Sunday 02 • 25 • 18

Luke 14:25-35. 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 the foundation and is not able to finish, all those 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 10,000 men to beat him who comes against him with 20,000? 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 word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I want to thank you all for praying last week as our team was in Nicaragua. We went with a small group and had a great week visiting the Pierce family. They are doing terrific work in Leon, Nicaragua, and you're going to be hearing more about that in the weeks to come. You'll get a team report in a few weeks.

Let me lead us in prayer as we investigate God's Word together. Lord, I pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts would be acceptable and pleasing in your sight. You're our rock, our fortress, and our redeemer. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen.

Supermarket Sweep and the American Dream

Several years ago, NBC ran a regular game show called Supermarket Sweep. Anybody remember this one? Supermarket Sweep featured teams of contestants with a grocery cart, and they were timed. They would run through this grocery and try to fill up their cart with the most expensive stuff. Whoever got the highest value at the end when time ran out, that's who won.

Now years after that show came out and finished, all these funny details about Supermarket Sweep came out. There's an interview with David Ruprecht, who is the host of the show. Here are some of the things we learned about that show that were behind the scenes. First, the supermarket, while it looked like a normal supermarket, was only about four or five aisles wide. It was tiny. Hallway mirrors were set up to make it look huge, but this was not your normal supermarket. It was an easy place to navigate.

Second, all the meat was fake. They didn't want the contestants to get meat juice all over their sweatshirts as they ran through the store. And then finally, all the taping of the show was done in like a four or five month period, so contestants were not allowed to take the food home that they got in their basket. It was used over and over again. After about three or four months, the food's kind of beat up after it's been handled that many times.

Why am I telling you about Supermarket Sweep? Because I think Supermarket Sweep is a terrific parable about the American dream. Life is about acquiring. It's a rush through to fill up your basket with all the good things in life—a good job, a great career path, a great significant other, a great home, a great body, a great church. We're just putting all these commodities in the basket and running around as fast as we can because this is a race, and it's a race against the clock.

But here's what I love about this: the things that we're running after, a lot of them are fake. They're beat up. They're not worth having. Supermarket Sweep could not be any further away from the life that Jesus calls us to.

This week is our closeout of February where we're doing a one-month renewal on our vision and our commitment to our vision. We called it "We Can." This is where we've gone over the course of this month. We said first, we can't ask too many things of God. We can't ask too much of him. He gives all these incredible promises concerning prayer and our prayers for God's kingdom. In fact, we ask too little all the time.

Then we talked about how we can't trust him too much with our treasures—that our treasures, while they're given to us, are dangerous to our hearts.

And the more that we trust him with them, the more that we unleash our hands, the more freedom we find. Last week, James preached a terrific sermon from Romans 8 about how we can't lose, that we have a future that is sure and certain, and there is a love that God has for his people that he will never let go of us. We can't lose.

And today, we can't commit ourselves too much. We look at this—that whatever we give to him in this life, whatever we entrust to him, the areas of our lives where we say, this is hard and we give ourselves, commit ourselves fully to him. We can never trust too much, commit ourselves too much to King Jesus.

Now, here's what I want to say. In fact, I think that when we get to the other side of this life, when we're face to face with the Lord Jesus in eternity, if we can feel any regrets at all—I don't know if you can feel regret in heaven—but my gut, if we feel any regrets at all, it's the areas where we held back and we played it safe, and we were too conservative with Jesus, and we didn't give him an opportunity to work. We trusted him. We didn't trust him enough. We acted like we are contestants on Supermarket Sweep rather than citizens of Jesus' kingdom. That's my gut.

So today, if you take notes, here's where we're going to go. I'm going to talk about submitting these three things to the Lord Jesus Christ: submitting your autonomy, submitting your identity, and submitting your purpose—because he has great things for us. We can't commit too much to him.

Submitting Your Autonomy

Let's look at this first one. Submitting your autonomy. Look with me first at verse 25. Can we put that up here? The passage—look with me at verse 25. I believe this is key for us understanding the entire passage. This verse will—the first verse is so crucial.

Jesus is followed by a gigantic crowd. Now this is what's funny about Jesus. When he gets a big crowd, Jesus becomes suspicious. He begins—it's so different from the American church. He gets a little suspicious of why all these people are coming. In the American church, a big crowd is how we measure success, or at least one of the ways. We say a big crowd, there's something going on there. Not Jesus. Jesus is suspicious. What are you doing here?

And this is what we're going to see. It's impossible being part of the crowd to really follow Jesus superficially. See, verse 25 introduces two groups: there's the crowd and then the disciples, and it's really easy to see which are which. The crowd comes around to see a show. The disciples, they're following. A crowd comes and listens and then goes home. Disciples stay, and they stay with Jesus, and they go wherever he goes. Crowds love preferences and a big display. Disciples love Jesus.

This is made only the more pronounced in verse 26. Do you hear this part?

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father or mother and wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. — Luke 14:26

And all God's people said, oh—you know, like we're choking on this, right? If you're not choking right now when you hear those words, you are not paying attention to what Jesus says. And those are hard words. These are the names of people that we love, that we love dearly.

So let me say, you know, some of you are saying like, aren't we supposed to be people who are known by our love? Jesus wants to be known by our hate? What's going on here?

Well, here's the thing. I want you to make sure that you trip over the right thing in this passage. There's plenty to trip on. Don't trip over the wrong thing here. The expression is tricky, but it's something we've seen recently. Remember a few weeks ago, two weeks ago, we studied Matthew 6. And Jesus in that passage says:

You can't love God and money. — Matthew 6

You will love the one and hate the other. You'll love the one and despise the other. You can't love both at the same time.

Now I don't know any Christian who I know claims to love God who pulls out their wallet and is like, I hate this stuff. I despise this stuff. But Jesus is telling us there, you can't have two masters. The problem with money is that it takes over.

And again, here, if you could translate that back here, Jesus is saying, there are competing allegiances. And I want you to so love God that the rest of your loves in your life are, by comparison, they fade away. They're still there. But this has got to be first—a clear first, a bright winter.

Now even if that sounds weird to you and that's a Hebraism, you may be like, that's kind of weird. You get this: our loves today are still in opposition to our hates. So why is it that I love to be on time? Because I hate to be late, right? Why do I hate going out of town for long periods of time? Because I love my family. See, our loves and our hates go together.

See, a disciple is one that so loves Jesus that all other loves fade into the background.

If you go outside of Raleigh on a clear night—you have to go a little bit out of Raleigh, get out somewhere in the country where you can see lots of stars. Not hundreds, thousands of stars. And yet if you wait out there long enough, as the earth rotates on its axis, those stars fade away because our favorite star comes out. What's our favorite star? The sun. Everything else begins to fade into the distance.

And so a disciple loves Jesus in such a way that other stars fade away. He is number one. He is the star of my life.

Now here's my question, and it's the question I'm going to ask you over and over again in ten different forms. One point sermon today: Are you in the crowd or are you a disciple?

The crowd is with Jesus and then goes back home. A disciple stays. The crowd lives according to preferences—this is making me feel really great right now. A disciple follows. A disciple imitates. A disciple sticks with. The crowd says, "Look, I'm in charge." The disciple yields his or her autonomy to Jesus. Jesus, you're in charge. I want to do what you say. I want to go where you go. I want to be where you are.

You know, CTK reached our highest attendance last month by over 50 people. We've been averaging 90 people over last year every Sunday. Last year's average was 340. This year, it's 430. And I look at that and it begins to make me a little uneasy. I'm like, hey, we're killing it, but who's here? Because we gotta ask this question: Are we a crowd or are we disciples?

It's too easy to turn our faith, and particularly a church, into just another commodity you put into the grocery cart. Supermarket sweep. I got me a good job. I'm headed the right way. Finally got a good apartment. I've got an okay car. Working on a decent body. Got me a great church. Just put it all in the cart. And that is incredibly dangerous. That is incredibly dangerous to your heart.

So my question is: Are you here to follow Jesus? Are you here to follow him? There's a great danger of CTK turning into a crowd. And I'm not saying that because of the numbers of people here. I'm saying that because we are, as a community, asserting over and over again our preferences and our autonomy. And I hear it all the time. I don't want to. Yes, I'm preaching meddling this morning, right? I don't want to multiply my community group. We got something good going on here. I don't really want to serve with kids. I need a break for a little while. I don't want to join. I just want to hang out here on the fringe forever. I don't want to go help plant a church. It's just not the right time for our family.

Brothers and sisters, discipleship never is convenient. Jesus never comes along and says, "Hey, when it's a convenient time for you, let me know and we'll work on it." Discipleship always comes at the wrong times. And the "I don't want to" is deadly to our church and its mission. But you know what else? It's dangerous for you. In fact, you're missing out on some of the greatest things that Jesus can do in your life when you say, "I don't want to."

The best thing, the loser in this equation is not us—it's you when you say "I don't want to." The best thing for your spiritual health, hands down, the best thing I could ask you to do, we can ask you to do, our elders can ask you to do, is go help plant a church. And that's going to be really hard.

And here are some runners up in case you were wondering. Help out with the Al Maffadini family—the Syrian refugee family that so many of our folks are coming alongside and loving. Go get involved with taking a child into your home. Bring a child into your home with the organization we're partnering with in Raleigh that's helping families in crisis. Be a part of a community group that's multiplying. Host a community group in your home. Get involved in helping plant churches—10 churches over the next twenty years. I mean, we cannot commit ourselves too much to him.

Let me be really, really precise with my language. There's a big difference between "we can't" and "I won't." I want to acknowledge this before some of you get really mad at me: Yes, there are seasons. I know you just had a baby. I know things are hard. I know there are circumstances that may prevent you. But "I won't" is about preferences. "We can't" is about putting ourselves in a place where we have to depend on God in weakness and discomfort.

And if there are two words that Jesus loves, man, they are weakness and discomfort. He can do so much when we say that. When we say, "Jesus, this is beyond me. I need you to show up for me to be able to be here." Man, he loves that. But "I won't" is so dangerous.

Jesus is looking for disciples, not a crowd. He's looking for disciples who live and speak and serve as the very presence of Jesus. That's going to cost every bit of our autonomy and all of our preferences and, you know what? He is indescribably worth it. You will never regret it. You will never regret submitting our autonomy.

Submitting Our Identity

Second, submitting our identity. This is verses 27 through 33. So Jesus takes that, turns it up a notch, and he begins talking about the cross. He begins talking about the cross.

Now, let's be really careful. Notice that Jesus is not talking about his cross. Throughout the book of Luke, we see him describing in great detail. He knew exactly what kind of death he was going to die. He knew exactly the paces he was walking and where they ended up. But in this passage, verse 27:

Whoever does not bear his own cross—

He's not talking about his cross. He's talking about the cross of disciples who would follow him. See, there's a cross for him. There's a cross for us.

Now I wanted to make sure everybody's on the same page. It is Jesus' cross that makes us saved. It is only Jesus' cross that makes us saved. It is not our commitment to him that affects our salvation. It is Jesus and his sufficiency. We've been talking about that through Romans this year. It's Jesus that makes us Christians. But it's our cross that confirms whether or not that's true in our lives, whether or not we're willing to follow and embrace him and really be his. That's what's shown here.

See, this is the most difficult part of this passage to preach for me because it's so familiar. Now we wear crosses as jewelry. You can drive down our interstate and see crosses on the side of the road. Crosses are everywhere. They're so familiar that it's really hard for us as twenty-first century people to connect with what was happening in the first century. So we're going to have to use some imagination.

What did first century people hear when Jesus said, "Come and pick up your own cross"? What did they hear from that? Two things.

First is embracing guilt. The only people in first century culture who had a cross were the guilty. You wouldn't see people walking around carrying crosses unless they were condemned to die, and everybody knew what that meant. That person has been declared by the state to be guilty. So when Jesus tells us voluntarily, "Hey, you're my follower. You're voluntarily going to pick up your cross," that means an admission in us of guilt. It says, "I am wrong. In the very core of my being, there's something wrong with me. I am wrong."

What if Christians approach the world today with that kind of embracing of guilt? Can you imagine how that would change the way we posture ourselves, the way we talk, the way we think about ourselves, the way we respond to criticism from people who don't like the church? Man, but we're cross-bearing people. By definition, we say, "I'm guilty. There's something wrong with me."

This means that we are free for people outside of us. When the blogs come and the critics come and they say, "Look at your history," we're like, "There is nothing you can tell me that I don't already know. I'm a cross-bearing person. I know that. I know people are terrible. I know people have done horrible things in the name of Jesus. You can't tell me anything I don't know."

When people come and say, "You know, you need to check your privilege," we're like, "You better believe it. Because we're cross-bearing people." You begin to become suspicious of yourself. You need to look into sexism? Yeah, okay. We're cross-bearing people. The blogs, anything people could bring to us, we're like, "I know already. We are cross-bearing people. We can hear any criticism. We know that we're guilty. We can deal with our racism and our sexism. We can deal with all our isms. We're not afraid because we're cross-bearing people."

Can you imagine what would happen? The world would sit up and take notice.

But the other thing it means is to embrace death. To embrace the cross meant to embrace death. First century people didn't carry the cross to the grocery store. They carried it to their execution. They carried it to where they would be put to death. The life of a disciple is one that embraces death. This is true in the Bible. This is true in church history.

Think about this with me. People have got it. Look at the history of scripture. When Noah gets on the ark with the animals and his family, he might as well have gotten into a floating coffin. Who shut the door on the ark? Oh, come on. You gotta talk to me this morning, please. I'm dying up here. I'm the only person talking, so I need some help. When they got into the ark, who shut the door? Who closed the lid on the coffin? God closed the lid.

When Daniel goes into the lion's den, does he think he's coming out of there? Now he's facing his death. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego go into the fiery furnace. They say, we might come out, but we trust in God either way. They're embracing their death. This has been the pattern. Why would we expect it to be any different? This is true throughout church history.

You may know the stories of some of the first missionaries in the great first modern missions movement. Do you know that most of the people who went out in that first modern missions movement packed their bags in their coffins, and most of them came back in those same boxes a year later or less? They knew that going meant death. Pestilence, persecution, sickness—they knew. That's part of the deal.

You know, Benedictine monks wear these giant brown robes called habits—terribly inconvenient to wear. Ever seen a monk in a habit with the big droopy sleeves? You're a monk and you're cleaning up after dinner. Cleaning up after dinner doesn't go so well with big droopy sleeves, right? You knock over stuff, get in everything. Why do they wear big droopy sleeves? Why do they wear habits? Those are cut in the shape of a cross. And when a monk dies in the Benedictine tradition, they sew him up in it and bury him in it. He's sewn up in the shape of a cross. Cruciform life is what Jesus calls his people to.

The crowd says, "Jesus, I've always wanted a pony." That was funny. Disciples say, a cross.

The Paradox of Free Salvation

Somebody will say to me, "Wait. Wait. I thought salvation was free. I mean, we've been going through the book of Romans and all the radical nature of freedom of the gospel, the way it comes to us in Jesus. What is all this stuff about cost?" That seems like a paradox, and you're exactly right. Gospel comes to us absolutely free, and yet it will cost us everything.

Now let me illustrate what that looks like. I have a friend who's a pilot. Let's say he comes to me and he's like, "Hey, I'd love to give you a free ride on my airplane." Great. I'd love to go up with you. But in that moment, when I step onto that plane and we taxi down the runway and we take off, I have a free ticket—not costing me a thing—but it's costing me everything. I'm saying, "I trust in you. You're the pilot." If you begin to crash the plane, if you're beginning to go down, I can't be like, "Oh, wait. I need to get off." Right? I'm all in. I've put my life in his hands.

Following Jesus means it comes to us absolutely free. This abundant life we receive, this resurrection life, this salvation we get in Jesus comes to us absolutely free, and yet it'll cost you everything. Jesus confronts us with this. To embrace cross-bearing means we can't hold back. No turning back. No turning back.

The writer Simone Weil says something that sounds so simple, even simplistic, but I think this is true. She writes: "The one indispensable and often overlooked requirement for resurrection life is unfortunately death." And we who want God's resurrection life flowing through our lives—it's going to mean death to things in our lives. It's going to be submitting ourselves to him in ways that we don't want. It means no turning back. No turning back.

N.T. Wright says, "One of the biggest problems facing the church today is to help the decided become disciples." Are you in the crowd or are you a disciple? Are you a disciple?

Trading Our Purposes for His

Last, trading our purposes for His purpose. This is verses thirty-four and thirty-five. Look with me at this weird mini parable about salt.

Salt that loses its saltiness is no longer good for the soil or the manure pile. — Luke 14:34-35

And all God's people said, "What?" That was the needle on the record player. I was like, "What? Jesus, what are you talking about? The soil and the manure pile?"

You know, I've preached the parallel passage to this many times here, and you know it. If you've been a Christian, you've heard this one before, right? Salt is a flavor enhancer. It's a preservative. Jesus doesn't call us to be salt. We are salt, and he sprinkles his people out in the world, and we're to be that people that others are like, "Tastes good. I want more of Jesus."

Now I've preached that a bunch of times, and I've always felt a little bit off preaching that. I've always been like, "Gee, I don't know," because salt on my table is optional, right?

It's bad for me if I have too much of it. Like, I can have corn on the cob and eat it without salt. I don't like to, but I can. So I've always been like, is that all of what Jesus meant? And so when I open up this passage and read this and I'm like, manure pile? What is Jesus talking about?

I brought up this morning a giant bucket of manure I want to show you. No, I'm just kidding. I didn't do that.

I'm indebted to an old friend of mine, Doctor Anthony Bradley, for his research on this. Anthony went to Clemson, kind of like NC State, got a big agricultural soil program, and he wrote this great article that I had never heard anything about. And so I want to share some of this with you.

He says, when Jesus spoke about salt, he was describing salt from the first century, not the stuff that's on your table, not NaCl in its purest form. Salt in the first century had all kinds of other things in it because it was just naturally there and harvested. So it had gypsum, it had magnesium, it had potassium, in addition to sodium and chloride. And there were different kinds of salts that people began to realize have different uses. Some are great on food. Some are great for agricultural usage. There are all these different kinds of salt.

So salt was and still is in some parts of the world used for fertilizer. This is what Anthony says: salt keeps dung from rotting and becoming useless. And it wasn't just the Hebrew people who discovered this. The Romans did. The ancient Chinese did. And they realized that if you could mix this in with manure, it made it go a lot further, and it made it more effective.

So this is what he writes: salt was used in places to help soil retain moisture, destroy weeds, make stubborn soils easier to till. And some soil salt keeps rust off of wheat, blight from potatoes. When applied properly, salt will kill surface weeds, allowing more deeply rooted plants and grass to thrive.

So look, while this may be a foreign concept to us in the West—we think salt shaker on my table—this is actually well known in other parts of the world. Did you know, I didn't, that Filipino farmers use salt on their coconut plants, coconut harvest? A seven-year study was done on coconut farmers in The Philippines, and the use of agricultural salt would increase production by 125 percent. Very, very helpful.

Now why do you need to know this? I know none of you are probably going to go home and salt your garden this afternoon. I hope you don't. But what if we are to listen to coconut farmers from The Philippines and farmers from ancient Palestine and relisten to this passage?

You're like the salt for the soil, a stimulant for growth. If you become like flavorless salt, no longer good for anything, how will the gospel of the kingdom be preached through the whole world?

Christians are not here just to be a flavor enhancer—optional, makes Jesus more yummy for people—or to preserve from decay. Disciples of Jesus Christ are sent on mission to stimulate growth in some of the worst places, scattered in manure piles of this world in order to cultivate life. That is a radically different way of understanding that passage.

See, the crowd's like, I want to go places where everything's new and shiny and happy and cool, and I'm with cool people, and we're having a great time and we're doing it with Jesus and it's really fun. Disciples are like, manure pile. Where's the nearest manure pile?

In the agricultural use of salt, if it kills weeds and makes soil retain moisture, and if it makes things grow and does so in the worst places, it tells me the disciples of Jesus are called into the manure piles of this world to look for places where instead of being shiny and happy and it's a party with Jesus, lives are broken, and there's devastation, and there's need. And manure—some of y'all like the way it smells, and there's pills for that. Right? Things don't smell great. Things aren't clean. It's messy. You gotta change your shoes when you get home. Right? Things are messy when we get involved. Things are messy when we hear this.

Do you remember the movie, The Muppets from 2011? Okay. I know I'm always throwing movies at you, but this was a really great one. So I love the Muppets movie from 2011—Amy Adams, Jason Segal, musical. It was great. So the best scene in that, and this is a little dark humor, is Miss Piggy and Amy Adams singing this duet. Miss Piggy's had kind of a downturn in her relationship with Kermit. And so she sings this song, and she and Amy Adams sing this as a duet: "I'm having a me party. Remember you might remember this? Come on. Help me out, y'all. I'm having a me party, a party by myself. A me party. I don't need nobody else."

Man, if there is a song the American Church has on loop right now, that is the song and that is terrible. It's tragic. It's tragic. Me, me, me. It's all about me. We don't come together and sing hymns about me. We sing hymns about Jesus. It's about him.

Contrast that with what doctor Cornel West writes:

Despite the challenges presented by the widespread trivialization and delusion of the Christian gospel, I remain committed to its fundamental claim, to follow Jesus is to love your way into the darkest corners of the world.

To be a Christian is to look at the world through the lens of the cross. In my view, to be a serious Christian is to live dangerously against the grain of the world. Far too many American Christians—to follow Jesus is to seek comfort devoid of courageous compassion and bold witness for the least of these.

See, the call of disciples is salt on manure. And there's nothing cool or sexy about that. But do you see how this reading changes everything? Do you see how understanding where Jesus is calling us—it changes everything. Salt isn't optional anymore. It's not, well, you know, we could have some salt or we could not. Salt is absolutely critical for what God's kingdom is doing advancing in this world and God's call is coming to everyone of us.

Will you be a disciple? Are you just going to be part of the crowd? Will you be a disciple?

See, we don't have to go far to find places to be salt. That is so encouraging to me. You don't have to go to Nicaragua. It's right here.

One of the biggest joys of the last few years for me as a pastor has been getting to know Preston Hunt. And many of you know Preston went to be with the Lord on January 25. Preston was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer. And I watched him and his family walk through that over the last twenty months.

Can I just tell you what it's like to be their pastor? I'd think, okay, I'm gonna go over to visit the hunts this afternoon, and I have to kind of gear up because it's hard. I'm like, man, what am I gonna say? I don't have any words. I gotta come up with encouraging things to say. It's really hard. I'm struggling. And I'd get there and I'd sit with Preston and he'd talk about the glories of knowing Jesus. And he asked questions like, who else can I tell about Jesus Christ? I can't tell you how many times—every time I walked away from their home I cried in the car on the way home. And I was like, that's it. That's a life well lived, and that's a death well died.

You know, when we had our celebration service for Preston, it was a party. It was a party because instead of life being about supermarket sweep, we were like, that's what matters. Life and death, no regrets.

Brothers and sisters, the other side of this life—if you can have regrets in heaven, I believe some of the regrets that we're gonna have are places in our life where we played safe, where we held back, we didn't risk, we were so scared, we didn't know if we could trust him. We lived as if we were contestants on supermarket sweep rather than residents of God's kingdom.

What is winning in this life look like? Is it the person who has a cart full of fake meat and beat up boxes—stuff that nobody wants anyway? Or is it a life lived well for Jesus and his kingdom? Because we can't commit to him too much. You will never regret it. You will never regret it.

In the name of the father and the son, the holy spirit, amen.