Dismissing Jesus (Part 7) - Take up your Cross

Now, I've loved being a dad.

I've loved my boys and all the energy and excitement they bring to our house, to our life.

But sometimes they do things that uh drive me a little nuts, too.

And sometimes that happens because they'll do something that you think, I did the same thing, and yet it annoys me now when I'm the parent.

So some time ago I made a plate of brownies or a pan of brownies, and we have a simple standard in our house, and that is if you're the last to use something, clean it up.

So if you take the last brownie, do the dish, put it in the dishpan, let it dry, don't just leave it sitting there.

So I come in after we've made these brownies, you know, I had like one and then they were gone instantly, except they weren't actually gone.

You got down to the end of the tray, and there was this little brownie knob sitting in the tray, and it was sitting there because nobody wanted to take the last one because then they would have to clean up the brownie tray.

And so they had eaten it right down to the last thing, and then said, ha, somebody else will have to do that.

And that highlights something that I think is is true, certainly for for some of my boys, for me, if I'm honest, maybe for some of us.

And that is there's something inside of us that wants to get the maximum return for the minimum personal investment.

And what we mean, what I mean when I say that is what we want is we want to eat the brownie without doing the dishes, right?

We want to get the physique without doing the workouts.

So let us buy a pill if we can that'll help us, you know, get where we need to go.

We want the income without necessarily doing the hard work of building our career through a season to get where we want to go.

We want somebody to just give it to us right away.

And that's true sometimes spiritually.

Sometimes when we approach God, what we want is we want to have somebody tell us what are the minimum entrance requirements for the kingdom of God.

How can I get everything good here and now that I want for my life with the minimum restriction from a divine being and still have the hope ultimately of heaven?

Well, we've been in this series that we've called dismissing Jesus.

And we've been looking at some things that Jesus said that are easy to dismiss.

And today we're going to look at Luke chapter 9, verses 21 through 27.

Luke 9:21–27

And in this section, Jesus says something that is actually repeated often by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the writers of the original Gospels, the eyewitnesses who saw Jesus in his life and recorded them, so that we have the words of Jesus.

And this is something that's repeated over and over and over again in the Gospels.

And it's the idea that Jesus says, very simply, if you want to be my disciple, he says, that you have to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.

In fact, in verses 23, 24, 25, he goes on.

He says, Whoever wants to save his life will lose it.

But whoever loses his life will gain it.

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their very self?

And then he says this, verse 26 Whoever's ashamed of me in my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father.

And here's what Jesus is saying very simply.

He's saying, if you keep your life, if you do your best to arrange everything so that your desires, your preferences, your agenda is foremost.

He says, You're going to lose your life.

But if you give your life up, if you give up your agenda, your preferences, your comfort for something greater, he says, then you'll gain your life.

And I believe that this is one of those statements that we like to dismiss.

Not necessarily just saying, oh, that's not true, but we like to say, eh, that can't really mean what it appears to mean.

Because I want to eat the plate of brownies and not do the dishes.

I want God to give me all of the blessings with no price, no cost to me.

And so we're going to look at this.

But in order to maybe just give us a starting point, I want to share with you a little bit of economic theory.

This is not high-end theory, this is simple theory.

And in economics, there's a simple concept that says your price and your number of units sold have an inverse proportion.

Which means, for example, if it costs you a certain amount of money to buy something and you mark it up$100, and you sell one unit, you make what?

$100 of profit, right?

Or you can make it cost$1, sell 100 units, and you make$100 of profit, correct?

You understand what I'm saying?

So you have$100 units at$1 and you make$100.

Or you can say, you know what I'd really like to do is I'll sell it for$50 above the price, and hopefully I'll sell$150 units or whatever, yeah,$50 units at that, at$50, and what would that equal, math people?

Nobody wants to yell it out.

$2,500.

Everyone's like, it's$2,500, but I'm not yelling it out in case it's a trick question.

It's not a trick question.

So, so so for example, if I were to say, you know what, I'm gonna have this great penguins championship t-shirt, and I'm going to sell it or a sweatshirt or maybe a jersey, because you wouldn't sell a sweatshirt for a hundred bucks, but but but you know, a jersey or something, and I could sell it for this, or I could sell it for this.

What I want to do is find find this price point that maximizes it in terms of a sale.

Now, obviously, if they don't win two more games, the jersey becomes worthless, and I'm selling it for less than I can get.

But but the idea is very simple, and here's how sometimes people perceive what the Christian message is.

And that is that Jesus was basically trying to find this price point of talking about here are the benefits, here are the costs, and I'm gonna find that that sweet spot right in the middle where where the maximum number of people will choose to follow Jesus and get the benefits.

But when we look at Luke chapter 9 and the other places where Jesus says, if you want to keep your life, you've got to give it up.

Luke 9 · chapter mention

But if you try to keep your life, you're gonna lose it.

What we see is that Jesus actually raises the price, the cost, he talks about taking up your cross, which is a which is an allusion to sacrifice, to death to self.

And at the same time, he gives it away.

And the reason that this is so significant is so often in church world, what we see is we see churches that will do one or the other.

And what I mean by that is they'll either say, you know what, we're going to raise the price.

And you see this in churches that get the faithful few mentality, where they say, you know what, we're all about depth here.

And all we do is depth.

And we don't care how many people come because it really doesn't matter how many people come, because we're doing depth.

I mean, that's what we do here, and we're the ones who really believe, and we're the ones who really get it, and we're the ones who and they go down this path.

And the mentality is Jesus' price is high, we're the ones who meet it, and of course nobody else is going to come.

Then on the other end of the spectrum, you get churches that are sometimes criticized for being attractional or something like that, where they basically say, look, uh, the grace of God is free.

And we want to reach as many people as we possibly can, so we're always doing whatever we can to help every single person come and learn and experience.

And sometimes in the attempt to do that, we'll avoid some of the harder subjects, some of the things that talk about the price of being a follower of Jesus, and we'll just keep talking about how you can have a happy family if you follow these principles and how you can become successful and how much God loves you.

And we'll never talk about any of the hard things.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in writing about this in World War II era, he was a pastor who was imprisoned in Nazi Germany for speaking out against the regime, talked about this in his day, and he said one of the greatest plagues in the church, he said, is something that he called cheap grace.

And what he was talking about was he was saying that cheap grace is the idea that says that God loves in such a way that we negate the message of grace of any price to be paid.

Now, you may be having some dissonance even as I talk about this, because you may be saying, Well, well, isn't the message free?

And remember what what I said, Jesus both jacks kind of the cost and he gives it away simultaneously.

Two things that don't seem to make sense to us.

And so what we need to see as we come to this passage is that Jesus was not afraid to drive people away if they had the wrong impression of what it meant to be his follower.

In fact, in John chapter 6, there's a story where Jesus had a huge crowd and he began to teach hard things, and people began to leave, and when the day was ending, there were only his disciples left.

John 6 · chapter mention

He had driven away thousands of people, and just his disciples were left.

And he said, Are you gonna leave too?

And they said, No, where else would we go?

You have the words of eternal life.

We have nowhere else to go.

And so, what I want to do here just for a few moments is talk about the demands of this passage, and then talk a little bit about how we bring together this idea of the demands of Jesus and yet this reality that he gives it away.

So, first let's just talk about the demands.

And what we see in this in this short section is that we are commanded to do a few things if we want to be followers of Jesus.

The first is this he says, Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross.

So the first thing we see is just this idea of self-denial that Jesus says we are to abandon our own ambitions and our own goals, our own desires for something else.

And this is one of the hardest things in the world to do because we're all inherently selfish.

I mean, certainly that's the sin nature, but but it's even more than that.

We just have have a favorite subject.

Do you know what your favorite subject is?

You do you know what my favorite subject is?

It's it's me.

And and what that is isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that's what we are by nature.

We're most interested in our own dialogue, our own story.

And in order to get off of our own story, we have to deny our own agenda, our own ambition, and say, I'm going to make my life about something else.

And what Jesus does here is he says, if you want to be my follower, that's where you have to start.

And then he says a second thing.

He says you have to dedicate yourself.

And this I see in this idea of taking up your cross daily, verse 23, and following me.

And to take up your cross daily means that you make a daily shift from your own agenda, basically to saying, I'm going to sacrifice for his mission, his agenda, and to follow me means that I'm going to adjust all of how I see the world to how God sees the world.

And here's the challenge with this.

And that is when we go out into our agenda, I haven't drawn stick people for a while, so I thought I'd bring them back.

When we go out into the world, what happens is we have one of two ways of basically seeing the world.

One, and some people would call this worldview, one is to see the world, and then to see the truth of what is in the Bible or God's word.

And so we see whatever God says through our experience, through the lens of our worldview.

The second is basically to look at the world through the lens of the Bible.

This is a Christian worldview that says, in essence, whatever is going on in the world, I see it through the truth that has been revealed to me in the Word of God.

And the reason that this approach is significant is because you and I can't take up our cross.

We can't follow God if what we're really doing is saying, I look at the Bible through the lens of my experience.

Or I look at truth through the lens of my experience.

And even if we think that we take the Bible as our lens, a lot of times what we do is we bring our own presuppositions to bear and we say, Well, the God that I worship couldn't possibly mean that.

The God that I believe in would never, and we make statements that are deeply theological, that have big implications, that are actually kind of our own stuff, that we're projecting into saying, I'm a follower of Jesus, but but we haven't taken Jesus at his word.

What we've done is we've said, I want Jesus' words to match my experience.

And here's one of the places that I think we see this.

I don't know if you've noticed the uh increase in people who are becoming life coaches.

Have any of you noticed this?

Like there's people who are like, hey, I'm a life coach.

And you know, they're handing out cards and on social media, you know, hey, trust me, I'm a life coach.

And and and not that there aren't times where we could use life coaches.

And not that those people aren't necessarily qualified, but I have noticed that sometimes people are life coaches who haven't done much.

And you're like, what are you gonna coach me in?

Like, what have you actually done in order to make you qualified to be a life coach?

And here's what what happens when when we turn or deny kind of this idea of God saying, if you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself, take up your cross daily.

Notice he says daily, and follow me.

In other words, dedicate yourself to my ends.

And that is, we turn Jesus into kind of our life coach Jesus.

And what I mean when I say that is a life coach Jesus is a God who's going to help you become successful, happy, and extraordinary in your experience and in your life.

And you see, the reason that this is denying Jesus or dismissing Jesus is it doesn't really deal with the take up your life or take up your cross and follow me, and if you keep your life, you'll lose it.

What it does is it makes Jesus or God into our divine helper so that we can become successful, we can become extraordinary, we can become champions, we can become victors, we can have our best life now, kind of a thing.

And certainly, I believe if we follow the principles that are in the Bible, it will lead to a better life now, but it misses the point.

Because what it does is it makes Jesus into basically one who, if we follow his principles, will make our life better here and now.

And what does Jesus say?

He says, only if you give your life up now will you really get life.

That's it.

That's what Jesus says.

So one more just thought in this in this passage, and this is in verse 25, and this is declare yourself.

It says this, what good is it for someone to gain the whole world and yet forfeit their very self?

And then he says this, verse 26 Whoever's ashamed of me in my words, the Son of Man, will be ashamed of them when he comes in his glory, and in the glory of the Father and His holy angels.

And I think that this is talking about declaring ourselves.

We've have students graduating from high school this weekend that we're recognizing.

One of the most helpful things you can do, students, if you're graduating, transitioning to high school or to college, to young adulthood, is when you go to a new environment, is to declare yourself as a follower of Jesus Christ.

You see, the easy thing to do is to go into a new environment and say, I'm gonna play it by ear, I'm gonna wait and see.

And and when I when I'm in the environment for a little while, then I'll decide kind of where I go in this.

But by waiting, what you're doing, at least in part, is you're saying, I'm leaving the options open for me.

And what does Jesus say here?

He says, if you're ashamed of me, if you don't want to acknowledge me because you're concerned about what those frat friends or that sorority sister might say, or you're concerned about what the professor will think because the professor has a view, or you're concerned about, he says, then I'm gonna be ashamed of you.

Now notice again what Jesus does here.

He he raises the price, the cost.

He says, if you want to be my follower, this is going to demand something radical from you.

Now, Jesus in John chapter 12 gives us a picture of something.

John 12 · chapter mention

And this is a gardening illustration.

This is John chapter 12, verse 24.

John 12:24

He says this, very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.

But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

And what Jesus is doing in John chapter 12 is he's saying, Yes, I'm calling you to die to yourself, to give up your life, but I want you to know that that's when your life will actually be the most full life that you can have.

John 12 · chapter mention

I know here in Pittsburgh we're a little consumed with penguin hockey this time of year and the Stanley Cup, but there's another uh sports championship going on right now.

It's the NBA.

Uh, it's a game called basketball.

And uh and at the risk of using too many sports illustrations, let me just give you one illustration from the NBA finals this year.

And this will be my last sports illustration this month.

I won't do another one after this, partly because I'm not preaching much, but um, that's beside the point.

LeBron James is uh arguably one of the best players ever, certainly one of the best of this area, if not the best.

And several years ago, he left Cleveland to go to Miami to play, and people in Cleveland who were Cleveland fans were burning the jerseys, they were upset, they were they were frustrated, they were they they just couldn't stand LeBron.

Now, a few years later, he comes back to Cleveland and leads them to a championship.

But here's what happened in the intermeing interme uh intermeaning time, in the time between, when uh he was he was in Miami, and that is they had draft picks that were number one, number one, number four overall.

They made some trades, and they had another high draft pick, and they rebuilt their entire team so that the team that they have now, they would not have had if LeBron hadn't left.

What they would have done is they would have finished 500 and had high draft or lower draft picks and not gotten the team that they had, they wouldn't have won the championship.

And here's the point.

And that is if you were a Cleveland fan, you would say, the only reason that we are winning championships or playing for championships now is because LeBron left.

And at the time, it seemed like the worst thing ever.

But now it's a good thing.

What Jesus does here is he says, When you go to give your life away, it's going to die, it's going to hurt, you're going to say that this doesn't make sense.

But only when you do that does he say, Will you get your life back in some ways?

Now, now here's the the real challenge of this.

And that is that the challenge of this is for you, for me, I want Jesus in many ways to be my life coach, to help me be successful here and now.

And a lot of times when I feel called to give my life away, I don't get to see the championship three years later, four years later.

What happens instead is I say, is that really worth it?

And that's the question that plagues us.

It's the question that probably plagues every one of us when it comes to giving our life to the cause of Christ.

Some of us will say, you know what, I would love to follow Christ, but if I followed Jesus in the area of my sexuality, it means I'd never be fulfilled sexually, and I just can't stand that thought.

So I don't know that that I can really give him control of that area of my life.

Some of us would say, you know what, I'd love to follow Jesus, but if I tithed to my local church, that would be a radical thing that would impact my ability to save and secure my own future or to enjoy my own comfort or to enjoy the things that I want to enjoy.

I don't know about that.

Some of us would look at some of our other actions or choices, and we would say, if I really follow Christ and I declare myself in my company, it means I'd never get that promotion.

I'd never be what I think I should be.

And here's why I say that this is a challenge, and here's Jesus answers this in John 12 as well.

And that is because we're so focused on saying, I want to have Jesus and my future, that sometimes we say, I've got to have both right now.

Instead of understanding that sometimes when we give our life away, Jesus is saying, You've got to trust me for a season when you can't see.

John chapter 12, verse 25, right after this part about dying, he says this.

John 12:25

He says, Anyone who loves their life will lose it, and anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for life eternal or for eternal life.

And in this verse, there are three times that the word life is used.

The first two is the same Greek word.

It's the word suke or psyche, depending on how you want to transliterate it.

And it's the word that means kind of your soul or your present life, your present existence.

So he's saying, if you want to basically give up your life, give up your current life, he says, then you're going to get back this eternal life.

And it's a different Greek word that's used here at the end of the verse, where it's the word Zoe, and the word has a connotation of something much fuller, much bigger.

And what Jesus is basically doing here is he's saying, I'm calling you to give away your life, but I want you to know that the life that you get back isn't the exact life that you give up.

And here's why this is so hard.

See, Life Coach Jesus always helps us get back a better life right away.

The Jesus who says, take up your cross and follow me, says, give up your life.

And you'll get back a better life, but it may not be in the time or the way that you think it will be.

And this is where faith comes in.

This is where we have to say, I've got to trust that God really is for me.

That he really does know what's best, even if I can't see it.

And so in the areas of my life where it's hard to surrender, I can say, God, I'll trust you because I believe that you are bringing this life to be.

Now, what I've talked about so far is Jesus kind of elevating the cost of this.

Let me show you why, right in this Luke 9 passage, that Jesus also gives this away.

In Luke chapter 9, verse 27, which appears just to be a dangling verse.

Luke 9:27

In fact, a lot of times when people look at this, they stop at verse 26.

But verse 27 says this: truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.

And the reason that often that verse is just ignored in this context is because you look at it and you say, these people won't taste death until they see the kingdom of God.

Doesn't that mean that these people will live until God's kingdom is ushered in?

How could that be?

And because it's hard to understand, sometimes we just dismiss it.

But but most commentators who try to resolve this say that seeing the kingdom of God meant that they would see the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus.

Meaning that that would be the inauguration of the kingdom of God in such a way that they would say, This is God's work.

And here's what is really happening is Jesus saying, I want you to understand that if you're going to be my follower, it's going to demand something radical from you.

But the kingdom of God is initiated by what Jesus Christ did on the cross, by what I'm going to do on the cross.

In fact, the reason that I think this is a real and good interpretation is in verses 21 and 22.

It says Jesus strictly warned them not to tell anyone.

What did he warn them not to tell anyone?

That he was the Messiah.

Verse 22, and he said to them, the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and must be killed and raised to life the third day.

You see what happens when we simply raise the cost and say Jesus wants everyone to be radical, is we create a legalistic kind of a society within our church where everyone says, you know what, we all need to be radical somehow.

Or we can say, you know what, it's it's grace means that there are no standards at all.

But what Jesus does is completely the opposite.

He says, I'm telling you, the standard is so high that you will never completely meet it, and yet I'm giving you the solution in Jesus Christ.

And what that does, if you and I understand that, if we live that reality, is it lets us say, I can follow Jesus with complete abandon, knowing that even when I mess up, and I will, and you will, whether it's it's every week, whether it's every day, whether it's every hour, we will, is we can come and say, God, I'm turning towards you, not away from you.

See, otherwise, what happens is we become evidence deniers.

We say, Oh, the standard's up there, well, I'm pretty good.

You know, I'm closer to it than I thought.

I'm not the one who took the last brownie.

You know, I what are you talking about?

Or we wallow in guilt and shame, always feeling as if we can't measure up.

But when we understand that Jesus raised the cost, but also gives it away, what happens is we understand that that his death on the cross for us is so significant that we can run to God with every one of our failures, not away from him.

And what that really does is it helps me, helps you to be able to say, okay, God, I will take up my cross and follow you.

Because that's what makes the most sense.

Where else would I go?

Who else has the words of eternal life?

Some of you may be here, you may be saying, I don't know about this Jesus thing, but it sounds like like way too much for me.

I don't want to give that much.

When you understand that God is really for you and wants your best, to say, God, I'm gonna give you what I have is a beautiful offering.

It's a beautiful thing because then you get to see God work.

And this is really our hope as a community, as a church, family, that what happens here is that together we encourage one another, we spur one another on to say there is a standard.

We're not gonna lower the demands of the law so we all feel good about it.

We're gonna keep saying, saying that God demands something that's way beyond what any of us can do, but he's provided a way, and therefore we can keep together saying we want to be who God called us to be.

And that'll become our strength in this community, in this region, as people say there's a group of people here who aren't self-righteous because they try to keep the law but are filled with grace, but they're not licentious because they just kind of say there is nothing.

But they understand and celebrate God's grace all the time.

Father, we ask today very simply that you would help us not to dismiss your words, to take up your cross and follow you by saying that they're just simply too hard.

Or we wouldn't dismiss them but by reducing them to something that we can totally do, but that we would understand and celebrate the demand, but also the provision.

And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

May God bless you as you go.

Have a good week.