their packs. The sergeant accosts them immediately: "Explain yourselves, soldiers!"

The first one says: "I didn't sign up for this! I signed on for the training in electronics." The second one says: "I'm in this for the college benefits, I never expected to fight." The third one says: "I never planned to leave my family and go to war. I'm out!" A fourth says: "I'm here because I couldn't find work! You don't want me--let the real soldiers do the fighting."

As the sarge shouts orders for MP's to detain the deserters, you see another group of soldiers throw down their guns. The sarge accosts them and they explain: "We're not gun people. We don't like guns and we're not prepared to shoot anyone. Let the gun people do the shooting."

You watch in dismay as yet another group throws off their packs. The sergeant accosts them and they respond: "Humping these packs all over the northern border is not for us. We're not the big body-building people. Let the workout junkies carry the packs." After all the desertions and qualifications, in the end, you end up standing nearly alone with only about five percent of the company who are ready to actually function as soldiers. The others cheer you: "You guys are the heroes! Git 'er done, and when you get back we'll have a big party!"

1. ONE RADICAL MINIMUM STANDARD

How successful do you think a company of soldiers in that condition would be at protecting their part of the northern border of the US? No army such as that would be able to achieve its primary objective of defending their country. It would be hopeless.

We live in the era of the volunteer army. Other eras have had to face the draft. I was among the last group of Americans to be classified under the old selective service system which operated during the Vietnam war. Fortunately, by the time I came of age, the military was no longer actively drafting people. It is no doubt hard for many people alive today to appreciate what it meant to have your birth date thrown into a lottery which would decide whether you would go on with your life or whether you would be in the U.S. Army. No one was allowed to say: "Well, I don't feel called to that! I'm just going to pretend that the draft notice never came." No, if you did not show up at the induction center on the date on your draft notice the MP's would be sent to get you.

And the volunteer army of today is not that different. The standard of service is the same. Whether inducted by volunteering or the draft, every soldier is under command. Once you are in your life is not your own. You go where you are sent and you do what you are told. While there are many different jobs to do in the military of today every soldier must learn to shoot, carry a pack over long distances, fight hand-to-hand, and survive in a hostile environment. The need for defense overshadows our personal need for comfort and safety, and every soldier is honor bound to obey his officers. This is not merely a formality for the sake of order. All of our lives depend upon it. As much as we would all dearly love for war to just go away forever, the only way any nation on the real earth lives in peace is through strength. For that, you need an army full of real soldiers.

Every Christian has an all-compelling calling which is higher and more total even than that of a soldier. Paul wrote to his protege Timothy: "Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier" (2 Timothy 2:3-4). Paul gave Timothy the general principle. If military service is a high calling which supersedes even comfort and safety, Christian service is higher!

Paul wrote to the Colossians this description of Jesus Christ: "He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything" (Colossians 1:17-18). Christ is first in all things, and we call that supremacy. The good of the country is a high calling for which we may be called to lay down our lives. The supremacy of Christ is a higher authority than that of any Commander-in-Chief, and his calling to serve him supersedes all other callings.

Luke records a parable told by Jesus where many guests received an invitation to an elaborate dinner. The master of the house received back one poor excuse after the next. So the master went to the highways and byways to find people who would understand that his call to come and eat was higher than whatever they were currently doing. If Jesus Christ really is invested with supremacy over all things, how high is his calling for us to serve him? He summarized it with these words: "So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions" (Luke 14:33). It is hard enough to think that this statement applies to our material possessions. But the context, which we will study in a moment, makes it clear that Jesus is making a claim upon everything that we would call "ours." As Lord of All, he has both the authority and the power to do so.

This is a clear statement that there is only one radical minimum standard for followers of Jesus Christ. If you study the use of the word "call" in the New Testament you will find that there is little or nothing about multiple calls to serve Christ. Most Christians think that there is a call to salvation, a call to evangelism, a call to full-time ministry, a call to missions, and perhaps a call to dangerous service. If Christ's standard for disciples is that they all give up everything to him, then we as Christians today have some major rethinking to do. It is a simple fact of Scripture that Christ calls every one of us to total commitment to live under his supremacy. Yet when he looks down at his army he sees about five or ten percent of us fully committed.

Am I making this up? Statistics show that only about ten percent of Christians share their faith on a regular basis. Many Christians have thrown down their guns and said: "I don't have an evangelistic gift or calling. Let the evangelistic people do it." This is just one example.

2. A RADICAL REFLECTION OF OUR SUPREME COMMANDER

The Lord Jesus was often followed by people who were only seeking the benefits he had to offer. They were all forming their own personal idea of what it meant to follow him. While it is true that he deliberately gathered the crowds, he refused to leave them in their ignorance of his supremacy and what that meant for every follower. In Luke 14:25-35 Christ takes time to explain that every genuine follower of him acts as a mirror of his supremacy. Anyone who does not reflect Christ's supremacy in his or her manner of life is simply not one of his disciples. In this teaching Christ impressed upon the ill-prepared crowds three aspects of their inner lives that would have to be completely reorganized under him, namely, their affections, their will, and their mind.

Christ began with a radical challenge to our affections: "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" (Luke 14:26). Someone has called this "the expulsive power of a new affection." In other words, we all have a priority list of people and things which we love. Responding to Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, means that he gets put at the top of the list and everything else gets shoved down.

The idea of hating our family members compared to how much we love Christ does not mean that we hate them in the normal sense. It means that Christ so far surpasses every human being in worthiness as an object of our affections that even our love for our relatives seems like hate. Jesus had a collision with the rigid, legalistic Pharisees over this matter: "He was also saying to them, 'You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition. For Moses said, 'HONOR YOUR FATHER AND YOUR MOTHER'; and, 'HE WHO SPEAKS EVIL OF FATHER OR MOTHER, IS TO BE PUT TO DEATH'; but you say, 'If a man says to his father or his mother, whatever I have that would help you is Corban (that is to say, given to God),' you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or his mother; thus invalidating the word of God by your tradition which you have handed down; and you do many things such as that" (Mark 7:9-13).

The Pharisees, who claimed to be following the Law of Moses better than anyone, were actually dishonoring their own parents. Their doctrine of Corban meant that their whole lives were given over to God. In their error they would end up having their parents go needy in order to uphold their humanly-devised doctrine. What they failed to see is that God himself commands love, honor, and provision for our parents. It is very clear that neither the Old nor the New Testament command us to disregard our family members, rather to put our love for them in perspective. Christ should be the all-consuming love of every disciple's life. I believe that because Christ empowers us by his Holy Spirit when we love him best we will actually be able to love our parents better than before we set our affections on Christ.

Christ is supremely lovely, so when our love responds to that it goes through the roof. Because of my experience as an emergency medical technician I carry large medical kits in my cars so I can help people. My certification has expired so I have to warn people: "Well, I can probably save your life but it won't be official. It's up to you." Because my emergency jump kits stay in the trunk they are subject to all kinds of temperature and humidity extremes. Everything in the kit freezes all winter and bakes all summer. I have discovered that the standard red alcohol thermometer that I use for taking people's temperatures will not survive the summer heat. The red indicator runs up to the top and will never come back down again.

Our love for Christ should be like that. Once the thermometer of our love has risen up above all normal human measures, it should never come back down again. Whenever anyone looks at us our indicator should permanently register a peak of love for Christ which exceeds what we have for every normal human being, even our family members.

The second huge area of our inner selves which must be brought into line with the supremacy of Christ is our will. When people observe our decisions in life can they see a reflection of the all-surpassing Christ? Jesus described perhaps the most disturbing claim upon our lives: "Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple" (Luke 14:27). This is not a reference to the normal difficulties of life which come upon all of us in one way or another. I do not believe it is even primarily about the acceptance of suffering for Christ's name.

I am convinced that, based upon the pattern of Jesus Christ himself, this speaks of an enduring decision, a setting of the will, to pursue the accomplishment of the good things of God's kingdom no matter how hard it gets. The writer to the Hebrews explained it this way: "Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart" (Hebrews 12:1-3).

The shame and sufferings are not the focus of kingdom ministry, Jesus is! He is the model, and so how did his total commitment of his life as revealed by the crucifixion work? Did he spend all of his time focused on the cross? No! As great as that suffering was, he focused on the joy of achieving the forgiveness of sins for every person who would believe in him. He focused on his session with the Father in heaven, and the glory which would be restored to him after the Ascension.

The logic is simple. If we have a low view of Christ, not much suffering will seem worthwhile. There are many Christians who have trouble getting out of bed to come to church. Others are laying their lives down in urban and rural jungles. What does the second group know that the first does not? They see the supremacy of Christ who made the highest, most agonizing sacrifice to achieve the greatest good for the kingdom of God.

When this realization comes upon us, we will look at our opportunities for ministry in light of the all-surpassing Christ, we will observe the inevitable difficulties, and we will say: "This is worth it! We can do this." Then we will set our wills in an enduring decision to see those things happen, come what may. That act of the will reveals itself in a dark world as so different from the norm that the supremacy of Christ will shine through. The more total our commitment of will, the more we polish our mirrors so that the magnificence of Christ can be seen.

Thirdly, a genuine response to the supremacy of Christ with our minds means that we will rethink and reorganize our lives for him: "For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, 'This man began to build and was not able to finish.' Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace" (Luke 14:28-32). Christ says, in effect: "I gave you a mind. If you want to be my disciple, your mind must be fully engaged. Think it through. Then reorganize your whole life according to my supremacy. Nothing less will suffice."

My personal testimony is that I went to the university less than a year after having received Christ as my Lord and Savior, but I had not done this last part of discipleship. I was interested in medicine as a career before I was saved, and then when I received Christ I just fit him into what I was already doing. Apparently, God wanted to get my attention so he sent me to the infirmary for nine days with a high fever and nothing to do but think, pray, and read the Bible. At the end of it I realized that I had never asked him what he wanted me to do with my life. I had not reorganized my life according to the logic of Christ's supremacy. I began a year of prayer and seeking which resulted in a very obvious call to ministry which was simply part of my total life reorganization for his glory. I see it as my finally coming to understand what being a man of God really means under Christ's supremacy.

CONCLUSION

Christ concluded this section with a sobering word about the uselessness of half-hearted discipleship: "Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned? It is useless either for the soil or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear" (Luke 14:34-35). I have heard two possible first-century explanations of why a salty substance might lose its saltiness, one by conversion with fire and the other by leaching with water. But why the salt loses its saltiness is not Christ's focus. Unsalty salt is like unslippery motor oil, food with no nutritional value, or a spouse who will not bond with you. It's like a politician who never stops campaigning and refuses to govern, or a teacher who cannot teach.

Christ wants us to see the uselessness of a disciple whose mirror is bad and will not reflect the supremacy of our Master. How can we even say he is our Master if the pattern of our behavior reveals that we do not have a master other than ourselves? If he is supreme, and we are his followers, then our entire lives will reflect that reality to a world which desperately needs to see him as he really is. Why would anyone want to worship a being we call Master but whose will we reject whenever it is uncomfortable? Perhaps the failure of Christian behavior is one reason why so many people think that Christ was a fake. Fake Christianity makes Jesus Christ, the worthiest being in the universe, seem fake. That is a travesty!

Have you fallen out of formation in the army of Christ? If you have, you are failing to see his supremacy. Have you chosen to throw your gun away by leaving the sharing of the good news to other people? Have you dropped your pack on the ground, hoping someone else will hoist it for you? Being a soldier is a total commitment to a higher purpose. And no one can be a soldier of the real Christ for us. We must do it ourselves. Jesus taught only one radical minimum standard for following him. It is our acceptance of his supremacy which makes it seem worthwhile. The question is not whether he is worthy of our all. He is worshiped in heaven for all eternity! The question is whether we will live so that whenever anyone looks at us they will see him.